Nvidia may be discontinuing some of the RTX 20-series

Reports suggest that Nvidia is taking its first steps towards discontinuing some of the RTX 20-series line-up in preparation for new GPUs. 

According to Chinese publication, ITHome, several RTX 20-series SKUs including the RTX 2070, RTX 2070 Super, RTX 2080 Super and the RTX 2080 Ti will have their production suspended with the plan being that they will be delisted over the next few months. Product discontinuation tends to take a number of months as leftover inventory needs to be used up but this could be a significant move towards a change within Nvidia GPUs. 

Notably, the report suggests that Nvidia is encouraging its partners to raise the price on these cards from the beginning of the month. Supposedly, this is due to rising interest in cryptocurrency mining and insufficient supply by TSMC which manufactures the Turing silicon for Nvidia. It's been reported that the RTX 2080 Super and RTX 2080 Ti, in particular, may run out of stock so, presumably, a price rise would stop a rush on any purchases. 

Regardless of why this could be the case, a price rise rumour is the one that's both juiciest and likely to ruffle some feathers. Tom's Hardware checked in with Nvidia but the firm was quick to point out that it doesn't comment on rumours or speculation. 

Effectively, the thinking is that Nvidia is changing focus to prepare for its potential announcement of the GeForce RTX 30-series in September. That's been the rumour for a long time now with the announcement supposedly arriving 17th September.

For now, no price rises seem to be obvious but whether that will change over the coming weeks as stock (potentially) gets harder to find, we'll have to see. The key takeaway here is that this probably isn't the best time to make a GPU upgrade purchase. We kind of already knew that with it seeming incredibly likely that Ampere graphics cards will be announced in September, but this reinforces the need to wait. Assuming ITHome is correct, of course.