Reports and rumors of how Nvidia plans to prioritize production of its RTX 50-series graphics cards in 2026 are swirling after a CES with no new consumer GPU launches, followed by reports that the company is ending the production of some RTX 50-series gaming GPUs and moving them to end-of-life status.
We've received a comment from Nvidia on the matter. We also spoke with the CEO of Gigabyte during CES, and his comments provide context about the overall situation and outlined a rather simple calculation that Nvidia could use to determine which GPUs it will prioritize.
We asked Nvidia for comment on the recent news that some models are being cancelled and received the following statement: "Demand for GeForce RTX GPUs is strong, and memory supply is constrained. We continue to ship all GeForce SKUs and are working closely with our suppliers to maximize memory availability."
While that statement suggests that it's full steam ahead for existing RTX 50-series products, there's more to the story. Tom's Hardware's Paul Alcorn was able to sit down with Gigabyte CEO Eddie Lin at CES for a wide-ranging interview that suggests Nvidia will still prioritize production of some of its GPUs over others based on a rather straightforward calculation, and that we should expect some RTX 50-series products to be in relatively short supply as the year progresses.
Lin described Nvidia's potential GPU allocation strategy, which focuses on maximizing profit from the limited memory resource, as follows:
"They cannot produce only high-end or low-end [products]... but they can, for example, they have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, five segments. They focus on 1, 3, and 5, and reduce the percentage on 2 and 4, because on 2 and 4, the revenue contribution per gigabyte of memory is lower. They will calculate how much revenue [each segment] contributes per gigabyte of memory." [Emphasis added]
Lin went on to share the example of a $300 GPU (like the RTX 5060), for which "the memory contributes $35 per GB of revenue, whereas for a $400 8GB GPU, that product would contribute $50 per GB of memory. For a $500 [card] with 16GB of memory, that puts you at only $32 of revenue per GB, then the [contribution] is lower."
Additionally, Lin noted that Gigabyte continues to receive bundled memory from Nvidia with its GPUs. Rumors have swirled that Nvidia is no longer providing board makers with memory, which would portend a dire situation for smaller-scale players if they were forced to buy memory on the open market. Other vendors could be subject to different agreements and conditions with Nvidia, but we haven't received any confirmation from vendors that Nvidia is no longer bundling memory.
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