The great chip shortage combined with crypto mining demands has been a heavy hit for graphics cards over the past few years. Getting a decent one over the past few years has been basically impossible, and those that have managed it have often paid through the nose. Given that shortage is all but set to ease it would seem like roaring into the next gen full steam ahead is a good move, but Nvidia is thinking of keeping some of those older cards around.

During an investors event (spotted by PC Mag) Nvidia CFO Collette Kress was asked about next generation products, specifically upcoming GPUs. Kress didn’t say a lot about what we can expect on the new side, but did mention that the 3000 series of GPUs may stick around to be sold alongside the next generation. 

“Even during this period of COVID and supply constraints, it’s been interesting because it’s given us the opportunity for gaming to continue to sell both the current generation (RTX 3000) as well as the Turing generation (the RTX 2000 series),” Said Kress. “So we’ve been doing that to provide more and more supply to our gamers in that. And we may see something like that continue in the future.”

Last year Nvidia announced a rehash on some of its 2000 series cards with upgraded RAM. It was a bit of an odd move then, but was clearly aimed at helping with the rush demand for gaming GPUs. We were hoping for some nice cheap 2000 series upgrades, but instead we were greeted with options a bit more expensive than what we’d hoped.

With the hope that the next gen of cards should launch without the massive shortages and high demands, there’s some light that things might be different this time. The 3000 series cards might actually be offered at a reasonable price point if a much more capable flagship is out at the same time. 

Given we haven’t even really seen the RTX 3090 Ti  since its announcement earlier this year, it may only be out for a few months before the next gen hits. We expect that card to be very limited in supply, but with all this talk, maybe Nvidia is actually going to put a fair amount of manufacturing behind it. Perhaps on launch we’ll see a limited amount and then a further surge when next gen releases. Either way, at least it looks like there will actually be GPUs of some fashion available in the future, which is something to look forward to.