The company Gigabyte has directly confirmed to Tom’s Hardware about a new Nvidia prioritization system, where the production of certain GeForce RTX 50 models will be reduced in favor of others. Journalist from the source spoke with Gigabyte CEO Eddie Lin, who explained that Nvidia will prioritize certain graphics processors over others based on a fairly simple calculation, and that a relatively small number of some RTX 50 series products should be expected throughout the year.
The company can’t just produce only high-performance or low-performance models, but they can, for example, have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 segments. They are focusing on segments 1, 3, and 5, and reducing the percentage ratio of segments 2 and 4, because in the latter, the revenue per 1 GB of memory is lower. This was mentioned by third-party sources a few days ago.
How exactly this looks at Nvidia, we don’t know, but third-party data paints quite a logical picture:
- Graphics cards with 8 GB of memory – priority will be given to the RTX 5060 Ti over the RTX 5060
- Graphics cards with 16 GB of memory – priority will be given to the RTX 5080 over the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and RTX 5070 Ti
The head of Gigabyte gave a simple example. There is a graphics card for $300 (e.g., RTX 5060), where memory brings Nvidia $35 per 1 GB of revenue, whereas for a $400 graphics card (e.g., RTX 5060 Ti 8GB) with 8 GB of memory, the income will be $50 per 1 GB. For a $500 graphics card with 16 GB of memory, the income will be only $32 per 1 GB. Based on this system, Tom’s Hardware authors calculated approximate figures for all cards.
No need to panic: Nvidia has not discontinued any graphics card. GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, GeForce RTX 5080 are still operational. Here we see the same as described above. The most profitable within the classes defined by the volume of memory will be RTX 5060 Ti 8GB and RTX 5080. The RTX 5070 alone has 12 GB, but in terms of profitability it approximately corresponds to the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB, but is significantly inferior to the RTX 5080. Whether it will be axed is unclear, but this is currently the most popular RTX 50 card on Steam.
