Nvidia’s 11 series of midrange gaming cards may debut next month

By Jon Martindale Published December 21, 2018

RTX 2080 — Riley Young/Digital Trends

Nvidia may release an 11 series of graphics cards after all, with the GPU serving as a midrange, affordable alternative to its high-end RTX-series of graphics cards. The rumored range of GPUs is said to sport the classic GTX moniker of Nvidia graphics cards and could launch as soon as mid-January with the GTX 1160.

When the Nvidia RTX Turing generation of graphics cards was announced in August, there was a notable absence of any midrange cards. The cheapest announced at that Gamescom event was the RTX 2070, which started at $500 to $600. The RTX 2060 is expected to appear at CES 2019, but Nvidia hasn’t made any kind of official announcements and judging by the high price of the other cards in the new Turing-range, we wouldn’t expect it to be as affordable as last-generation cards like the GTX 1060. A GTX 1160, however, could be a more economical alternative.

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This rumor comes from VideoCardz, which has a couple of sources claiming that an 1160 Ti may be announced at CES 2019, too. The 1160 will reportedly still utilize the Turing architecture, but will have a weaker GPU at its core and will be unlikely to come with the ray tracing lighting feature of the more high-end RTX cards. Whether it will include Tensor cores to support deep learning supersampling (DLSS) remains to be seen.

Another tip VideoCardz received is that the RTX 2060 may be the lowest-spec RTX card Nvidia plans to release. That would leave the rumored 11 series to flesh out the lower end of Nvidia’s new graphics lineup, replacing the 10 series with cards like an 1130 and 1150.

Nvidia has yet to make any kind of announcement or statement that confirms or denies these rumors, but with CES 2019 taking place in just over two weeks, there is not a lot of time to wait to see if we will learn more there.

If it does announce them though, don’t just rush out and buy one straight away. Nvidia’s cards have suffered some reliability issues in recent months, and AMD’s Navi is also expected to debut in the coming months and could offer monstrous performance at a competitive price in its own right.

Evergreen writer

Jon Martindale is a freelance evergreen writer and occasional section coordinator, covering how to guides, best-of lists, and…

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