NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti back in production?

Yesterday we wrote about a reappearance of the GeForce GTX 1650 and now we hear the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is making a comeback too. It's a highly unusual situation of course, but the current GPU shortage is spurring NVIDIA to come up with alternatives to get more GeForce cards to the market. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti uses a 16nm GPU and GDDR5X memory -- which both may be easier to get production capacity for than for the 8nm foundry capacity and GDDR6 memory needed for RTX 30 series cards.

Fresh batch of GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPUs spotted in the wild

The origin of this story is a post over at Quasar Zone, from a user who received a new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti video card after he had sent in his old 1080 Ti for RMA. As WCCF Tech reports, the fresh card has a serial number that suggests a production date of 2021.

The card is more specifically an EVGA SC model and another user has pointed out that the FTW model he has recently received also features a production date of 2021. Given that EVGA issues a warranty of 3 years on its NVIDIA GPU based graphics cards, it wouldn't make sense to produce new batches of a card that has been replaced by newer offerings, or even if it was to serve warranty, most replacement units are produced early on rather than four years after launch. It could be possible that EVGA had used up its replacement units to keep up with shortages at some point in time & producing newer units now but it's only speculation.

There is no official confirmation yet of course, but given all that's happened over the past couple of months, we wouldn't be surprised if the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is indeed back in production. Despite being four year olds, this GP102 based card still delivers great performance and can be a decent option if you can't get your hands on a newer alternative.

NVIDIA RTX Voice now works on non-RTX cards

On a related note, NVIDIA quietly released an update for RTX Voice that enables support for non-RTX video cards. RTX Voice is a machine learning-based tool that promises to boost microphone quality by reducing unwanted background noise. According to NVIDIA, the tool relies on Tensor cores, but right after the release of RTX Voice someone already came up with a hack that enabled support on non-RTX GPUs.

Now the hack is no longer needed as the latest version of RTX Voice supports GeForce GTX cards as old as the Kepler generation. Support for these GPUs was reportedly quietly added a couple of months ago, when NVIDIA released RTX Broadcast, the successor to RTX Voice.

But, if you own an RTX 20-series or RTX-30 series graphics card, you're better going off going with its successor, RTX Broadcast, which includes RTX Voice and a webcam feature that allows you to set up virtual backgrounds when streaming or video chatting. Plus, it's doubtful that RTX Voice will receive ongoing updates, unlike RTX Broadcast.

Overall, RTX Voice and RTX Broadcast work very well to enhance microphone quality.