Nvidia has been releasing graphics cards since the GeForce 256 in 1999, which was marketed as the world’s first GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), a term that is now synonymous with graphics cards today. Since that time, Nvidia has released decades of video cards that have pushed gaming forward. As its product lines increased and began to split, the company had to find ways to let the consumer know what sort of video card they were buying. Enter the GTX branding, short for Giga Texel Shader eXtreme.
Introduced in 2008, the GTX labeling is less about describing the internals of a video card and more so a marketing term. An Nvidia graphics card with the GTX branding signified that consumers were looking at the top-of-the-line product from a given product range. This was an effective marketing tool aimed at gamers, as they generally seek powerful video cards in order to power the latest titles.
This name also helped to differentiate it from Nvidia’s GT graphics card line, the company’s then entry-level video card line that wasn’t designed with gaming in mind. As technology advanced, the company would use the GTX line of cards to integrate new and emerging technologies, eventually giving the Ti branding to the most powerful cards. The line’s final major update was the GTX 16-series, which used the modern Turing architecture. However, these cards notably lacked the dedicated cores for real-time ray tracing and AI upscaling that defined the RTX 20-series.
GTX cards took the industry by storm
Nvidia saw increased popularity with its GTX series of video cards, with the GTX 1080 graphics card being one of the most influential cards ever released. Today, the GTX brand has been entirely superseded by the newer RTX line of graphics cards. This new RTX line of cards leans heavily into ray tracing, having dedicated RT cores. It also supports DLSS frame generation and upscaling, making it the new leader in the video card space in terms of specifications.
While the time of the GTX line of video cards is now behind us, it’s become an iconic branding that dominated the late 2000s and 2010s. But even with RTX cards getting all the news and attention, older GTX video cards have begun to make a comeback in the past few years. These older GTX cards were once Nvidia’s flagship cards, meaning they have become great choices for gaming PC builds on a budget.
The GTX 1660 Super is still an older, but decent card in 2025 for budget-minded consumers building a 1080P gaming PC. It’s capable of handling older AAA games, esports titles, and indie games. If you are one of the many people still using an older GTX video card, you may still be able to squeeze a few more years of life out of it before jumping onto the RTX bandwagon. But with the budget RTX 5050 now being around $250, getting those new RTX features might be a worthwhile investment.
