That's what I'm thinking, too. EVGA seems like a pretty reliable manufacturer in my experience, their bus-powered 1050 Ti lasted me 7 years and still runs in my brother's PC, to my knowledge. Wouldn't surprise me if Nvidia rejected some board revision EVGA suggested, which led to the ensuing fallout.
I'm still looking for a good replacement to my EVGA bus-powered 1050Ti. I just want a bus-powered GPU that can run desktop applications. I have a separate one with a power connector for ML stuff.
Are the new Intel GPUs bus powered? If not, they could make a killing off of frugal Linux users by offering a chip designed around the ~70w TDP of a PCI bus.
Please don't needlessly shit on Intel GPUs. The last thing we need is sustaining the Ngreedia and AMD price gouging GPU duopoly.
Intel GPUs are great if you want the best linux drivers and they do AV1 decode and encode.
If you're, for example, a gaming streamer, or you need to encode CCTV or other kinds of footage and stream it as cheaply as possible, or if you do video editing in DaVinci resolve or other apps, then the AV1 accelerator capabilities of such a budget GPU are a godsend.
If you aren't planning on using it for gaming, check out the Intel Arc Pro A40 instead. It's a nice little single thickness 50 watt bus powered card with modern specs.
That was on my short-list to look at, good to have another data-point. How is the Linux support? My most recent video card experience with AMD is a HD 6350 and that has very mediocre linux support (as became obvious when KDE and Firefox both started using GPU assisted rendering by default)
AMD open sourced their drivers and maintains them directly in the kernel now, ever since 2017. No issues at all for me using Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04, which uses Wayland and GPU rendering by default.