Nvidia’s gaming graphics card sales are down 44% compared to last quarter
Sales of Nvidia’s GeForce graphics cards have significantly decreased, which may be a sign that the company’s GPU prices are about to drop even further. This is especially true given that the rumor mill suggests that Team Green’s partners still have a significant amount of extra RTX 3000 stock to unload. Nvidia recently released its fiscal Q2 numbers, revealing that the company came in at less than 20% of predicted total revenue, with a “significant” fall in gaming GPU sales being a contributing factor. Gaming revenue was $2.04 billion (about £1.7 billion or AU $2.9 billion) for the year, a 33 percent decrease from the previous year and a significant 44 percent decrease from quarter to quarter.
As we noted at the beginning, there has long been speculation in the rumor mill that Nvidia’s partners, or third-party graphics card manufacturers, had a ton of extra RTX 3000 stock to sell. And if that is the case, a significant decline in sales activity from one quarter to the next won’t help. When weighing the possibility of having to liquidate current-generation stock against moving forward with the launch of the next-generation (Lovelace) GPU, Nvidia appears to be in a difficult situation. The issue is that if Lovelace graphics cards, which are said to be much more powerful, are released or even announced anytime soon, it would further hurt RTX 3000 sales as people would see what they might get if they wait and possibly hold out.
The end result is that the RTX 4000 launch must happen soon enough because, if it doesn’t, AMD’s RDNA 3 next-gen products, which are also scheduled to arrive soon, won’t get a response. However, ampere sell-through also needs to pick up, which is why we think prices will drop even further in the near future. At least at the top end of Ampere, we’ve already seen a good indication of this with EVGA drastically slashing the price of its base RTX 3090 Ti, all the way down to clearly $1,000 less than the MSRP (almost half-price).
Another option to help sell off RTX 3000 inventory would be to delay the debut of the RTX 4000, which would imply that, as some rumors on the grapevine have it, just the RTX 4090 might be released this year (with the RTX 4080 and others to follow early in 2023). Even though it’s just a rumor, it’s probable that Nvidia may issue Lovelace models more slowly than usual, with slightly longer gaps between GPUs than the initially speculated month-to-month cadence for the RTX 4090, 4080, and 4070.