Nvidia’s GeForce graphics cards have seen a sharp decline in sales, perhaps a hint that their GPU prices are set to drop even further – mainly because rumor has it that Team Green’s partners still have a large amount of excess RTX 3000 stock. to clean.
Nvidia has just revealed its second-quarter fiscal results, which showed the company achieved less than 20% of projected overall revenue, part of which is due to a ‘significant’ decline in gaming GPU sales.
Gaming revenue reached $2.04 billion (about £1.7 billion, AU$2.9 billion) for the year, down 33% from the previous year and down 44% from the quarter. previous.
CEO Jensen Huang commented (opens in new tab): “Our projections for sales of gaming products dropped significantly as the quarter progressed. As we expect macroeconomic conditions affecting sales to continue, we have taken steps with our gaming partners to adjust channel pricing and inventory.”
Analysis: A tricky situation for Nvidia to handle?
As you may recall, we saw the aforementioned actions to adjust pricing when Nvidia implemented a plan to significantly lower the recommended prices on the RTX 3090 Ti, RTX 3090, RTX 3080 Ti, and RTX 3080.
The question is, will we see more price cuts in the near future? As the rumor has been rife for some time now with talk that Nvidia’s partners, i.e. 3rd party graphics card manufacturers, have a lot of excess RTX 3000 stock to clean up, as we mentioned at the beginning. And if that’s true, sales activity dropping sharply from one quarter to the next certainly won’t help.
The situation Nvidia appears to be in is complex, in terms of balancing any need to sell current-gen stock with the launch of the next-gen GPU (Lovelace). The problem is that releasing, or even announcing, what are rumored to be much more powerful Lovelace graphics cards soon will hurt RTX 3000 sales even more, as consumers see what they can get if they wait and maybe hang on.
So the bottom line is that the release of the RTX 4000 should arrive soon – after all, Nvidia can hardly let it slip away, because that would mean that the RDNA 3, AMD’s also-coming next-gen offerings, would be left without answer – but at the same time, Ampere’s sell-through needs to be increased, which is why we believe prices could drop even more sharply in the near future.
We’ve already seen a promising sign of this, at least at the top of Ampere, with EVGA seriously dropping the price of its entry-level RTX 3090 Ti, up to $1,000 cheaper than the MSRP (nearly half the price).
Another alternative to helping sell the RTX 3000’s stock might be to slow down the RTX 4000 release process, which means that, as some whispers of the vine have suggested, only the RTX 4090 may come out this year (with the RTX 4080 and others at follow in early 2023). This is just a rumor – so large amounts of spice should be applied – but it’s perhaps possible that Nvidia could stagger the release of Lovelace models more than usual, with slightly longer delays between GPUs than the month-to-month cadence originally Rumors for the RTX 4090, 4080 and 4070.
At least for us – and this, again, is just speculation – it looks like one way or another, we might get a longer, slower RTX 4000 series launch, or see bigger price cuts on the RTX 3000 models soon. Because let’s not forget, we also have the cost of living crisis that will affect PC owners’ ability to spend larger amounts of money on GPUs as well…
Through VideoCardz (opens in new tab)
