Nvidia’s GeForce graphics cards have experienced a marked decline in sales, perhaps a hint that prices for its GPUs are set to fall further – particularly as the rumor mill believes that Team Green’s partners still have a large amount of excess RTX 3000 stock to clear.
Nvidia has just revealed its fiscal Q2 results which showed the firm made approaching lower than 20% of projected overall revenue, part of which was due to a ‘significant’ decline in gaming GPU sales.
Gaming revenue hit $2.04 billion (around £1.7 billion, AU$2.9 billion) for the year which was 33% down compared to the previous year, and a hefty 44% down quarter-on-quarter.
CEO Jensen Huang commented: “Our gaming product sell-through projections declined significantly as the quarter progressed. As we expect the macroeconomic conditions affecting sell-through to continue, we took actions with our Gaming partners to adjust channel prices and inventory.”
Analysis: A tricky situation for Nvidia to deal with?
As you may recall, we saw the aforementioned actions to adjust pricing when Nvidia implemented a plan to considerably cut the recommended price tags on the RTX 3090 Ti, RTX 3090, RTX 3080 Ti, and RTX 3080.
The question is: will we see more price cutting in the near future? As the rumor mill has been rife for some time now with chatter that Nvidia’s partners, meaning third-party graphics card manufacturers, have a whole lot of excess RTX 3000 stock to clear, as we mentioned at the outset. And if that is true, sales activity falling quite heavily from one quarter to the next certainly won’t help.
The situation Nvidia looks to be in is a complex one, in terms of balancing any need to sell off current-gen stock against going ahead with the next-gen (Lovelace) GPU launch. The problem is that releasing, or even announcing, what are rumored to be much more powerful Lovelace graphics cards any time soon will put a further dampener on RTX 3000 sales, as consumers see what they might get if they wait, and perhaps hold out.
So, the upshot is that the RTX 4000 launch has to come soon enough – after all, Nvidia can hardly let it slide, because that would mean RDNA 3, AMD’s next-gen offerings also due to land before long, would go unanswered – but at the same time, Ampere sell-through needs to be cranked up, which is why we believe prices could fall even more sharply in the near future.
We’ve already seen a promising sign of this, at least at the high-end of Ampere, with EVGA seriously dropping the price of its base RTX 3090 Ti, all the way down to a clear $1,000 cheaper than the MSRP (almost half-price).
Another alternative to help sell off RTX 3000 inventory might be to slow down the RTX 4000 launch process, by which we mean that as some whispers from the grapevine have suggested, only the RTX 4090 may come out this year (with the RTX 4080 and others to follow early in 2023). That’s just a rumor – so large amounts of seasoning must be applied – but maybe it’s possible that Nvidia might stagger the launch of Lovelace models more than usual, with slightly longer delays between GPUs than the originally rumored month-on-month cadence for the RTX 4090, 4080 and 4070.
At least to us – and this, again, is just speculation – it looks like one way or another, we may get a more prolonged and slower paced RTX 4000 series launch, or see bigger price cuts on RTX 3000 models coming pretty soon indeed. Because let’s not forget, we’ve also got the cost of living crisis which is going to be affecting the ability of PC owners to splash larger amounts of cash on GPUs, too…
Via VideoCardz