Cheaper GPUs are good for gamers but bad for Nvidia's bottom line:
Nvidia doesn't officially announce its second-quarter financial results until the end of the month, but the company is trying to soften the blow by announcing preliminary results today. And as with so many other tech companies in the last month, the results are mixed at best. With $6.7 billion in revenue, Nvidia managed to eke out year-over-year growth, but the results are still bad news because that number is down from a previously forecasted $8.1 billion, a miss of $1.4 billion.
Nvidia blamed this shortfall on weaker-than-expected demand for its gaming products, including its GeForce graphics processors. Nvidia pointed to "a reduction in channel partner sales," meaning that partners like Evga, MSI, Asus, Zotac, Gigabyte, and others were selling fewer new GPUs than anticipated. This drop can be attributed partly to a crash in the value of mining-based cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum—fewer miners are buying these cards, and miners looking to unload their GPUs on the secondhand market are also giving gamers a cheaper source for graphics cards.
[...] Nvidia will supposedly launch its next-generation RTX 4000 series GPUs later this year. Based on the new Lovelace architecture, these GPUs may appeal to some gamers who originally sat out the RTX 3000 series due to shortages and inflated prices and are now avoiding the GPUs because they know a replacement is around the corner.
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The party is over for Nvidia as crypto and gaming GPU demand is down:
Nvidia on Wednesday announced its financial results for the second quarter of its fiscal year 2023. The results were a mixed bag as its client PC businesses suffered declines, but its automotive and data center businesses thrived.
Nvidia's gaming, professional graphics, mining, and OEM business segments were down significantly both sequentially and annually, which is why it had to warn investors that it expects slow sales of gaming and ProViz graphics products to persist for a while. Meanwhile, the company said that it plans to talk about its next-generation Ada Lovelace architecture next month but never revealed when actual GeForce RTX 40-series graphics boards will be available.
By contrast, Nvidia's data center and automotive hardware shipments were up significantly compared to the same quarter a year ago. They will be up again in Q3 FY2023 now that the company's Hopper H100 compute GPUs are in total production and ready to ship.
[...] During its second quarter of fiscal 2023, Nvidia encountered multiple challenges, including macroeconomic conditions (inflation and uncertainty among consumers), high inventory levels in the channel (as the company aggressively sold its graphics cards in prior quarters), softening demand from the end user (both because gamers are expecting Ada Lovelace to launch shortly and because of uncertainties), inventory corrections by partners, and lowering prices of graphics cards as a result of softening demand as well as increased supply by competition.
[...] It should be noted that Nvidia's gaming revenue in Q2 was still significantly higher when compared to $1.654 billion in the second quarter of the company's FY2021 (~calendar Q2 2020). It indicates that the chip designer benefited greatly from increased demand for discrete GPUs for gaming PCs, increased prices of standalone graphics cards, and the crypto mining craze.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Frosty Piss on Thursday August 11 2022, @02:48AM (1 child)
Maybe perhaps who want a graphics card for, you know, graphics, can maybe actually get one.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by coolgopher on Thursday August 11 2022, @05:00AM
And maybe, just maybe, we'll get actually affordable GPUs again.
(Score: 1) by XivLacuna on Thursday August 11 2022, @02:42PM
The ridiculous prices people paid for graphics cards showed that people are willing to pay.
I am willing to pay more for a graphics card that uses on package memory like High Bandwidth Memory.
I'll probably never make back the cost of it from energy savings but I will make it back in terms of comfort since such a device wouldn't use and vent off as much heat in the summer.
Something like a RTX 4080 with HBM whatever and a Noctua cooler on it.