Discrete GPU Sales Plummet to Historic Lows:
If you've been looking at the GPU market recently and thinking, "nope," you're not alone. Jon Peddie Research has released its year-end summary, and it paints a grim picture: Shipments of discrete GPUs have fallen to levels not seen in almost 20 years. It's an unexpected situation given the recent deluge of GPUs in the channel thanks to the death of crypto. Plus AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have released all-new GPUs this year too. Despite the bounty of silicon at their disposal, gamers are just not buying GPUs right now.
[...] The reasons for the steep decline in GPU shipments aren't perfectly detailed in the summary. However, we can make a few guesses. This entire year has seen a rapid slowdown in the PC market as the pandemic began to fade. People went outside again and turned off their PCs. There's also been increasing economic anxiety for most of the year as well. This has been punctuated by mass layoffs at major companies recently, such as Meta and Amazon. Additionally, a lot of PC upgraders held off in the third quarter in anticipation of all the new hardware coming out.
Many people might have examined the new CPUs and GPUs and concluded prices were too high. This issue has affected both AMD on the CPU front and Nvidia on the GPU side. AMD had to dramatically lower Zen 4 prices for Black Friday and has largely kept them in place. Nvidia hasn't lowered prices, but so many scalpers tried to return RTX 4080 cards that Newegg halted refunds for them.
Tom's Hardware summary of the report
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday January 01, @04:40PM
This is why I haven't bought a new GPU in the better part of a decade apart from whatever came in my computer. It's ridiculously expensive and trying to find one that's decent, but reasonable for the money is a lot more work than I care to put into it. I miss when there was a clear way of knowing whether a new component was going to be better than what I already owned without having to do a ton of research.