News Nvidia's RTX 2070 and 2080 Sales Disappoint, Gaming Revenue Down 45%

[abryant]

Nvidia presented its fourth quarter and fiscal 2019 earnings today, which reflected a surprising 45% year-over-year loss in gaming GPU revenue. Overall the company performed better than expected after it lowered its earnings projections last month, with the $2.21 billion fourth quarter beating expectations and leading to a jump in its share price in after-hours trading (despite the 24% year-over-year loss in quarterly revenue). Read more here.

PAUL ALCORN
@PaulAlcorn
Paul Alcorn is a Senior Editor for Tom's Hardware US. He writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage and enterprise hardware.

 

[InvalidError]

Did Nvidia break the gaming camel's back by ratcheting prices while only incrementally improving performance?

 

[chalabam]

The RTX failed to sell, because the people willing to pay that price for that performance, already bought those cards on the older generation, and will not pay again for the same performance.

Raytracing is not so valuable. Is hard to tell the difference between a raytraced game an a non raytraced one.
Also, raytracing causes a high drop in FPS, and fluid games are one of the main reasons to pay premium prices for a GPU.

 

[hotaru251]

lets release $1200 GPU with hardware that has literally ZERO support for months and only a handful still.


RTX may be great in the future (along with dlss) but having your primary profit tied to so niche a thign is not smart :|

Should of had faster GPU's w/o RTX/DLSS that the majority of gaming community WANT and then have a sub option of slower cards, but with the new tech in them..this way you can fit both groups and give the game makers time to actually support your product.

 

[SockPuppet]

It's because they still have their GPU prices at insane-o miner levels. Bring the prices down to a fair level and we'll all bite. It's that easy.

 

[InvalidError]

Should of had faster GPU's w/o RTX/DLSS that the majority of gaming community WANT

It may not be what the gaming community wants, but it is where the compute, professional visualisation and datacenter markets need, which is also where the more stable and high-margin growth is. Nvidia may pretend to still be a gaming company but its high-end products are clearly geared toward datacenter and research first where the same dies in their fully functional form are worth 3-5X as much. Don't expect this to change as datacenter and visualization get further ahead of gaming as Nvidia's primary income drivers. (And AMD is doing much the same thing with Vega/Instinct.)

 

[g-unit1111]

Why when people spent so much money on last generation's hardware and it still handles everything you can throw at it? Manufacturers are too quick to release new hardware when the previous generation is still gaining support from the software companies. Also, let's face it - a $600, $800, and even $1200 GPU right now is a luxury that few can afford right now.

 

[DookieDraws]

No doubt some of the early reports of the new GPUs having issues, some even dying, hurt sales. And pricing. Good gracious, they've lost their minds with such crazy pricing!

RTX = Really Terrible Xperience (Yeah, I know how to spell experience. <--- See.)

 

[atomicWAR]

Yeah I think the pricing increase was to much to ask ATM. With little to no support for RTX features, Nvidia would have been better off taking more of a hit the first generation to get enough hardware in market so Dev's had time for solid software support. Then when they released second gen RTX, bring up the prices some (a whole SKU higher is still a bit much).

 

[derekullo]

The RTX failed to sell, because the people willing to pay that price for that performance, already bought those cards on the older generation, and will not pay again for the same performance.

Raytracing is not so valuable. Is hard to tell the difference between a raytraced game an a non raytraced one.
Also, raytracing causes a high drop in FPS, and fluid games are one of the main reasons to pay premium prices for a GPU.

It is very easy to tell the difference between a ray-traced game and a game that is not using ray-tracing.

Ray-tracing allows light to be simulated to act like it would in the real world.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/metro-exodus-ray-tracing-dlss,5992.html

The top most picture's reflections in the above would be extremely hard to get correct with simple rasterization.


Just as the Wright brothers first aircraft wasn't a Boeing 737, Nvidia had to start somewhere.

Ray-tracing wasn't invented by Nvidia as a marketing gimmick either.

From Toy Story to The Matrix to Aquaman they have all relied on ray tracing to make sure their CGI (computer-generated imagery) looks as photo-realistic as possible.

 

[Andrew Harding]

From one perspective (tracing one of the rays?) there wasn't really a price increase. The 2070 has about a 1080's conventional power and costs about the same as a a 1080, for instance. It doesn't have the big generational uplift that previous generations have had, but if shopping in that range today the new card is the better buy.
Where they're hurting I think is that their biggest competitor - their own cards from a generation or two ago - is so good. For anyone willing to play at 1080p or so their older cards do just fine even in the latest games - removing 'I must upgrade or I can't play HalfCryField 3' purchases... and a lot of the people willing to spend $x on a graphic card already did that with a 9 or 10 series. As the ray tracing ecosystem fills out I expect sales to pick up. I also wonder whether the new specialist hardware could be put to use in any way at driver level, even inefficiently, for a few extra 'free' frames per second in games that don't support the new features.and would otherwise leave the new cores completely idle.

 

[vrekman64]

keep asking for more than 50% of monthly salary for a product and everything is going to be alright.

For guys that are able to produce this much sophisticated products, they are pretty stupid when understanding simple things...

 

[hannibal]

Rtx is selling just fine. From Anandtech the history of gpu revenues is:
2015Q4 $646m to 2016Q4 - $810m to 2017Q4 $1348m to 2018Q4 $1739 to 2019Q4 954m.
So we Are just back to normal. Actually better than 2015... the just was that cryptomaining boom that put gpu sector to big buble!
Nvidia is still above the 2015-2016 situation.

 

[DarkOmenX]

No wonder with pricese like that. NVIDIA is loosing the grip, became too greedy and relaying only on "capable" managers within the company who dont understand the fundamental basics of gaming lookung only at numbers. Then they made the biggest mistake ever by utterly supporting cryptoidiots completly neglecting the gaming community wich was the long steady driving force of nvidia existance, count to that AI and industrial tech they got heavily involved and ofcourse the company is so streched that it basicaly looses on all fronts but too blind to see it and too arogant to admit it. The DXR is great tech but the performance hit is too big and unacceptable. First nvidia literally forced us to 4K gaming booosting and promoting very expensive 4K high refresh monitors including HDR, GSYNC, then all of the sudden with the newest generation an "most powerful" one thy revert back to 1080p gaming????? Wtf nvidia what kind of crap you selling here? And now at the end we learn that with DXR eabled it is playable and eyecandy only when suported by DLSS and how many games support that at this very moment?? BF5 became more of nvidia playable tech demo but other than that???? What is there? Big mistakes by nvidia leadership is mow showing catastrophic results and flops.

 

[randomizer]

From Toy Story to The Matrix to Aquaman they have all relied on ray tracing to make sure their CGI (computer-generated imagery) looks as photo-realistic as possible.

Pixar didn't use ray tracing until Cars, and then only for things like reflections. In any case, it's not really a meaningful comparison. Film render times are in the order of several hours per frame despite the available computing power. You simply can't expect to do anything like what is possible in a film at 60FPS on consumer grade hardware (or any hardware, really) even at a considerably lower resolution, which is why games will likely use hybrid renderers for the foreseeable future. The cost of ray tracing far outweighs the benefits much of the time anyway.

 

[-Fran-]

Are those corrected for the mining craze and compared to previous years?

I mean, I just wanna be fair here. I have blood in my eye for these cards, but I know this is not all the information.

Cheers!

 

[ZenderR]

Bought new 1080 for $350 a week ago.
Why would I pay $800+ for 10% performance increase?

 

[Marnad]

I spent $580 CAD + tax on a GTX 1070 about two years ago; it's still doing a decent job coupled with 1440p and G-sync. I love to PC game when time permits, but I have two children and justifying the purchase of a new GPU can be quite trivial at times.

The absolute cheapest GTX 2070 I can find is $640 CAD + tax = $736. Also, a GTX 2080 is $900 CAD + tax and the cheapest GTX 2080 Ti is $1400 + tax. Hmm, I wonder why Nvidia's revenue is down on the gaming side, lol. I really hope AMD's Navi product can shake up the competition!

Having said that, I do tip my hat to Nvidia for starting the implementation of ray tracing; it's always interesting to see how GPU technology progresses.

 

[DarkOmenX]

Bought new 1080 for $350 a week ago.
Why would I pay $800+ for 10% performance increase?

I have to correct you here I was 1080FE user and changed to 2080 not Ti and I can tell you 2080 pure preforms 75-80% faster then 1080 all stock speed @ 4K and in some games I saw performance increase by 120% so thats all crap reading 10%, 2080 performs faster then 1080ti that's for sure let alone 1080, but in other hand too expensive and all that DXR hype you can forget unless DLSS is sported at same time and even then not in 4K but UWHD resolution. In BF 5 2080 without DXR outperforms in every scene 1080 by latest 65% and more in 4K and that freaking huge.

 

[Olle P]

Should of had faster GPU's w/o RTX/DLSS that the majority of gaming community WANT...

Nah, it's just a matter of bad pricing and timing (due to earlier mistakes).

The correct way would be to keep the pricing from the previous generation, but then the previous generation wouldn't sell any more unless they really dumped the price of those.
As it is they can't blame GTX 1060 for not selling the much higher priced RTX 2060...

 

[DarkOmenX]

Who ever doesnt care about dxr/dlss now you have a choice Radeon VII

 

[InvalidError]

Why when people spent so much money on last generation's hardware and it still handles everything you can throw at it? Manufacturers are too quick to release new hardware when the previous generation is still gaining support from the software companies.

Most companies exist to make money. If you don't release better products, nobody has any reason to buy more of your products that they already have, your sales and profits dry up, and your company shuts down. BTW, GPU product cycles used to be 8-12 months between 20-30% faster refreshes and product stack shifts, the 2.5-4 years we have now is already 3-4X slower than it used to be.

The problems with RTX in the consumer space is that it is too little extra performance, too long after the previous generation and too expensive for what little performance it brings in most current workloads.

As for why 3+ years old GPUs can still handle "everything you can throw at it", this is simple: game developers don't design games around GPUs that won't exist for 3+ years into the future, they design games around what their target audience is expected to have at launch. If no substantially faster GPUs are launching for people to upgrade to, then the target audience has no faster GPUs for game developers to aim for and you end up with 3+ years old GPUs still being fine in most newer games.

 

[DarkOmenX]

Most companies exist to make money. If you don't release better products, nobody has any reason to buy more of your products that they already have, your sales and profits dry up, and your company shuts down. BTW, GPU product cycles used to be 8-12 months between 20-30% faster refreshes and product stack shifts, the 2.5-4 years we have now is already 3-4X slower than it used to be.

The problems with RTX in the consumer space is that it is too little extra performance, too long after the previous generation and too expensive for what little performance it brings in most current workloads.

As for why 3+ years old GPUs can still handle "everything you can throw at it", this is simple: game developers don't design games around GPUs that won't exist for 3+ years into the future, they design games around what their target audience is expected to have at launch. If no substantially faster GPUs are launching for people to upgrade to, then the target audience has no faster GPUs for game developers to aim for and you end up with 3+ years old GPUs still being fine in most newer games.

which is not bad at all as the GPU's /CPU's are pretty powerful this days anyway

 

[InvalidError]

which is not bad at all as the GPU's /CPU's are pretty powerful this days anyway

Current high-end GPUs may be powerful but they are also priced beyond the reach of most mainstream gamers. Until mainstream (~$250) GPUs are capable of at least 4k60 medium-high details, I'd say there is still a lot more room left for improvement.

 

[Blackbird77]

How do you expect to sell a product in which only the top of the line 2080ti (costing 1400 US Dollars) has incremental performance over the previous-gen 1080ti? No one with brains is willing to pay that kind of money on a graphics card built for gaming (unless money is no object). Nvidia really dug it's own grave on this generation. Although I do admire pushing tech with the ray tracing functionalities, it isn't at all a justification for more than DOUBLING the price tag of a 1080ti while delivering less than 50% gain. By the way, you really have to pin-point differences between Ray Traced and non Ray Traced versions of the game. While you are at it, fragging away or driving away, it really doesn't matter at all with the current non-RT versions running so well in the visual and performance aspects. Nvidia should yes push the tech forward, but not ask for a kidney from us. If they maintained the pricing like all the previous gen stuff, it would have been a winner. Sorry Nvidia, wrong strategy - gamers aren't stupid. And that is where AMD is gaining a lot of attention. I've had AMD and Nvidia brand cards over the years, but Nvidia almost always (except on the days of the Radeon 9700/9800 pros) seemed like the brand that offered the most value. Better tech, better performance, a little bit higher price point. Now they screwed up. Gaming card with professional card price tag and no justifiable performance gain. Better tech? Maybe in about two years or so, since game engines have become so efficient and realistic without the need of RT. No killer APP here for the RTX's to shine. No big difference in performance. HUGE difference in price. OK, how the hell did this pass all the way up to management at Nvidia? Someone is about to get fired...