News Sales of Desktop Graphics Cards Hit 20-Year Low

Sleepy_Hollowed

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I mean, could the dramatically increasing costs be a contributing factor?

The root cause for next year and year after.

I understand that fab access might be part of the equation for higher costs, but once that is solved by sinking demand, whomever drops prices with acceptable performance and quality (I’m not touching nvidia until say, maybe 7 years after this connector is figured out), will see a huge market share gain.

I just don’t know anyone who cares about Ray Tracing, considering all the console and handheld gaming going around.
 

lmcnabney

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I mean, could the dramatically increasing costs be a contributing factor?
Well, this is Q3 data. That is before the new generation arrived and used mining cards started moving into the used market. 4Q numbers will make it obvious if it is a real downturn or just buyers timing their purchases.
 

Jagar123

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Well, this is Q3 data. That is before the new generation arrived and used mining cards started moving into the used market. 4Q numbers will make it obvious if it is a real downturn or just buyers timing their purchases.
I was planning on upgrading once the 4000 and 7000 series dropped. However, at these prices I am not even a little bit interested. I imagine many people are in the same boat. I would consider a 4080 at $799, and an 7800 XTX (or whatever it will be) at around ~$50-$100 less. Nvidia has lost their mind (AMD not far behind) with these prices.

I am actively monitoring the situation and hope both companies reduce prices dramatically. However, I am not holding my breath.
 

pug_s

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I am surprised about the low sales from AMD. Just this past month I managed to buy 2 AMD radeon cards for me and my son for a good price. Then again, the sales figures doesn't account for Q4-2022
 
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neojack

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Well it's not hard to figure the reasons

  • even a relatively old GPU can play games acceptably for most people (30-60FPS)
  • miners are selling their rigs
  • new cards are extremelly expensive. Few years ago 300-500$ was flagship tier. now for this price you get low-middle range.
  • consoles are more popular for gaming than PC. PC Gaming was on a rising 10 years ago thanks to the MMO trend. not so anymore
The new cards are good mostly for VR, 4K gaming and Ray Tracing , but those technologies are not used by a majority of gamers which find former generations sufficient (1660ti is still very popular because it just works)

Gamer Nexus made a good video on the subject of the 4080, but some reasons still applies to the whole generation
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCJYDJXDRHw
 
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lmcnabney

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I am actively monitoring the situation and hope both companies reduce prices dramatically. However, I am not holding my breath.

I'm still using a 4670k and 1080, so I am way past due on the upgrade. However the market is resisting returning to rational pricing. The rich people can always buy what they want and it appears that regular gamers have been conditioned to accept the $1000 GPU as normal. If things don't turn around and PC gaming continues on its slide into a boutique upscale / fanboi market than I will likely not replace my PC and buy my first console since an Atari 2600. I can accept the $5-600 price point for a premium GPU, but not for a midrange one.
 

bit_user

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Few years ago 300-500$ was flagship tier.
Not from what I've seen. In 2018 or thereabouts, I recall seeing a plot of the inflation-adjusted prices of flagship GPUs for the preceding 15-20 years. Leaving aside Nvidia Titan and dual-GPU models, I recall they made a fairly sound case that flagships tended to run about $700, up to and including the GTX 1080 Ti.

The RTX 2080 Ti was perhaps the first to buck that trend, with a MSRP of $1000.
 

Tac 25

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just a few weeks ago, I was Christmas shopping at a large mall. Went look inside some pc stores, all I could see are boxes of Nvidia cards. Mostly various RTX and GTX 1630 (why is the box of this thing so big? LOL). Not seen any AMD card on display. When I asked a store girl, she said Nvidia cards sell more in their store than AMD.

EDIT: forgot to say, there is indeed a big price drop. RTX 3060 was around 29000 pesos when I visited February 2022, now on Dec 2022 - it's only 23000 pesos from the same shop. That's approx 100$ drop in price.
 
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chalabam

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I have 3 failed geforces. At that failure rate, I will not spend mountains of money in a thing that may break with such a high probability.

Also, new games do not compel to invest in GPU. Quality gaming has dropped enormously.

But prices will not go down significantly. I already predicted this, because the government printing money unavoidably causes inflation. People here rejected it, but is elementary economics.

The war in ukraine is rising public spending so much, that unavoidably, more money will be printed. Prices will keep going up.
 

ottonis

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Historically, software was driving hardware demands: typically, this was the new super 3d game, that everyone wanted to play, but first had to upgrade their GPU, CPU, RAM, or even a sound card in order to meet minimum hardware specifications.

Nowadays, even two generations old and modest GPUs are capable of running virtually all modern games at 1080p and at decent quality settings.
Back in the day you needed the latest and greatest GPU in order to achieve playable frame rates in the latest games - anyone remembers 3dfx voodoo add-on cards?

The only niche where still only the best available GPU is good enough is professional rendering / video editing because saved rendering time equals more earnings and higher income.
But for the vast majority of customers, including office users and gamers, any decent card from the past 5 years will do the job.

So, AMD and nVidia may want to acquire a game developer studio and let them create new games that will not only look extremely photorealistic and have the best game play and physics ever but also require a 4090Ti in order to run at 60 fps in 1080p mode and medium settings.

Moreover, both AMD and nVidia need to cut prices by at least 30-40%.

Finally, they need to optimize their GPUs for much higher performance per Watt (efficiency).

Frankly, who is going to spend 1500 bucks on a heat-generating, power-consuming card for games that he could just as well play with a 4 year old card that costs 70% less and consumes 50% less power, or just use a a gaming console?
 
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It looks like people are finally getting smarter. They’ve got no excuses and nobody to blame but themselves. I’m laughing at nvidia and amd heartily.

turns out they don’t like it when demand goes south because of their stupid high prices on the supply side. This is good for the babies. They need to cry and get it out of their system and then lower their friggin prices.
 

el.nomikos

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As Intel enters market of discrete GPUs, Nvidia strengthens its positions, but AMD weakens.

Sales of Desktop Graphics Cards Hit 20-Year Low : Read more
Easy. Inequalities worldwide have gotten a lot worse. Actually every year is worse than the previous and that has been going on for at least a decade now. The rich get richer and the poor

get poorer. But the richer are now less whereas the poorer are a lot more. If you add the inflation again worldwide you have a very bad result. Prices are skyrocketing while wages are the

same or even less than what they used to be. So there you have it. Boycott gpu makers till the end of time.
 

Bazzy 505

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There are several factors in play here. We staved off the worst of last global financial crisis by releasing insane amount of cheap liquidity into the system throuh our central banks (both ECB and Fed, now after 2 years of covid a lot that liquidity has been released into the system. It has helped to keep employment level quite high, but the real wages has gone down substantialy. This has has been further exaberated by current shifts in world politics.
As result we're living in days where increasing proportion of those who would self-identify as middle classs struggle to save more than 200 USD per month.
Collapse/ban (in some countries) of crypto has also released insane amounts of relatively new hardware on secondary market.
Than there's the fact that 4 year old GPU's are still reasonably powerful to game on at 1080p and consistently show as most widely represented SKU's in steam charts.
Out of touch NVIDIA and AMD pushing new SKU's that are either too slow to displace previous generations, or not available in volumes or costing 2-3 times as much as current generation consoles.
And let's not forget the long term trend of PC gaming segment sales shrinking consistently for past decade ( with exception of covid period which is mostly over now) in favour of mobile gaming which is 2x the size of pc market right now.

You can easily map pretty much all of this on big crash on console market in the 80's. In a way you a have perfect storm there right now :)
 
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Dec 28, 2022
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It looks like people are finally getting smarter. They’ve got no excuses and nobody to blame but themselves. I’m laughing at nvidia and amd heartily.

turns out they don’t like it when demand goes south because of their stupid high prices on the supply side. This is good for the babies. They need to cry and get it out of their system and then lower their friggin prices.
yeah that's right