I don’t know the details, but I’ve heard some crazy financial things have been going on with the Nvidia company in general. Probably related?
Not sure. Nvidia has been dancing around the most valuable company on earth. Beating out Apple and Amazon.
Absolutely. But the Ti/Super cards don’t generally come out until after all the base models are released and they’re looking to refresh so it’ll probably be a good while before there’s a (sorta) similar replacement to the 4090
Do you mean “end of production” instead of “end of life”? Because Nvidia generally does a great job of updating drivers for chips they no longer produce.
On the plus side, if you’re upgrading, you can probably get a good price on selling your old card.
I was also astonished to find my ~6 years old laptop that I was going to throw in electronics disposal is still worth a couple hundred dollars thanks to its NVidia GPU.
Ok, so the in-practice retail price went from $2050 to $2800, based on the chart. A 37% price hike doesn’t look crazy to me given all that is going on, including Christmas. NVIDIA isn’t going to restart their 40xx manufacturing given the massive demand for their AI products.
I’ll tell you what is crazy. NVIDIA’s revenue growth is crazy:
2020 17 billion
2021 27 billion
2022 27 billion
2023 61 billion
Trailing 12 months (10/31 data): 113 billion
So demand for their products roughly doubled between 2023 and 2024 fiscal years (ending Jan 31st following year). Or look at it another way. If “Old demand” is $27 billion, then old demand is maybe 1/4 of their business, as opposed to 100% a couple of years ago. Old demand included graphics cards, but also automotive, networking, and data center.
Above figures from yahoo. I don’t know a lot about NVIDIA: information taken from yahoo finance.
Q: Does NVIDIA have any competitors in the high-end game card space?
Not really. AMD’s 7900 XTX is superior to the 4080 when it comes to raster performance, but people spending $1000+ for a GPU want access to Nvidia’s software features as well, such as RTX ray-tracing performance. Many of those people are wrong and would be happier with a 7900 XTX but AMD can’t compete against Nvidia marketing. Nothing touches the 4090 since that GPU disregards previous concepts of acceptable size and power consumption. AMD will probably have a response with RDNA 4 at that power level, but it isn’t out yet.
Holy moly, capitalism is awesome. Gaming PCs at Newegg range from $600 to $2500, with the median maybe at $1400. I mean sure those may not be dream systems, but I’d say the semiconductor industry has adapted to these massive demand shifts pretty well. Are gaming software developers complaining?
For gaming (not AI or compute workloads), can I put in a good word for GeForce Now, especially during this transition between the 4000 and 5000 series? It is Nvidia’s game streaming service. You push play and the game starts in a few seconds, like Netflix but for PC games.
For $20/mo (or half of that during the holiday sale), you get a RTX 4080 in the cloud. It works phenomenally well (as long as your internet is fast, ideally hardwired ethernet, and the game is supported; see list).
Unlike Stadia, Google’s failed streaming service, Nvidia’s uses your existing Steam library. No need to re-buy any games and you keep your progress. And presumably they’ll upgrade to the 5080 once those come out. You also never have to worry about disk space, installations, DRM, etc. It’s all taken care of. You can play on anything from an app to a browser window to a phone or tablet or smart TV.
At that price ($200/year paid every 6 mos), it is much, much more affordable than trying to keep up with the PC upgrade treadmill. They’ll soon start capping playtime at 100 hrs/mo, but if you subscribe before January 2025, they’ll delay that by a whole year (so you get unlimited playtime through 2025).
I use it all the time both at home (as a gaming PC replacement) and on the go (with a Logitech/Tencent G-Cloud, which is cheaper, lighter, and has a better screen than the Steam Deck, but it doesn’t have a good GPU and it’s good for streaming only).
It’s a ridiculously good service, both on its own and compared to its competitors (Luna, Shadow, Xbox/PS streaming, etc.). Nvidia is way, way ahead of the other companies… they’re the only ones who have direct first-party access to all the RTX cards they want, after all. Their competitors are running hardware a generation or two behind.
Or maybe not. AMD announced a few months ago that they intend to cede the high end enthusiast market to Nvidia and focus on growing market share in the low-mid sector
It’s official, AMD is abandoning high-end Radeon gaming GPUs for now.
No other gaming company can compete with Nvidia’s dominance in AI too (which somewhat trickles down into gaming). Between the massive profits from their AI sales, CUDA, and the gaming-specific stuff that @Palooka mentioned (not just ray tracing but also DLSS/DLAA/frame gen/etc), they’re so far ahead it’s hard to imagine anyone else catching up in the next decade.
Nvidia is ten times bigger than Intel and AMD combined, and bigger than most countries’ GDPs. Intel is in trouble. AMD hasn’t been competitive for a while now. The gap is only going to get bigger unless Nvidia decides to just give up on gaming to focus on AI, or someone leapfrogs them with some completely different technology. Otherwise it’s only a matter of time before they own the world…
That last paragraph reminds me that Nvidia took the top spot earlier this year as the most valuable public company.
And I am more confused. Sales have slumped so prices spike?
This comes from Jon Peddie Research (JPR), which has compiled figures for Q3 sales of ‘graphics add-in boards’ (meaning standalone GPUs that slot into desktop PCs) finding that 8.1 million units were shifted in the quarter.
That’s down 7.9% on the same quarter in 2023, a fairly hefty drop, and it’s also down compared to Q2 2024, with an even larger decrease of 14.5%.
I’d assume the slump is largely in the low-mid end sector. And, of course, since Nvidia stopped making 4090s, they’re not being sold and distributed through normal retail channels so fewer recorded sales there.
It’s hardly a surprise. The 4000-series Nvidia and 7000-series AMD cards were uniformly awful in terms of price/performance ratios, with almost nothing being a better deal than the previous generation cards in terms of $ per fps. The generational performance gain wasn’t much to begin with, and then the manufacturers paired the mediocre gains with price increases. When I was looking a year ago to replace an old 1080 I was completely underwhelmed by the offerings. Ended up buying a 7800XT, but if there’d been the chance of a generational advance in the offing I might have held off.
Indeed.
I recently saw a CPU comparison that noted most people on the Steam survey have Intel CPUs but, currently, the top ten best selling CPUs are all from AMD. That’s a big hole to climb out of for Intel and will take years.
On the GPU front their recently release of the Arc B580 has been met with resoundingly great reviews and hailed as the best budget video card in a decade. Great news for Intel and for all of us…competition is good. BUT…apparently Intel barely made any and they are near impossible to get a hold of and scalpers are scooping them up and raising the prices so no longer a good “budget” card. Doubtless Intel is trying to ramp up production but that takes time and it may take too long to be useful.
Intel has some profound problems. Another company ruined by CEOs who want to max share prices and ignore their actual business.
I’ve been a gamer since the 90s at least, and for that whole time, it never really seemed like Intel bothered to diversify into anything else. They’ve had several attempts at me-too budget GPUs but they always seemed half-hearted.
ATI was at least on-and-off competitive with Nvidia in the early days, and then once AMD bought them, they soon won the console wars. They at least have that to fall back on (and yes, seizing the moment to take advantage of Intel’s mismanagement helps too).
But Nvidia, on the other hand… man, that early risky bet on CUDA and GPGPU paid off insanely well. Between crypto and AI, Nvidia went (seemingly overnight) from “entertainment accessory company” to “secret supplier of much of the US economy”. Did anyone expect a gaming graphics card company to become the world’s most valuable company in just over a decade?
This is caused by a couple factors:
-
Higher-end Intel CPUs from the last couple generations had a basically fatal flaw that would lead to instability and failure for reportedly >50% of their chips. On top of that, Intel handled it in probably the worst way possible. Even after the fixes have been made and released, there’s a lot of mistrust lingering.
-
AMD just released a new generation. Performance gains seem minimal, but the standout benefit is efficiency. Cooler chips means easier cooling which means easier overclocking.
As for the Arc B580 - it just released five days ago. It’s definitely gonna be in short supply. Early benchmarks are astounding, though.
It seems worse than that though. I have seen reports that merchants (big ones) see nothing in the pipeline and have no idea when or how many B580 cards they might get. And these companies look far down the road when it comes to supply. Maybe Intel gets this sorted. I really hope they do. The market needs a good budget card and Nvidia certainly needs some competition (good for us consumers). I also hope Intel sees the success of their budget GPU as a path to high-end ones. Nvidia made a fortune off of them and AMD decided to bow out of that market. Maybe Intel can get a piece and help them get through some hard times ahead.