Desktop GPU sales hit 20 year low, 42 percent fewer than last year.

[Brooksie359]

8 hours ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

My take is that during the pandemic, Nvidia learned that people will buy their GPUs at scalper prices. Because of this, Nvidia increased the price themselves because they figured they could make more money per card without necessarily shipping hardware that justified the higher prices.

 

I guess people aren't as willing to pay scalper prices as Nvidia thought they were.

Not many people were willing to pay scalper prices as cryptocurrency was likely the biggest reason why they sold at those inflated prices as they could make that money back through mining. The same can't be said now so very few people are going to buy a gpu for 1600 or 1200 bucks. If prices were more reasonable I would be upgrading and I imagine I am not the only one who is reluctant to upgrade due to crazy price hikes. 

[porina]

1 hour ago, PatrikStar24 said:

This is bad news for everyone. Nvidia is bordering on Microsoft levels of market share (i.e. monopoly levels), and the consequences of Radeon Technology Group being unable to get their S%#@ together for years on end have finally caught up with them (for too many reasons to get into here). 

I did touch upon it in a previous reply. The chart is based on sales in a time period, not installed base where AMD will be more stable (e.g. Steam Hardware Survey). The time of AMD's indicated fall may be in part due to AMD fans holding out to see what RDNA3 brings, where nvidia has a wider market base diluting such effects. Intel was also the new thing in town so they may have gained uplift from that. Remains to be seen if momentum can continue until their next gen. RDNA3 being so new wont be shown yet.

 

I don't feel AMD are doing badly as far as the actual GPU product is concerned. The concern is they don't seem to be interested in growing volume and thus share, which I think is due to business priorities in other more profitable areas. If AMD is unwilling to buy share by lowering pricing, the only other chance I can think of is if they manage to attain clear performance leadership in a future generation and use that to gain more attention. RDNA3 is still like early gen Ryzen. It's good in some things (CPU: Cinebench, GPU: raster) but weak in others (CPU: FP, GPU: RT). Can they do something more with chiplets to make RDNA4 even better?

[mr moose]

20 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I wonder how many read the articles regarding this, vs just jumping to conclusions based on their preconceived notion about the situation.

 

People are spending less time at home so as a result, fewer people are buying gaming stuff.

With ever increasing inflation and many people having unsure financial futures, people are less likely to spend money on frivolous things like gaming.

This is happening across the industry, not just Nvidia and their gaming graphics cards.

A large amount of people bought computers at the start and during the pandemic. As a result, the sales are no longer as spread out.

 

 

There are several other factors at play as well, and this is not something that is exclusive to the GPU market.

It's very rare for such a big change to the market to be caused by a single thing. It's a very complex system with lots of different variables.

Pretty much this,

 

what people don't seem to understand is that economies rubber band, and the bigger the upset the bigger the bounce.  We have something as major as the pandemic suddenly crush logistics and force mass buying of chip based products and we have a genuine chip shortage, then when the pandemic ends and people are let free they run out and spend money on other things (cant fly on holiday so I'll renovate the home instead) which stimulates the economy in a stupidly fast way causing mass inflation and the need to tighten interest rates.  Then because these things aren't easy to finesse you get a sudden withdrawal of spending as people get scared about losing jobs, paying increasing bills and mortgages etc, so you have a lull in luxury spending (which GPU's fall into for the average consumer) and you have a lull in corporate expenditure (upgrading server farms etc) as they try to negotiate an unknown economic situation.

 

TL:DR there was a chip shortage, there was a supply/demand issue just as there is now, Mining likely had little to do with it in the last 3 years.  

 

 

 

 

 

[LAwLz]

12 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

Not many people were willing to pay scalper prices as cryptocurrency was likely the biggest reason why they sold at those inflated prices as they could make that money back through mining. The same can't be said now so very few people are going to buy a gpu for 1600 or 1200 bucks. If prices were more reasonable I would be upgrading and I imagine I am not the only one who is reluctant to upgrade due to crazy price hikes. 

If we look at the steam hardware survey, which we can fairly safely say does not include cards in mining farms, then we can see that A LOT of gamers actually did buy these really expensive graphics cards at highly inflated prices. We have a ton of build threads on this forum where people say they will buy whichever GPU they can find, for whichever price they can find, just to play games. 

 

I don't get where this idea that "only miners bought GPUs at those prices" comes from. We have clear evidence everywhere that gamers bought them too. And why wouldn't they? They were stuck at home, the government gave them a bunch of money in the form of stimulus checks, and they couldn't spend the money on things like travel. 

 

 

The reason why people aren't paying the same anymore is because the situation has changed. People no longer have a bunch of spare cash just sitting in the bank. They no longer have a government giving them thousands of dollars to spend. They are no longer stuck at home. They are no longer in desperate need of upgrading their computers. 

You can't look at a situation where like 20 things has changed and then point to a single variable and go "this is the reason that explains everything". 

[Brooksie359]

25 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

If we look at the steam hardware survey, which we can fairly safely say does not include cards in mining farms, then we can see that A LOT of gamers actually did buy these really expensive graphics cards at highly inflated prices. We have a ton of build threads on this forum where people say they will buy whichever GPU they can find, for whichever price they can find, just to play games. 

 

I don't get where this idea that "only miners bought GPUs at those prices" comes from. We have clear evidence everywhere that gamers bought them too. And why wouldn't they? They were stuck at home, the government gave them a bunch of money in the form of stimulus checks, and they couldn't spend the money on things like travel. 

 

 

The reason why people aren't paying the same anymore is because the situation has changed. People no longer have a bunch of spare cash just sitting in the bank. They no longer have a government giving them thousands of dollars to spend. They are no longer stuck at home. They are no longer in desperate need of upgrading their computers. 

You can't look at a situation where like 20 things has changed and then point to a single variable and go "this is the reason that explains everything". 

Not sure what you are talking about. The scalping process no longer worked as soon as mining wasn't profitable so it stands to reason that mining was a huge reason why scalpers could get away with those pricing. Also hardware survey doesn't mean much when prices went down already and alot of people bought cards once prices normalized or they could have gotten the gous at msrp from an actual pc parts store. I know many people who got cards from microcenter during those times and yes the prices were slightly higher than msrp but they were nowhere near as bad as scalper prices. 

[GoodBytes]

I am confused by this chart:

 

Why is the GPU shipment so low during the mining boom, while Nvidia and AMD both showed record sales numbers?

I get that these numbers aren't official ones, but something is definitely off. 

 

[porina]

56 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Why is the GPU shipment so low during the mining boom, while Nvidia and AMD both showed record sales numbers?

Some random speculation on my part.

 

This is claimed to be units which could include in the mix a lot of low end GPUs. Stuff like Ampere and RDNA2 to a much lesser extent might not be that much volume in comparison. It might be record revenue, but not necessarily record units. 

 

Mining specific SKUs and professional/enterprise stuff might not be counted.

 

Could there be some regional factor too? In the other charts we see Arc climbing before the western release. We know Intel did a China release earlier which likely makes up that.

 

Is laptop mix bigger this time? Again, those wouldn't have gone into desktop numbers.

[PocketNerd]

Demand goes up... Prices go up.

 

Demand goes down.... Prices go up.

 

Wait.... What?

[GoodBytes]

42 minutes ago, PocketNerd said:

Demand goes up... Prices go up.

 

Demand goes down.... Prices go up.

 

Wait.... What?

Yea, it is to compensate for the lower demand!

[porina]

44 minutes ago, PocketNerd said:

Demand goes up... Prices go up.

 

Demand goes down.... Prices go up.

 

Wait.... What?

Unexpected demand goes up, prices go up as manufacturing can't keep up.

 

Expected demand goes down. They turn down the production so there isn't a massive excess they need to fire sale.

[leadeater]

7 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

Why is the GPU shipment so low during the mining boom, while Nvidia and AMD both showed record sales numbers?

I get that these numbers aren't official ones, but something is definitely off. 

Would need to look at things like model break downs since proportionally more high end GPUs could be selling since mining was around the x060 Ti to x80 GPUs in the bulk amounts and those typically aren't the highest volume.

 

Either way a company like JPR likely is not able to account for a lot of the direct mining sales with how they gather their data.

 

Realistically I just think it's the downturn in the economy and low interest in the current new generation more than anything else.

[Kisai]

11 hours ago, mr moose said:

 

TL:DR there was a chip shortage, there was a supply/demand issue just as there is now, Mining likely had little to do with it in the last 3 years.  

 

Mining had everything to do with the availability and pricing. You do not see people standing in line to buy a GPU Today. You did on release on the 30 series in September 2020, six months into Pandemic lockdowns. The Pandemic started in Dec 2019 and became a "global pandemic" in March 2020, and that's when logistics started being interrupted. Those GPU's were already built by September 2020 and were not "affected by logistics", but stores made off like they did, as they held back supply for their own store-brand builds. Those launch GPU's were immediately scalped, just like PS5's were.

 

You can also look across many of the scalping tools to see that the scalping was grabbing inventory regardless if there was someone stupid enough to pay for it. 

 

There were two cycles in play, the "chip shortage" which started BEFORE the pandemic. Ask anyone who tried to order a Dell computer or server in 2019 how long they had to wait, or what they had to settle for.  The retail end was being scalped to sell to people mining ethereum, and there are people on THIS forum defending doing so. To what scale that had on the actual supply of GPU's we will never know because the stores were also doing underhanded things as well to raise the prices. Unless you bricked your computer during mid-2019 to mid-2022, you were literately SOL and had to pay these scalper prices, which were 2-3x the actual retail price, by the stores themselves.

 

And what happens when a manufacturer tries to adjust to demand is that they either underestimate or overestimate when they should cut back so they aren't sitting on a glut of supply. Which is what we saw in the launch of the 40 series. They were expecting demand in GPU mining to grow, not crash.

Notice that line follows the trend right until March 2022.

 

There's also the fact that the "ASIC" development for Bitcoin mining may have played more of a role in creating the chip shortage in the first place.

https://blog.libove.org/posts/are-crypto-currencies-to-blame-for-high-gpu-prices/

 

 

As per everything, there is usually no smoking gun going "GPU prices were high because Scalpers bought up all inventory to sell to miners", it was more complicated than that, and it was unlikely scalpers were responsible for the high prices except during the Launch window of each card, then the retail channels just raised the prices themselves to levels that the miners were willing to pay but no gamer would unless they needed a GPU "now".

 

 

[PocketNerd]

4 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

Yea, it is to compensate for the lower demand!

<Has serious BC Ferries flashbacks>

[Mark Kaine]

On 12/30/2022 at 3:10 PM, Colty said:

Unfortunately, ARC GPU's aren't mature enough for most user's daily gaming.

I tried AMD once, had driver issues in 3/4 games I was trying to play (5700XT, about half a year after release)

Because of those two things, I'd still grab Nvidia off the shelf, but I can't convince myself to pay more than $500 for a GPU. I theoretically should, I would love to play more PC games on my OLED, but my PS5 does more than well enough for sightseeing games so a 3060 (paired with a 240Hz 1080p BenQ) stays in my rig for CS:GO, older games, and the occasional game that isn't released on PS. 

i tried like 3 or 4 amd gpus last couple of years... tbh they *did* get better,  last one was a rx590 and it was pretty ok, not as awful as the others,  ie i think if you're willing to tinker a lot you could probably get it to work,  although the same could be said about intel, latest drivers seem to have improved a lot, so if someone really wanted to they could definitely go that route, nvidia while better, isnt perfect either and has some annoying issues too (gfe, bugs, etc)

 

i might go intel at some point,  if its a significant improvement over my 3070, why not.

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Realistically I just think it's the downturn in the economy and low interest in the current new generation more than anything else.

basically, 3000 series were kind of revolutionary,  actually good value and then with the shortage everyone wanted one even at regularly absurd prices, and i think people currently just don't need new, even more expensive cards that aren't even a big jump like 3000 series was (for the most part)... thats just my impression of course but yeah, with the current pricing who really needs those cards. the pricing also just doesn't make sense for the consumer, even a 4090 which is supposedly "good value" who can really afford those, not many people for sure.

 

 

[leadeater]

12 hours ago, Kisai said:

Mining had everything to do with the availability and pricing. You do not see people standing in line to buy a GPU Today. You did on release on the 30 series in September 2020, six months into Pandemic lockdowns.

People stand in lines when  they know availability is so bad that is what they must do to get one, that's not proof mining was the cause. There is much better causal links to the problem for the manufacturing facilities shutting down and worker shortages due to sickness and lockdowns in shipping and logistics companies.

 

One is an assumption on observation without knowing the cause and one is verifiable known issue with known impacts. 

 

Mining would have contributed to demand, it's not likely to have caused the global shortages. It doesn't take much supply shortage for prices to spike very high and speculative scalpers have more to do with that than miners do. Miners buy direct, scalpers sell to you or at least take the stock you could have gotten.

 

In 2021 there were roughly 14 million active GPUs mining ETH based on the hash rate, that is roughly one quarter of one year of estimated shipments. So unless mining farms are cycling every single card every quarter, which they are not, then mining is not taking up all the supply.

[Gamer Schnitzel]

I literally said a few months ago that PC gaming is dying and that in the future everyone will play on mobile phones but the dumb fucks linked me the rising Steam sales because they did not understand that has zero correlation.

 

The fact is that kids today simply do not play PC and if kids don't play PC then nobody will. Companies are not going to be producing games for a bunch of 50 year olds that couldn't get laid all their life. The reason why PC gamers got a PC in the first place was because when PCs came out everyone was buying them, they were just new and also very useful. People installed games on them and PC gaming was born. Nobody went to the store to buy a PC just because of games. But today people do not have any reason to buy a PC. Kids do their homework either at school or they get a cheap laptop that cannot run games. If the parents can afford it they'll buy the kid a console and if not the kid will play Fortnite or Genshin Impact on the phone but most kids these days don't play any games because of social media. Being a degenerate back in the day was fine. Nobody at school knew what you did at home so you could play WoW all day and not have to feel bad. Today you are frequently messaged at home and you are required to post and report everything that you do. If you play games instead of watching Tik Tok videos people will think you are weird so a lot of people, especially girls, are put off video games. Back in the day you could barely play an online game for 5 minutes without running into a chick but today literally no girls play unless they are degenerates themselves while back in the day you could meet loads of non degen girls who literally had nothing to do with video games but they just played for the fun of it. But since social media put pressure on kids to pretend they are cool they are gone.

Without kids there will be no PC gaming no matter how boomerish you guys wanna be.

 

The only way to save PC gaming is what I have posted trillion times now. Ban social media for anyone under 16. Online games will be blooded with new players because kids will no longer spent 90% of their free time scrolling through social media feeds telling them to kill themselves on video for likes.

And the US and EU have to come together and fine Jensen for several billions for making PCs unaffordable for a large part of the population + give him a short deadline to release an extremely affordable GPU that is freely available at cost to all PC builder companies to start selling a PC that can run basic games for £500.

 

If you want to save PC gaming do this. Or you can pretend you know better but then I suggest you start downloading Roblox and Genshin Impact on your phones already guys.

[StDragon]

7 hours ago, PocketNerd said:

Demand goes up... Prices go up.

 

Demand goes down.... Prices go up.

 

Wait.... What?

The oligopoly repricing system based on prior demand metrics in concert with inflation and supply chain disruption.

Soon, we can add tariffs to that as well which will hike the prices up further.

[GhostRoadieBL]

11 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

I am confused by this chart:

 

Why is the GPU shipment so low during the mining boom, while Nvidia and AMD both showed record sales numbers?

I get that these numbers aren't official ones, but something is definitely off. 

 

this may have been answered in the last few minutes but the chart only shows shipments, not number of GPUs shipped.

when large farms were getting set up they count for only a single or maybe a few shipments but the shipments are of hundreds or thousands of cards as a unique SKU from Nvidia rather than the public SKU and price you would see in a store. Even accounting for the chip shortage on the manufacturing and assembly lines, they were still shipping more GPUs than ever in history for the company. Just primarily to single addresses as pallets of gpus instead of singles to consumers like they normally do.

Typically these charts are in 'units' (that one is too) and it allows some clever adjustments on the company's part to identify what a "unit" is, some charts will be in individual cards, others can be as assembled asics or combined packages where a 'unit' is a pallet sold as a single transaction. It all depends on the 'UOM' or unit of measure for the object the company is selling. I've had UOMs for parts shipped to our company as a fully assembled server, in a rack with everything pre-wired sent as a "unit" and other companies send each component already assembled as a separate invoice so the rack shows up with a freaking binder of invoices for each part (including screws) as UOM x1 per part. I hate these companies. 

 

TLDR: UOM always screws with these 'units shipped' charts when you create custom SKUs for racks of parts rather than counting them one by one off the assembly line.

 

edit: one of the best ways to identify how many cards shipped is to dig into the company's income statement breakdown during tax season (or investor updates) and compare the "segment profits" to the units shipped data

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-2022 looking at the net income, despite claiming to be down on sales they doubled their net income in 2022 compared to 2021 which doesn't align with the increase in shipments they made between the two years so that extra income came from increasing margins. Hopefully they nose dive on income at the start of 2023 but they'll likely scale back cards to get more chips from a single wafer instead of pushing the core counts like they did with the 40 series compared to the 30 series.

 

Side note: Nvidia claims to have paid $189million in taxes on $9.9 billion in profit before taxes or 1.9% in income tax.

'tell me your corporation lobbies without saying lobbying'

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

this may have been answered in the last few minutes but the chart only shows shipments, not number of GPUs shipped.

when large farms were getting set up they count for only a single or maybe a few shipments but the shipments are of hundreds or thousands of cards as a unique SKU from Nvidia rather than the public SKU and price you would see in a store. Even accounting for the chip shortage on the manufacturing and assembly lines, they were still shipping more GPUs than ever in history for the company. Just primarily to single addresses as pallets of gpus instead of singles to consumers like they normally do.

Typically these charts are in 'units' (that one is too) and it allows some clever adjustments on the company's part to identify what a "unit" is, some charts will be in individual cards, others can be as assembled asics or combined packages where a 'unit' is a pallet sold as a single transaction. It all depends on the 'UOM' or unit of measure for the object the company is selling. I've had UOMs for parts shipped to our company as a fully assembled server, in a rack with everything pre-wired sent as a "unit" and other companies send each component already assembled as a separate invoice so the rack shows up with a freaking binder of invoices for each part (including screws) as UOM x1 per part. I hate these companies. 

 

TLDR: UOM always screws with these 'units shipped' charts when you create custom SKUs for racks of parts rather than counting them one by one off the assembly line.

That's not how someone like JPR counts them. Even a fully built server with 8 GPUs in it as a single SKU from say HPE still counts as 8 GPUs shipped in these data collections. One of the reasons for that is the data is accumulated from GPU packages and VRAM sold by Nvidia since that's what they actually sell, even internally to themselves for their FE cards.

 

That's how a lot of this data is collected, it assumes everything supplied and purchased to assemblers/AIB etc is sold, which generally isn't too inaccurate.

 

So even a pallet of 1000 GPUs to a mining company would still be 1000 shipped GPUs. International shipping laws even require that the inventory in shipments is correct and accurate, otherwise they get seized or fined.

[mr moose]

13 hours ago, Kisai said:

Mining had everything to do with the availability and pricing. You do not see people standing in line to buy a GPU Today. You did on release on the 30 series in September 2020, six months into Pandemic lockdowns. The Pandemic started in Dec 2019 and became a "global pandemic" in March 2020, and that's when logistics started being interrupted. Those GPU's were already built by September 2020 and were not "affected by logistics", but stores made off like they did, as they held back supply for their own store-brand builds. Those launch GPU's were immediately scalped, just like PS5's were.

 

You can also look across many of the scalping tools to see that the scalping was grabbing inventory regardless if there was someone stupid enough to pay for it. 

 

There were two cycles in play, the "chip shortage" which started BEFORE the pandemic. Ask anyone who tried to order a Dell computer or server in 2019 how long they had to wait, or what they had to settle for.  The retail end was being scalped to sell to people mining ethereum, and there are people on THIS forum defending doing so. To what scale that had on the actual supply of GPU's we will never know because the stores were also doing underhanded things as well to raise the prices. Unless you bricked your computer during mid-2019 to mid-2022, you were literately SOL and had to pay these scalper prices, which were 2-3x the actual retail price, by the stores themselves.

 

And what happens when a manufacturer tries to adjust to demand is that they either underestimate or overestimate when they should cut back so they aren't sitting on a glut of supply. Which is what we saw in the launch of the 40 series. They were expecting demand in GPU mining to grow, not crash.

Notice that line follows the trend right until March 2022.

 

There's also the fact that the "ASIC" development for Bitcoin mining may have played more of a role in creating the chip shortage in the first place.

https://blog.libove.org/posts/are-crypto-currencies-to-blame-for-high-gpu-prices/

 

 

As per everything, there is usually no smoking gun going "GPU prices were high because Scalpers bought up all inventory to sell to miners", it was more complicated than that, and it was unlikely scalpers were responsible for the high prices except during the Launch window of each card, then the retail channels just raised the prices themselves to levels that the miners were willing to pay but no gamer would unless they needed a GPU "now".

 

 

Righto, lets just ignore the wealth of stats that show the recent corona virus outbreak having the lions share of impact on everything to concentrate on a one percenter.

 

You have to remember that the chip shortage was not caused by brand or product type, it was literally the entire product chain from fabs to logistics and warehousing for anything that required fabrication in said facilities.  That is everything from GPU's and CPU's to the ECU and BMU's in modern cars.   Fucking hell my sister in law had to wait 8 months for her new car to be delivered after signing the sales papers.  All due to chip shortages.

 

Or are you going to argue that the price of second hand cars going through the roof in Australia was caused by miners too?

 

 

 

[porina]

10 hours ago, Gamer Schnitzel said:

I literally said a few months ago that PC gaming is dying and that in the future everyone will play on mobile phones but the dumb fucks linked me the rising Steam sales because they did not understand that has zero correlation.

Success of one category (mobile gaming) doesn't kill off other gaming areas. They can coexist.

 

I didn't try to compare numbers to mobile, but the last time I looked (some months ago) the estimated monthly active Steam users is comparable to lifetime sales of either of current gen PS5 or XB hardware. 

 

10 hours ago, Gamer Schnitzel said:

Or you can pretend you know better but then I suggest you start downloading Roblox and Genshin Impact on your phones already guys.

Why not both? I'm a daily player of Genshin on PC, but also have it on phone. Experience is very different.

[Heliian]

On 12/31/2022 at 5:57 AM, mr moose said:

the bigger the upset the bigger the bounce.

No

12 hours ago, leadeater said:

In 2021 there were roughly 14 million active GPUs mining ETH

That's just eth.  The fact that crypto died and there is now a glut of gpus means that it was the major stressor on the market.  

Chip shortages still exist but there is for sure no shortage of gpus now. 

[SimplyChunk]

On 12/30/2022 at 2:13 PM, Crunchy Dragon said:

upgraded to a 2070 Super.

I got a 2070 Super and it's fine for most things at 1440p

On 12/30/2022 at 10:01 PM, Mel0n. said:

Bound to happen eventually. When GPUs get more expensive every generation and more powerful than people need, no one buys them...

Plus the serious lack of AAA games these days...

[SimplyChunk]

This Data doesn't account for used GPU sales right?