Nvidia Appears To Have A GPU Inventory Problem (seekingalpha.com) 83
Reports out of Taiwan now suggest that Nvidia has a gaming GPU inventory problem. An anonymous reader writes: Tech news site SemiAccurate which covers the GPU space pretty closely, and has broken stories like AMD's acquisition of ATI Technologies and Nvidia's Bumpgate, just published an article on why Nvidia has delayed their new gaming GPUs. It seems the Hot Chips 30 agenda cancellation and Jensen's no new GPUs for 'a long time' comment have created enough of a stir to get journalists and industry insiders asking questions. While curiosity amongst all this confusion is natural, I was surprised to discover that people were starting to speculate Nvidia's delay was due to technical issues with their new GPUs. This had never been a concern of mine, and as it turns out, it's clearly not the case. So, what the problem? Nvidia has overestimated pent-up gaming demand and underestimated the impact of declining mining demand.
I will take some off there hands for free! (Score:5, Funny)
I will take some off there hands for free!.
Allow Data Centre Use (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
And nvidia only sells 8-track tapes.
Nvidia also sells the hardware used in the Nintendo Switch as well as another line of high-end gaming tablets. Don't get me wrong, I would like to see them taken down a peg too, but it doesn't look to me like they're out of markets to trample.
Re: (Score:1)
get some priorities, folks! (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
You were always supposed to pay that tax, it's just that businesses weren't required to collect it. People were supposed to keep records on their spending and submit that to the state.
Which was really fucking stupid. Why on earth should citizens keep tabs of that in order to figure out how much more money they get to give to the government? That's a substantial amount of effort, especially given that there's been no reporting requirements for those businesses.
Hard to decipher what the story is... (Score:3)
Re:Hard to decipher what the story is... (Score:5, Insightful)
But if the problem is excess inventory they have to sell near a loss, well that's what you get for creating a false supply shortage to drive up prices.
or they just don't release the new chips because AMD can't get their shit together on the GPU side, and sell off the inventory at normal prices.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
There may also be the problem of lengthening release cycles of AAA games that are ever more expensive to produce, inflated RAM prices that delay system upgrades and so lessen any associated GPU demand. Still, a 40% price inflation in Nvidia products alone is enough to give a second though for any young gamers who wants to spend their money on new games that are also more expensive than before. Meanwhile the miners brag how they scored another five cards with those prices.
Re: (Score:3)
They have excess inventory because the bottom fell out of the mining game with lenders no longer giving money out for people to build the machines. Once that happened, they were stuck with inventory that is going no where because they didn't see the market trend.
The upside is that this will drive the costs of cards way down, and since they massively missed the market it'll be a good chance to get a card if you're using an older one.
price fixing. (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
The 1080 Ti's can be had at MSRP again. So some of them have dropped.
Re:price fixing. (Score:4, Insightful)
its almost 2 years old, let me just shit my pants that its now at 2016 MSRP
Re: (Score:2)
price fixing only requires collusion when there _is_ a competitor.
No, it price fixing still requires collusion even if there are no competitors. Otherwise it is just price setting.
Re: (Score:2)
Collusion between *marketeers* to inflate prices of a sole-source product is price fixing and many such as car dealerships have been charged and fined.
And if they find multiple retailers colluding to inflate prices of Nvidia GPUs it would certainly be considered price fixing. I'm not sure how that is related to what I said, since in that case there are competing retailers involved.
Re: (Score:3)
Every time I see an article talking about how the prices are coming down I go and look, and surprise everything is still really expensive. For instance only a few sketchy places are advertising new 1080's for under the MSRP that was listed a year ago.
Re: (Score:2)
GPU prices have not dropped in the last few months, despite drop in demand, and oversupply.
You mean you haven't looked. There were only stories out 2 weeks ago about a fresh round of price cuts with several cards back down at their MSRP.
Here you go: https://www.newegg.com/Product... [newegg.com] shop away. The price is right where it should be.
Re: (Score:2)
It isn't dead yet. There's a slowdown in sales because everyone who was mining ethereum and its derivatives is now waiting for bitmain to spin up production to meet new demand. So no new buys, as difficulty is expected to rise soon with massive influx of ASICs.
But if people have the hardware running, my understanding is that difficulty isn't yet up to the point where it wouldn't make sense to mine (expecting price to rise in the future, as much of ethereum mining was making loss at the moment of being mined
Still too expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
So lower the price. The cheapest 1080 gtx I can find right now, is still $100 higher than what I paid last summer.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Still too expensive (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Ahahahahahahahahaahahahahahaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah. "Just make them cheaper". Nice one! Classic joke.
Re: (Score:2)
Wouldn't necessarily help. Everybody now knows that they have the next generation of chips ready to roll and they're only delaying them to clear out the existing stock of older chips.
So may as well wait a bit and get a new generation chip that'll be faster than the one you can buy now.
The only thing a change in price will achieve is potentially selling the top end cards to the midrange market, which would itself cause a delay in their future upgrade cycle and damage longer term earnings.
Me, I'm happy to wai
full disclosure, at the very end (Score:5, Informative)
The author admits he has shorted nVidia's stock at the very end of the article, on the 3rd page.
Re: (Score:2)
Key part seems to be confirmable by other parties - that being nvidia being forced to accept hundreds of thousands of GPUs from Taiwanese OEMs.
Re: (Score:1)
It's legally required. If you own stock in a company you're writing about, it has to be declared. Otherwise, you may be on the hook for stock manipulation.
Re: (Score:1)
The week Taser went public, suddenly there were news articles about how tasers could kill.
Somebody was up to something. Always follow the money.
Re: (Score:2)
It's never really about ethics in financial journalism.
A whole lot of factors (Score:3)
The mining causing prices to skyrocket also had the effect of making gamers not upgrade their GPUs, and now that the current lineup is old they will probably be waiting for the next version to come out.
You also have godlike 4K HDR10 144Hz monitors that are about to start shipping, and no current GPU can handle that even on a lot of simpler titles. So people may be waiting to upgrade to something that can handle that.
The altcoin mining craze seems to finally be dying down and prices are returning to normal, but it's too late. If gamers aren't crazy for these GPUs anymore, and miners aren't buying them either, it seems plausible that they'd have a lot of unsold inventory lying around.
Re: (Score:3)
...and now that the current lineup is old they will probably be waiting for the next version to come out.
Definitely this... I just built a new gaming rig two weeks ago, and swapped my 3-year-old 970 GTX into the new system. Nothing available right now is a sensible upgrade for the price, and the coy comments about a new GPU might as well have been, "You'd be an idiot to buy the current gen right now. We have new stuff, but it won't be available until we sell the old inventory to suckers."
I know a few others doing the same. They really want to upgrade, but they're not going to buy the current gen, because it's
Re: (Score:2)
There's the other side to this coin too. Most people who would upgrade after a couple of years, while their old hardware was working were suddenly faced with not really wanting to upgrade due to prices.
So they didn't, and many of them likely noticed that there isn't actually anything coming out that can really overtax their three-ish years old hardware.
I wonder just how badly nvidia and amd managed to shoot themselves in the foot by essentially forcing the "upgrade every couple of years" people face the fac
Re: (Score:2)
Right there with you. I wanted to build a new machine in February but the GPU prices were nuts, so I waited, and I'm absolutely not about to go drop $600 on a 2 year old GPU. I've waited this long, I can wait until the next gen GPUs come out.
Re: (Score:1)
Assuming they stick to their guns and really *don't* release any new GPUs for a couple years, you can expect the next release to be celebrated with as much fanfare as they can muster while they talk about how it's the "single largest jump in GPU technology in the history of the company" or something equally misleading.
I wonder if this has something to do with the fact that they're having a hard time churning out faster and faster cards? So instead of dropping a card that's 20% faster each year, they release
Re: (Score:2)
They didn't say it would be a couple of years but in any case why release a gaming product that isn't significantly different than their last gaming product? For example the TitanV doesn't perform that much better than the TitanX in gaming because the key thing the Volta architecture introduced is the tensor cores which are great for machine learning and AI applications as well as the denoising step in ray tracing applications but they don't do anything for gamers so there's little point putting out a Volta
Re: (Score:2)
yup same here, which is why my ryzen has a GTX980 in it
and big shocker, it still runs everything just fine
Re: (Score:3)
This. I was interested in upgrading 6 months ago, but the crypto craze had prices beyond what is reasonable, so I waited. Now I'd rather wait a while longer for the next generation unless there are some sweet discounts (unlikely). 4K at >60 Hz is a big want. I'd also really like to see some unified G-Sync/FreeSync standard come along, preferable without the 2-3x monitor markup.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd also really like to see some unified G-Sync/FreeSync standard come along, preferable without the 2-3x monitor markup.
VESA already did this, it's called Adaptive Sync and it's part of DisplayPort 1.2a.
NVIDIA refuses to implement it.
Price inflexion point (Score:2)
My uneducated guess is that there's a price inflexion point concerning miners. Once the price drops below they'll have the opposite problem: supply shortage. Gamers will buy at current prices too, but miners are waiting for a price drop where mining makes sense, and when it does they'll fly in like locusts and the cycle begins anew.
Nvidia may be in for some difficult times (Score:5, Insightful)
I've used both Nvidia's and AMD's (Formerly ATI) graphics cards but have never been a huge fan of Nvidia's almost monopolistic practices so I tend to get AMD cards whenever I can. Still I would say Nvidia has a lot to worry about on it's hands. Although AMD and Intel are competitors, they do have times that they work together closely and Intel's next gen GPU are signs that they will. Unlike Nvidia, Intel is likely to be working on open standards with AMD and their recent joint CPU / GPU project looks like they'll be able to do so.
Lower prices? (Score:2)
I seriously doubt it.
Turn it into a folding @ home farm (Score:2)
Can't wait for the lawsuit (Score:3)
This Link (Score:1)
Is why the internet has problems. I don't want to register to finish reading an article. Let me read the article or don't, do not let me read half the article, and hold the other half as ransom. Fuck you. I hope "Seeking Alpha" dies and leads its "investors" into financial ruin. Fuck Nvidia, too. They created a fake low supply issue to keep prices high and compete with AMD. You can seek an Alpha and be lied to if you want, but thinking isn't that hard.