Graphics card manufacturer eVGA has made a name for itself for two decades manufacturing and selling Nvidia’s GeForce GPUs, including some of the more affordable options on the market. But according to Gamers Nexus YouTubers, analyst Jon Peddie, and an EVGA forum post, EVGA is officially ending its relationship with Nvidia and will no longer make cards based on the company’s RTX 4000 series GPUs.
EVGA’s graphics cards have used Nvidia GPUs exclusively since its inception in 1999, and according to Gamers Nexus, GeForce sales account for 80 percent of EVGA’s revenue, making this a momentous and potentially business-damaging change. But EVGA CEO Andrew Han told Gamers Nexus that the decision was more about “principles” than finance – Han complained about a lack of communication from Nvidia about new products, including information on pricing and availability.
Nvidia’s pricing strategy was apparently another sore point for EVGA. Nvidia’s first-party Founders Edition cards were often able to undercut cards from EVGA and other suppliers, forcing them to either drop prices or lose revenue as a result.
Nvidia may not be entirely to blame here – the broader dynamics of the GPU market are also difficult to navigate. As Peddie also points out, even as GPU costs have increased, profit margins for the board partners who make Nvidia GPUs have fallen. Modern high-end GPUs have massively higher performance, cooling, and PCI Express signaling requirements than cards from just a few years ago, making them more expensive to design and manufacture, and coverage of the RTX 4000 series shows that trend only continue to increase.
It also probably doesn’t help that the GPU market has fallen back to earth this year after over a year of limited inventory and inflated prices. Declining cryptocurrency values and the Ethereum cryptocurrency’s move away from GPU mining have both flooded the market with used GPUs, which in turn has hurt demand for new GPUs. In Nvidia’s most recent earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang complained about “excess inventory” of RTX 3000-series GPUs that caused the company to miss its quarterly revenue guidance by $1.4 billion.
For Nvidia’s part, its public stance can be summed up as “goodbye and good luck.”
“We’ve had a great partnership with EVGA over the years and will continue to support them with our current generation of products,” Nvidia spokesman Bryan Del Rizzo told Tom’s Hardware. “We wish Andrew [Han] and all the best to our friends at EVGA.”
The ending of the EVGA-Nvidia relationship could also hurt Nvidia — Peddie says EVGA accounts for about 40 percent of Nvidia’s GPU market share in North America — but medium-term, the company is unlikely to be alarmed. Nvidia has other partners, and despite differences in cooler designs and clock speeds, GPUs in the same series tend to perform similarly regardless of which Nvidia partner actually made them. In other words, an RTX 3070 is an RTX 3070, and people who want one will just buy one from another company if EVGA’s products aren’t available.
EVGA will continue to sell its other products, including power supplies, although Han told Gamers Nexus that the company has no plans whatsoever to return to the GPU market — not with AMD’s or Intel’s GPUs, and not with future GeForce product generations. Han also said that EVGA will continue to sell cards based on older GeForce GPUs, including the RTX 3000 series, until they sell out towards the end of 2022. The company will also have enough stock of these cards on hand to fulfill any warranty repairs or replacements for currently supported cards.
Kyle Orland contributed to this report
#GeForce #GPUs #EVGAs #sales #ties #Nvidia
Leave a Comment