GPU Market Nosedives, Sales Lowest In a Decade

Shipments of integrated and discrete graphics processing units dropped to a 10-year low in the third quarter as PC OEMs reduced procurements of CPUs, and gamers lowered their purchases of existing graphics cards while waiting for next-generation products. From a report: In contrast, miners ceased to buy graphics boards due to changes that happened to Ethereum. In general, sales of standalone graphics cards for desktops hit a multi-year low. Usually, PC makers increase procurement of PC hardware components in the third quarter as they assemble computers to sell them in back-to-school and holiday seasons when sales are high. But as demand for PCs softened recently, manufacturers initiated inventory corrections and lowered their components buying to sell off what they already have. As a result, sales of integrated and discrete GPU dropped to 75.5 million units in Q3 2022, down 10.5% sequentially and 25.1% year-over-year, according to Jon Peddie Research. In addition, shipments of desktop GPUs fell by 15.43%, and notebook GPUs decreased by 30%, which is the most significant drop since the 2009 recession, JPR notes.

Have you seen the prices of new GPUs?

[DarkRookie2]

They are still quite expensive. And the economy is in a downturn.

Re:

[AmazingRuss]

Plus there is a glut of them on eBay, for cheap.

Re:Have you seen the prices of new GPUs?

[muh_freeze_peach]

3080s selling for +$1k is not cheap, when the MSRP was set at $699 3 fucking years ago.

Re:

[Xicor]

this. maybe eventually they will stop treating gamers like shit and sell for a reasonable price.

Re:Have you seen the prices of new GPUs?

[leonbev]

Used 3080's are currently selling for $550 on eBay right now.

Sure, a lot of those cards were probably beaten to hell by crypto miners, but at least they're priced lower than MSRP now.

Re:Have you seen the prices of new GPUs?

[rsilvergun]

I've been running a 580 from a crypto miner for the last couple years and it's been rock solid. Bought it during the last crash. Anecdotal I know but it shows they can be just fine. The only trouble I had is that the bios was set up for mining when I got it. I had to flip a switch on the card to get it to run full speed.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

Miners run their GPU's at capacity but are religious about cooling. That's now to protect semiconductors.

Not so much gamers who frequently try to OC with inadequate cooling.

One is an investor, one is a consumer.

Reputation systems like eBay work.

Re:

[alvinrod]

Most miners in the last few years were likely mining Etherium and the algorithm it uses was intentionally designed to be memory bound. Most miners would just underclock their cards because faster clock speeds didn't increase performance and it saves a lot on electricity costs.

Re:

[lowvisioncomputing]

1. There are plenty of miners who are stealing their electricity, so "burn baby burn."

2 In some cases it may be cheaper to just upgrade your CPU.

In my case, I need a 4th HDMI out for the beast [lowvisioncomputing.com] So in the new year, I'm going to upgrade to an i9-13900 with dual HDMI outputs.

Screw NVidia. I'll wait for the next generation of upper-midrange GPUs with 2 HDMI ports, and see what AMD has to offer.

What I won't be doing is wasting money (both up-front and over the long term) on NVidia's latest and greatest

Re:

[thegarbz]

I'll take a card having experienced a reasonably constant load, undervolted to keep it cool, and run in a thermally controlled environment over some card sitting at max temperature in some neglected air choked gaming PC any day.

Re:

[Rei]

I recently bought a 3090 on Ebay for $510. Admittedly it has no display output, so no use for gamers, but I need it for CUDA for neural network applications. I won't be able to pick it up and try it out until Christmas (I hope there's nothing preventing it from running general CUDA apps...), but I figured there's no point to wait, with the massive dump of Ethereum mining cards, the dump of cards from people upgrading to a 40xx card, and the seasonal increase in demand around Christmas.

Re:

[Mr.Fork]

THIS. 5 years ago, you could get video card behind the current generation for a few hundred dollars. Now they're $5-700 - and it needs to come down in price. A new gen vid card should be $500. Not over 1k.

The economy is pretty OK actually

[rsilvergun]

it grew last quarter. The Fed Chair, Jerome Powell, is trying to cause a recession (as are most CEOs) but they're not having any luck with it.

Prices are still pretty close to pre-Ethereum merge levels though. At least for MSRP. I'm just now seeing a mid range card (a 6650 XT) going for $250 bucks. It's a lower end model (the MSI, serviceable but not as good as the XFX or Sapphire) though, and the nVidia equivalent is still $350-$450.

Prices survived the initial crypto crash because of high pent up de

Re:

[DarkRookie2]

I got my RX580 for around $200 near when it was release. That is at the higher end of that gen.
Sorry, I am waiting for the 6800s to get to around that price and have the new shiny 7800 be the $250-300 option. The 6800s are still going for $400-500. The announcement of the 7000s I don't think move the price.

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

Your price perception is kind of skewed by the fact that the 580, while being near top-of-the-line for AMD that generation, was competing with NVidia's bottom of the line- so in the shared market, was really a low end card.
The 580 was competing head-to-head with the GTX 1060... which was a pretty cheap card.
The best card of that generation- the 590, would walked like a dog by the plain 1070.

If the 580 had been competing with 1070s and 1080s, AMD probably would have been charging NVidia prices for the ca

Re:

[DarkRookie2]

How so? I am comparing against other AMD cards. nVidia usually always beat AMD but AMD was cheaper.
I want the 8 series of cards of the generation to back down to the $200-$250 they were pre-pandemic. The RX380 and the HD4870 both I had before were in that price range.

Re:

[blackomegax]

AMD was only cheap because they sucked relative to nvidia. the 580 performed like a 1060 so it was priced like a 1060. That is how competition works. Now AMD has cards that compete 1:1 with nvidia for the most part, and, hey, they're cheaper than the SKU they compete with!. RX6900's cheaper than 3090's. 7900XTX will be cheaper than the 4090. RX6600 is cheaper than a RTX3060, etc.

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

To be completely fair, the 7900XTX doesn't match the 4090.
It averages about 10% behind.

However, it's 30% cheaper, so the performance per dollar value proposition is still fantastic.

Re:

[DarkRookie2]

So, we all have nVidia to thank for price gouging everyone because they want in the enterprise AI world and not the GPU world.
Assholes.

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

Heh. I think maybe you were slightly tongue-in-cheek there...
But they're as responsible for the increase in price as they are for the cheap prices of parent's 580.
Which is to say... They're really not.
AMD sets the price based on what they think they can sell compared to the competition.
The fault of price lies entirely on the consumer who hasn't punished these fuckers by not buying their cards (apparently until now)

Re:

[Chatterton]

Yes, sure they are cheaper. But they also are in a price bracket that is simply crazy. At the time, I did found that a 2080 msrp (699$) was already crazy for a video card and good luck to buy one at that price in Europe. Unfortunately for me I need NVidia cards for running my tensorflow models and my 2080 with 8GB start to show its limits :( I have found a second hand 3090 FE with 24GB for 'only' 850 euro, but it is still hurt in the butt but less than a new one will hurt :(

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

How so? I am comparing against other AMD cards. nVidia usually always beat AMD but AMD was cheaper.

Oh, simple.
AMD's flagship was priced in a competitive manner with the cards they competed with on the NV side.
They were cheaper because they sucked.

However, today that's not the case.
AMD is competitive as fuck.
That means their pricing has skewed to match.
$200 will not get you a near-top-end AMD card anymore. It will get you the clearance bin card.
The 580 was only $200 because it sucked.

I wasn't saying you can't get cards for $200 anymore, I was just saying you won't ever get a "near top end" card

Re:

[DarkRookie2]

Yesyesyes. I understand that AMD sucks compared to nVidia. But both are guilty for pushing their flagship cards to near $100 when they all use to be in the $200-400 range.
I don't want to spend $200 for a video card that will allow me bump the detail settings from low to med. And that is all that it will improve. I use to get more details and more frames for that amount.

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

Yesyesyes. I understand that AMD sucks compared to nVidia.

That wasn't the point at all- and neither is it true, today. AMD makes excellent cards. The shit they inherited from the ATI purchase was a fucking disaster, though.

But both are guilty for pushing their flagship cards to near $100 when they all use to be in the $200-400 range.

I can see you missed what I was saying.
Flagship cards were never in the $200 range.
Even the 280GTX was a $650 card.

I don't want to spend $200 for a video card that will allow me bump the detail settings from low to med.

That's all you've ever gotten for $200 (at least since the start of tiered SKUs in the ATI/NV wars).
The ATI 9800XT was a $500 card. Arguably ATI's last good card.

And that is all that it will improve. I use to get more details and more frames for that amount.

You didn't. You just felt like you did because you had a 580, which

Re:

[Major_Disorder]

I have a RX-570 that I overpaid for, early in the pandemic when prices were just starting to go nuts. I am watching prices on the RX 6800 and 6850. The way they are going I figure I will probably be buying one of them at a boxing day sale, or early in the new year. Fortunately the RX-570 works pretty well gaming in Linux, and so far I have only found 1 game I really want to play that the card doesn't handle no matter what I do to the settings.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

They are still quite expensive. And the economy is in a downturn.

And the glut of used GPUs available cheap now on the market is basically the competition.

For the average user - would having a GTX4090 (with power cable issues and all) at $2000 perform so much better than say, a used 3080 for $500? Sure it might be used and abused, but right now, which offers better value for money?

Heck, can't these cards do SLI as well? So you can maybe get 2 3080s and still be saving money, or even 3?

The glut of "good enoug

Re:

[Rei]

Depends on what you're using it for. I use my graphics card purely for CUDA, and these days specifically for neural networks. Where memory is usually the limiting factor. 24GB is a BIG difference vs. 12GB.

(That said, 3090 is also 24GB, so it's an easy choice IMHO vs. a 4090)

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Not surprised

[BackwardPawn]

I remember when there were killer AAA games being released all the time and I wanted to upgrade my GPU every other year. I can't think of a new game in the last 5 years that would justify spending another $500+ on a GPU. I've got an RTX 2070 that was purchased when I built my PC. Runs all my older games better than ever. Runs all the new games well enough. No plans to upgrade any time soon.

Re:

[muh_freeze_peach]

I have a 2080ti, and my sweet spot is 1440p@144hz - this card is having a hard time pushing those numbers in new games like MW2 and BF2042. But I imagine playing on 1080p@60hz this card would probably last another year or 2.

Re:

[BackwardPawn]

I guess if you're playing competitvely. I get bored with eSports games, as I just don't have the time to put in to get good. That's not true, I don't have the motivation. I'd rather play something like Witcher 3 or Mass Effect. If anyone's got suggestions, I'd be grateful. Lately, I've been watching a lot of Critereon Channel and Mubi, as Hollywood produces crap and gaming seems to be focused on eSports and Battle Royal.

Re:

[war4peace]

Give Days Gone a try.
If you're into military games, you might enjoy the Sniper Elite series.

My go-to games are:
Elite Dangerous (for casual space exploration, relaxing gameplay)
Forza Horizon 4/5 (for casual-ish driving around, car collecting, freeroam)
Euro Truck Simulator 2 / American Truck Simulator, for driving around with not a care in the world while listening to my favorite music.
Factorio - for exercising my brain, I found it very helpful when you need analytical/critical thinking and planning.
Satisfact

Re:

[BackwardPawn]

I need to go back to Forza Horizon 5. I had finished 3 & 4 just prior to 5's release and was Horizoned out. I appreciated the new setting and the advances in their model, but it was more of the same. I am looking forward to the new Motorsport.

I tried the demo for Euro Truck simulator and never quite got it. I actually own Elite Dangerous, but the description struck me as "Euro Truck in Space." If I can listen to some albums and keep the other half of my brain occupied with driving, I can see the

Re:

[war4peace]

I very much enjoyed Days Gone, I consider it one of the best single player games in recent years. It's one of those rare gems where you really do connect with characters.

Re:

[BackwardPawn]

I'll give it a try. Thanks.

Re:

[blackomegax]

The best thing about your go-to list is all those games run pretty well on 1050Ti or modern integrated GPU's.

Re:

[war4peace]

Sure, go play the Eye-candy-yet-shallow Cyberpunk 2077 if that's what you fancy (actually, I jest. I liked it but not enough to finish it.)
The point was uber-powerful GPUs are no longer "need to have", but rather "look at me, I got the latest fad" thing.
10th gen nVidia cards are capable enough to play most modern games at high graphics quality settings with more than decent frame rates.

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

I went from a 2080Ti to a 3090Ti.

It doesn't struggle with 1440p on new games like the 2080Ti did... But I'm also not sure I really care.
Mostly, I play in 1080P anyway (streamed to TV via Steam Link).

All the 3090 really got me was good ray tracing performance. The 2080 *really* struggled there without some pretty aggressive DLSS settings.
All in all... probably not worth the $2k or so I paid for it, but meh.
It might be a decade or more before games actually catch up with this card at my play resolution

Re:

[Chatterton]

That the problem. When you bought your 2080, putting $2k in the whole PC was already crazy but you still get something pretty much top of the line for every component. Now for that price you only get the video card ? :(

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

I definitely don't disagree. I was flush with cash, so I didn't really care.
It was absolutely about as far from a wise use of resources as one can get.

I recommend people get a couple-generations-old card for this very reason. I see my 2xxx and 3xxx purchases as wasteful luxury.
The $1500 I spent on the 2080Ti was stupid, and the $2k on the 3090Ti was stupid.
The last card I bought that I really felt was worth what I spent was my 1080Ti. Which was also expensive, but it replaced a very old card, and is st

Re: Not surprised

[rpnx]

This. People don't have infinite money. They should have adapted prices to market and they didn't. There was too much lag.

Imagine

[muh_freeze_peach]

Maybe people really ARE voting with their wallets?

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

At these prices... it's probable that people simply don't fucking have enough in their wallets.

I remember back when I was making 30-40k a year... I wasn't spending no $1000 fucking dollars on a video card. I saved up for a really fucking long time to buy a $400 video card, and I was never able to pull that off again until I was making enough to buy a 1080Ti without checking my bank account balance first.

Re:

[war4peace]

20 years ago, or even 8 years ago, I was hot-headed enough to aim for the latest and greatest just because.
Now, my main/work/gaming PC is a soon-to-be-7 year old platform which still plays latest games (with a couple exceptions) at more-than-decent framerates (for me, at least): around 100-ish FPS on 3440x1440. to add to that, it's fully watercooled, which makes the cost of upgrading mush higher (and choices way more limited). I'll upgrade when:
1. frame rates consistently drop below 60 average while playing

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

Absolutely.
My game streaming PC 2 GPUs ago (1080Ti) was still playing all but a couple of games at triple digit frame rates.
I jumped from 2080Ti to 3090Ti in quick succession just because I wanted to see if ray tracing was worth a shit (the 2080Ti really just isn't quick enough to do it without laying the DLSS on thick, the 3090Ti however gives good frame rates even without DLSS), but ultimately- I would still be completely happy with my 1080Ti today. I gave it to my nephew, and he thinks he's hot shit be

AI is the new GPU buzzword

[JoeyRox]

Perhaps Nvidia can start an open AI project that figures out how to get humans to continue overpaying for video cards.

Its about time!

[alanshot]

In the height of the miner induced supply crisis we bought my son an Oculus. Specs on the Oculus site said his average video card was fine. Turns out that was only for the Oculus software. All of the games he wanted required a minimum 1080i video card, which at the time was over $800. Nope!

Luckily thats what I was running in my gaming rig, and I wasnt playing as much as I used to so I just gave up playing FPS' and traded him cards so he could play.

Maybe now I can get back into gaming again.

Re:

[Joe Tie.]

That was a far more heartwarming story than I ever expected to read about the economics of GPUs. I don't have much to add but just wanted to mention how sweet this is. It's always cool to hear about tech development in the context of familial bonds.

I got a 2070 before the crisis

[xack]

I paid less than £300 for it brand new. And I will probably wait until the 5070 or even the 6070 before upgrading. Hopefully by then the graphics economy is back to real normal by then. Yes GPUs are in stock now, but greed is still there and there is still the chance a new cryptocurrency might rise that requires mining. The only way to get back to normal permanently is laws against mining worldwide and for scalpers to be punished hard.

Re:

[BackwardPawn]

Same. I paid about US $500 for the RGB, cherry picked version, and only did that because the base model was out of stock. It was supposed to come with a rebate, but the manufacturer used the pandemic as an excuse to never process it.

My heart pumps purple piss for them.

[MachineShedFred]

Welcome to a boom / bust cycle. You guys made money hand-over-fist for the last two years based on inelastic supply supporting eye-watering prices. Now, the demand is gone but the prices remain.

Welcome to a market bust. Lower your prices if you want a recovery.

$280 for a decent last-gen Graphics Card ?!

[greytree]

I want a new Graphics card, an RTX 3060 would do nicely.

But I am not paying rip-off prices for one.
Ditto a new motherboard, CPU, etc.

So we will wait, the bastards trying to screw us will go bust, and then we'll pick up all our stuff for half the price.

1. Overcharge so much that people stop buying
2. ...
3. Bankruptcy!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

So we will wait, the bastards trying to screw us will go bust, and then we'll pick up all our stuff for half the price.

No you won't. Your taxes will be used to bail them out

That happens when the companies go insane.

[Chas]

Seriously, they're acting as if there's still a chip shortage and the whole crypto-scalping thing was at its height.
Hence the "What are you smoking?" prices.

The performance of current-gen stuff is perfectly acceptable in 99.99% of the use cases.
So, until they go cold turkey on this crap, leave them holding the bag.

NVIDIA has their business market to fuck over for right now.

Re:

[irving47]

There's still a chip shortage. Go to any car dealership and ask why their inventory is so low. If they don't know, ask someone else and you'll eventually hear about the chip shortage for the electronics. I've bought arduinos and raspberry pi's for years and even the most basic microprocessors are still selling for 200%-400% higher than they were a couple of years ago. Speed controllers for robots? Get in line, sucka, 6 months backlogged!

Prices

[endus]

I aged out of the target demographic many years ago, but prices on GPUs are ridiculous now. The technology gets dated so quickly and it's so expensive to replace.

I recently subscribed to GeForce Live and am liking it. I don't play a lot of games anymore, but if you think of refreshing a GPU maybe every 3 years, with Live you pay 600 bucks over those three years to get a close to top of the line experience. You're also getting the entire "gaming PC" as a virtual machine, not just the GPU. That's closer to reasonable. Consoles are still cheaper, but it's much more competitive at least. The performance has been great and I haven't even done anything to optimize it. I'm sure when/if I run a hard line to the Shield I run it on, it will be even better.

That said, I'm mostly playing single player these days. I remember when Quake came out and it supported TCP/IP so you could play people over the internet instead of just dialing up a friend or setting up a small IPX network. It was literally a dream come true. Freshman year of college very non technical people were coming to my room to play it on my computer. I assume that the level of competition online these days means Live would be way too slow, though. I just don't have the time to invest (or the willingness to be called racial slurs by an 11 year old, or deal with cheaters) to try it, unfortunately.

Influence of SOCs?

[Midnight Thunder]

Although Intel isnâ(TM)t currently going in the SOC direction for the x86*, businesses using ARM processors are. If the rise of SOCs continues, then I wonder how much harder discreet GPUs will have to perform to offset the performance per watt we are seeing, especially in laptops.

Supply and demand

[dutt]

Well... if your price increase to a 10-year high, then don't be surprised that the sales dropped to a 10-year low.

Why do I need yet another video card?

[Fly Swatter]

The GPU industry has finally hit the stage of development that CPUs hit about a decade ago: anything somewhat recent is good enough for the forseeable future.

Also: market saturation and bad economy.

Lull before midrange cards return

[Lije Baley]

I don't usually buy 80 or 90 series cards because they are power hogs/space heaters. Usually stick to 70 series, but right now there isn't anything of interest being offered. Nvidia is busy taking its position in the market for granted by mouthing off and withholding new midrange cards, so like many others I'm considering a return to AMD, especially with their talk about efficiency improvements, but their new cards aren't quite here yet. I hope the new AMD cards will be good enough to resuscitate the mar

Re: Lull before midrange cards return

[Qwaniton]

AMD cards are plenty good enough. Don't be such a Goldilocks.

Not just GPUs

[Petersko]

I'm now shopping for my next system, even though I've got an i9-9900k that's still filling most of my needs.

"Last gen" prices just aren't budging. I always shop one or two generations behind, simply for cost/benefit. But the differences are much smaller than I would expect.

Add to that the price change to the new generations of motherboard, and the cost of memory not shrinking appropriately, and I'm basically looking at waiting another year in hopes of some downward pressures.

I can't be alone.

Customers are finally coming their senses

[SciCom Luke]

If a supplier delivers GPUs for outrageous prices, nobody is forcing the customer to buy.
Let us wait until the suppliers come to their senses and adjust prices to a more reasonable level.

Now you can get a decent graphics card for $200

[linuxguy]

I just bought an MSI Radeon RX 6600 8GB for $209 on Amazon. This is pretty reasonable I would think. Most of us here on Slashdot are old timers I assume. Do we need anything higher than 1080p gaming? I don't even game much anymore. I was into serious gaming back in the Quake 3 Arena days. My serious gaming days are behind me. The only reason I am even upgrading my graphics card is because the last time I tried to play Halo Infinite against my son, my computer struggled mightily.

I mostly play retro games

[devslash0]

...which run fine on Intel HD4000.

Many reasons

[larryjoe]

There are many factors causing the current GPU downturn.

The downturn in desktop and laptop PCs impacted bundled GPUs. The PC downturn was impacted by worldwide economic conditions but also by supply chain issues and a move away from pandemic-related work and schooling from home.

The article mentioned a significant decrease in mining. Certainly that impacted add-in board GPUs, which was also somewhat impacted by the overall PC slump and also to some extent the dumping of used mining GPUs. However, one more

Software optimization sucks and people know it.

[Narcocide]

We have plenty of 10 year old games that finally run well on 5 year old hardware. There just isn't enough new content coming out that can actually use a brand new $1200 beast of a GPU to actually justify buying one. Hardware development massively outpaced software development and it's time to take a step back and focus on software optimization now.

But think of the shareholders !

[nehumanuscrede]

Price of a top of the line Nvidia card: Ludicrous
Size of a top of the line Nvidia card: Even more ludicrous
Power draw of a top of the line Nvidia card: Insanity
( We won't discuss the " Buy a new 4090, get a fire extinguisher free " promotion going on right now )

Combine all that with inflation eating away at available spending cash for the average household and here we are.

Once upon a time, the gaming industry is what drove GPU manufacturers to make bigger, better and faster products.
We've kind of reached

Worse part isâ¦

[RealNeoMorpheus]

Fucking people still buying or wanting to buy nvidia.

They sold directly to miners, then blamed them for the shortage and on top of that, crippled the gpus with bogus drivers limitations after taking their money.

Talking about money, they are so convinced that people are so stupid, that they charging an arm and a leg for their new gpus.

Not to mention, they force you to create an account just to have the privilege of receiving notifications for new drivers, push proprietary crap to keep you locked into their h

Re:

[GBH]

I've been around a long long time.

I've been through numerous AMD and Nvidia cards on many platforms. After my last AMD experience about 10 years ago I've not touched an AMD since. The AMD drivers were absolutely terrible. Hard to install, crashed all the time, updates were prone to breaking the software so you had to roll back you name it. Vowed I'd never touch an AMD card again. Nvidia it's never crashed. Driver updates are from a single EXE that works with absolutely everything. Click, install, done. Neve

The problem is the mining

[wakeboarder]

Some gamers could justify the price of an expensive card because you could offset it with mining. With crypto being down and harder to mine, not many people want to buy and expensive card.