Graphics card maker eVGA has made a name for itself making and selling Nvidia’s GeForce GPUs for two decades, including some of the most attractively priced options on the market. But according to YouTubers at Gamers Nexus, analyst Jon Peddie, and a post on the EVGA forum, EVGA is officially ending its relationship with Nvidia and will not be making cards based on the company’s RTX 4000-series GPUs.
EVGA graphics cards have exclusively used Nvidia GPUs since its founding in 1999, and according to Gamers Nexus, GeForce sales account for 80 percent of EVGA’s revenue, making this a momentous and possibly dangerous change for the industry. business. But EVGA CEO Andrew Han told Gamers Nexus that the decision was about “principles” rather than finances: Han complained about Nvidia’s lack of communication about new products, including pricing and availability information.
Nvidia’s pricing strategy was apparently another sore point for EVGA. Nvidia’s First-party Founders Edition cards could often undercut the price of cards offered by EVGA and other vendors, forcing them to drop prices or lose sales 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 risen, profit margins for board partners making Nvidia GPUs have fallen. Modern high-end GPUs have much higher PCI Express signaling, cooling, and power requirements than cards from just a few years ago, making them more expensive to design and manufacture, and reports on the RTX 4000 series indicate that that trend is only going to continue.
It also probably doesn’t help that the GPU market has tanked this year, after more than a year of limited stock and inflated prices. Falling cryptocurrency values and Ethereum cryptocurrency moving away from GPU mining flooded the market with second-hand GPUs, which in turn affected the demand for new GPUs. In Nvidia’s latest earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang complained about “excess inventory” of RTX 3000-series GPUs causing it to miss its quarterly revenue projections by $1.4 billion.
On Nvidia’s part, their 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 on our current generation of products,” Nvidia spokesman Bryan Del Rizzo told Tom’s Hardware. “We wish Andres [Han] and our friends at EVGA all the best.”
The end of the EVGA-Nvidia relationship could also hurt Nvidia (Peddie says that EVGA accounts for about 40 percent of Nvidia’s North American GPU market share), but in the medium term the company is unlikely to break even. bewilder a lot. Nvidia has other partners, and despite differences in cooler design and clock speeds, GPUs in the same series tend to perform similarly regardless of which of Nvidia’s partners made them. In other words, an RTX 3070 is an RTX 3070, and people who want one will simply buy one from another company if EVGA’s products aren’t available.
EVGA will continue to sell its other products, including power supplies, though Han told Gamers Nexus that the company does not plan to return to the GPU market at all, not with GPUs from AMD or Intel, nor with future generations of GeForce products. . Han also said that EVGA would continue to sell cards based on older GeForce GPUs, including the RTX 3000 series, until they sell out in late 2022. The company will also keep enough inventory of these cards to fill any orders. warranty repairs or replacements for currently supported cards.
Kyle Orland contributed to this report