At the conference Bank of America Jeff Fisher, NVIDIA’s senior vice president, spoke in detail about the company’s success in the gaming market, noting both decent sales growth since 2019 and high demand for more modern and expensive graphics cards from this brand. However, in the above statistics, there are indications of a high percentage of GeForce RTX 20 generation graphics cards in the user base.
Image source: NVIDIA
When it comes to player growth around the world, NVIDIA relies on statistics from Newzoo and Steam. In the first case, from 2019 to 2022 inclusive, there was an increase in the gamer audience on the PC platform by 100 million people. The number of users of the Steam platform has almost doubled from 2019 to 2023 inclusive. According to NVIDIA’s own calculations, around 200 million people now own GeForce graphics cards of various generations, and their number is growing by an average of 10% annually. The number of graphics cards sold by the company is also growing proportionally, and the average selling price is also increasing by an average of 9-10% per year.
Image source: NVIDIA
From calendar 2019 to calendar 2022, PC sales almost didn’t increase, according to Gartner, but the number of GeForce graphics cards sold at retail increased by 40% during that period, according to NVIDIA. The company’s gaming revenue grew from $4.8 billion to $8.4 billion between calendar years 2019 and 2022, for an average annual growth of 20%. As pointed out by the company’s senior vice president, the Ada Lovelace family of graphics cards has been sold three times more actively than Turing in the price segment above $699 in the first twenty weeks since the announcement. However, this can be explained by the long absence on the market of cheaper models of the GeForce RTX 40 family, which was artificially supported by NVIDIA to sell the accumulated surplus of graphics cards of the previous generation after the end of the next wave of the cryptocurrency boom.
This partly explains the average co-payment when gamers switch to the Ada Lovelace family of graphics cards. According to Fisher, these graphics cards cost customers an average of $300 to $400 more than they already had. As part of the transition to the Ampere family, this surcharge was a bit more modest at $200. According to an NVIDIA representative, gamers in the older price segment tend to swap out a graphics card for a new one every two to two and a half years on average, but in lower price niches the frequency is three to three and a half years.
However, the most fascinating thing about NVIDIA’s statistics is the data on the build rate of graphics cards with RTX support. Currently, they collectively make up about 44% of NVIDIA’s user base. At the same time, only 18% of the graphics cards available for gamers offer performance on par with the GeForce RTX 3060 and higher. With such indicators, Fisher tried to justify NVIDIA’s great excitement about the prospects of further updating the graphics card fleet.
However, this statistic seems interesting to us against the background that a very large proportion of graphics solutions from the GeForce RTX 20 generation are represented among the RTX-supporting graphics cards used, since these are only likely to offer a lower level of performance than the GeForce RTX 3060. In fact, graphics cards are likely to offer this Generation make up more than a quarter of all NVIDIA products currently in use and form the backbone of RTX-ready solutions. As it stands, the GeForce RTX 20 series is still outperforming the next two generations of RTX-enabled graphics cards in terms of cumulative sales. It is possible that the mining boom actually contributed to this popularity and not only the outstanding gaming qualities of the graphics cards of the Turing family as such.
Incidentally, Jeff Fisher once again denied NVIDIA’s involvement in price inflation during the pandemic and cryptocurrency boom, noting that during the pandemic years and during the cryptocurrency boom, the company partially did not raise recommended prices for its GPUs for new products like the GeForce RTX 4060 are coming, even at a more attractive price point than their direct predecessors. But in the end market, as NVIDIA’s representative admitted, prices have gone up.
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