Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) is one of the biggest events of the year in the technology world. A few days ago, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang opened the conference with a nearly two-hour presentation. He presented strategies, plans and new products.
Many of us gamers were probably a bit disappointed when Nvidia never unveiled the expected graphics card RTX 3080 Ti, as many had thought they would. Nvidia could still offer a whole bunch of intriguing, technological advances, including artificial intelligence, quantum computers, supercomputers, server parks and much more. Conferences like this are closely followed by the world of technology, because they like to set the framework for what kind of innovations flow into the gaming world after a quarter.
What has been most interesting so far – for us players – was when Nvidia gave some small hints about how it goes with the supply chains for video cards.
In short, it’s gloomy reading.
Enormous demand
Nvidia’s shareholders can laugh all the way to the bank for phenomenal sales figures, both above the data center and to the gaming market, but for those who have crossed their fingers to get a video card right away, the company helped extinguish that hope.
CFO Colette Kress at Nvida said in a blog post that the demand is much greater than the inventories.
– We expect that the demand will be greater than the supply for large parts of the year, says Kress.
This does not fully support what they said earlier this spring. Then a clear improvement was expected before May. At the same time, Nvidia writes that they believe that there will be large enough inventories after the first quarter for an increase in sales.
The hall may increase, but that hardly means the big changes for you and me. AMD has also not said a word about the situation for several months, and that is not a good sign. Director Lisa Su then said that they expected delivery problems until the summer.
I think it will last much, much longer.
Spinnvill market
Small stocks in 2021 are by no means unique to video cards. This applies to many different types of consumer electronics at the moment, whether it is individual components such as processors or entire game consoles. I’m certainly not the only one waiting in search of the PlayStation 5 console I ordered about a year ago.
Still, it is clearly the worst in the video card market. We have written about this before, but in a nutshell it is about a mix of the coronavirus, lack of silicon, cryptocurrency and generally high demand.
It was difficult enough to get a video card in the first months after the launch of Nvidia’s Turing architecture in 2018, and it was several years before the pandemic came. I myself waited six months to get an RTX 2080 Ti.
Now it is the corona virus that has led to major delays in the global value chains on top of this, while an astronomical growth in interest in cryptocurrency has made “mining” record popular.
The growth in cryptocurrency has been absurd only in the last month, where the total market value of all cryptocurrencies has risen by less than 34 percent. After a quarter as more people discover “mining” of other, more profitable currencies, interest will probably only grow.
This is again driving demand for video cards.
At the same time, sales of computers, according to the analysis company Canalys, increased by 55 percent in the first quarter of 2021. It’s extreme. Sales of computers have not been so high since 2012, and Canalys believes that the use of home offices is driving the growth.
Again, it is the coronavirus that is at the bottom.
All of these factors put further pressure on already fragile supplier lines. There may well be a sharp correction in the cryptocurrency market, but I doubt that it will be enough with the first. Now the demand for video cards is simply crazy.
Dark clouds on the horizon
If you are lucky enough to first find a card that is actually in stock, it will not necessarily offer any positive surprise. For example, we are now working on a test of an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card from Gigabyte. Gigabyte has recommended a Norwegian price of around 6000 kroner for this card, but at the time of writing, only CDON actually has it in stock – and then for the neat sum of 13091 kroner.
It wins.
I have actually lost all faith that the market will normalize over the next six months. The online stores have no reason to reduce prices as they are now, and there are many indications that the production bottlenecks will struggle for the same length of time.
With the demand that is today, it is likely that the market will not be able to deliver enough until well into next year again.
The only thing that is certain is that both Nvidia and AMD will continue to make new video cards and make money on products that almost no one can buy.
Gamer.no has been in contact with Nvidia about an interview about accessibility several times. For example, it has not come into place.
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