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Comment by 654wak654 | Hacker News Reader

They're selling consumer GPUs with huge margins too. The markup on the 40xx series is insane but they're still shipping a ton of units.

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The consumer GPU margins aren't even close to what Nvidia rakes in on an H100 sale.

Rarely does Nvidia sell a GPU for 2000 dollars or more, and when they do its relatively low volume.

An H100 sells for tens of thousands of dollars and is sold out to 2024 - companies are literally fighting over them - I can absolutely see conditions might arise Nvidia might want to use some fab capacity for their much more profitable H100 parts vs consumer GPUs.

is that the case? They sold a bunch early on but theres been lots of press about the lousy 40 series sales volume this year and their struggle to get people buy 4080/70's.

In Feb they artifically constrained 4090 volume to try and push 4080s no one wanted. The 4070 was dead on arrival and had production cut by April.

They've near stopped production now - theoretically because the AI stuff is so lucrative, but if they were really "shipping a ton of units" of the 40 series and didn't have excess inventory i doubt they'd have done that.

- https://www.dexerto.com/tech/nvidia-rtx-4070-production-repo... - https://www.dexerto.com/tech/nvidia-rtx-40-series-production...

I blame it on Nvidia's product segmentation falling apart. Only a few years ago, the 1060, 1070, 1080, and Titan Xp had price differences that matched their performance differences. In their current lineup, buying anything that isn't a 4090 is getting ripped off. The 4060 and 4070 are basically e-waste. The 4090 had a 100% performance improvement in a lot of tasks over its predecessor, and the 4060 managed 10%. Sometimes. I don't know why they bothered making them--it's no wonder they cut production.

Have to fill that line-up so they have something to sell to OEMs and retail customers have something to pick up.

Aren't consumer GPU shipments the lowest they've been in over a decade?

Yes but it’s hard to disentangle the effect of the crypto crisis ending last year, the pandemic boom in consumer hardware sales coming to a close, and the pricing of Ada from one another. So many GPUs were sold to miners and made their way to the secondary market that gamers have lots and lots of options that aren’t new sales.

Maybe. But the traditional gaming market doesn't have a lot of growth and I have to believe the high-end may be a dedicated niche but it's a niche.

Looking at Steam concurrent player count it is continuing to ride a steady escalator upwards to I don't think PC gaming as a hobby is gonna shrink anytime soon. My guess is that in a year or two you'll see a big rebound in sales as all of the pandemic hardware starts to get old.

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