Thursday, May 31st 2012
GeForce GTX 680 A Sellout Success: NVIDIA
NVIDIA's flagship single-GPU graphics card, the GeForce GTX 680, achieved performance leadership over AMD's Radeon HD 7970, and forced a price-cut, however, a section of the community feels that availability is an issue with it. According to NVIDIA, availability is attributed to sales, and not lack of volumes. At an annual investors' meeting with the company's top-brass, NVIDIA released a slide which depicts GeForce GTX 680 as having 60% higher sales than GeForce GTX 580, six weeks following their respective launches.
There is one cosmetic inaccuracy in the graph, though. GeForce GTX 680 and GTX 580 are labeled "GT". One inference that can be drawn out of the graph is that NVIDIA is seeing some success in putting the 28 nm silicon fabrication process to use, despite the GTX 680 being one of the first chips built on it. In comparison, the GTX 580 arrived when the 40 nm process achieved a higher level of maturity. There seems to be a genuinely high demand for the GTX 680.
Source:
PC Perspective
There is one cosmetic inaccuracy in the graph, though. GeForce GTX 680 and GTX 580 are labeled "GT". One inference that can be drawn out of the graph is that NVIDIA is seeing some success in putting the 28 nm silicon fabrication process to use, despite the GTX 680 being one of the first chips built on it. In comparison, the GTX 580 arrived when the 40 nm process achieved a higher level of maturity. There seems to be a genuinely high demand for the GTX 680.
65 Comments on GeForce GTX 680 A Sellout Success: NVIDIA
The major upgrade for a lot of people was the 400 series, not the 500. Now, after almost 3 years, they upgrade to 600 series.
EDIT: Ok Steam survey does not work atm, at least for me, probably because they are updating with data from May. Better yet, tomorrow we'll see what percentage of GTX680 are there. I bet there's actually more of it than any HD7000 card. Like I said several weeks ago AMD needs to give the impression that they can deliver and meet demand, because demand is lower than they can supply. Hence they don't mention 28nm problems with yields and demand, even though their pricing speaks volumes. Nvidia put up several "excuses" because they would not be able to meet the demand, even if higher than "normal" (for a flagship card) demand is the culprit, because no matter how much they've been selling the concept of "not meeting demand == losing potential profits" is something that scares the hell out of investors and partners.
GTX 580 released
11/09/2009 - 13.34
12/24/2009 - 18.09
Take out the fact that it was Holiday season. The stock went up so its a success
GTX 680 released
03/22/2012 - 14.35
05/31/2012 - 12.43
Hmm. So if your stock goes up 5 points its whatever, but if you loose 2 points its a 60% success over gaining 5 points in stock value.
I want this guys job.
Let's say the 700 series will be launched tomorrow and the performance would be triple of the 600 series. I doubt that more than 1% of the people that just got a 600 series card would upgrade to it in the next year or so. Get it now? ;)
Now secondly, that 500 series sold much more than 400 series is a fact. I could have just said that, but decided to argue with your logic.
So 500 series sold more, hence people would be much more inclined to skip the 600 series, like they did with 400 serie and NOT the 500 series, which HAS sold a lot.
Even though it's true that most upgrade every 2 or 3 years, not all people upgrade at the same time. That's where your logic fails badly. People would skip 400, 500 or 600 just as easily based on their buying cycle... Now 500 series was much better than 400 series, which one is far more likely to be skipped? 400 series, oviously. And that's what happened actually. People are buying the 600 series in masses, because for the current climate is a hell of a card.
@ Xzbit
You always mention stock as if it means anything. It doesn't, not on this matter. Sales of a high-end card has very little to do with stock price. That is based on what people wnat to do with their stock and nothing else and is 90% of the times based on what some moron said or in what the think is a trend than on hardware or actual sales of an especific product. Investors know absolutely nothing about hardware, they buy or sell out of oportunity and what they perceive as trends, as I said. In particular the stock price grew up in 2009 mostly because of Tegra and Nvidia seriously entering the smartphone and tablet market.
Yes they are popular and I mean very popular but to say that the reason we can't find them is because of demand is bullshit.
Every press release has graphs, charts, and useless numbers in them.
This combined with the excellent demand and your cards end up being out of stock all the time. It's simple man.