And so I did, even if it was very obvious. I checked 2021's annual report and found out that in 2021nVidia made a bit more than half money from gaming sector. Big surprise, but mining was in others category with tiny percentage. You would think that nV sold more cards to "gamers" (well to miners that is), but that's false, because their gaming revenue share remained basically the same since 2016. And even absolute revenue changed very little. What did grow a lot was data center revenue share, but that's neither gamers or miners, so we don't care about that here.
I wanted to find how many of each card was sold, but sadly wasn't able to find that data. So I had to resort to next best thing, the Steam survey. I thought about including price into equation too, but there's no good data about it and including MSRPs into that table would have been disingenuous at best. Also it's not really critical for us too, to see where approximately cut off point is, where cards sold clearly drops off and here is it, the chart:
Here you see a percentage of Steam users with card used to play games and card models. I didn't include RTX 3050 Ti, because it wasn't launched worldwide and most likely OEM only deal. I also had to include normal RTX 3080 model with 12GB model, because Steam HW survey sees them as same card, despite the fact that their core count and vRAM differ. And obviously RTX 3090 Ti has less than 0.15% player share and was lumped together into "others" category, so it's unclear how many were sold.
As you can see most popular card was RTX 3060, it managed to reach 3.40% Steam gamer share. You can see less RTX 3050s sold, perhaps due to worse value per dollar, maybe because it was worse value than RX 6600 and perhaps of its performance or perception of its performance weren't met (because it was usually 75 watt card without power connector needed). You can see that beyond RTX 3060 sales dropped dramatically, literally twice, despite there not being 2 times price delta. Surprisingly RTX 3070 reversed that trend a bit, but then RTX 3070 Ti sold more than 2 times than RTX 3070. Past this point strong diminishing returns are already observed, but there seems to exist rich people market and products. RTX 3080 sold relatively well, but that's technically two cards so data is unreliable. Then we have RTX 3080 Ti, it finally sold worse less than RTX 3070 Ti, but we don't see sales reduction in times anymore. RTX 3090 sold worse than RTX 3080 Ti, again, no tiems worse sales, but it seems that units sold slightly accelerated. And finally we have the RTX 3090, at this point we see the most dramatic reduction in units sold, how much is unclear, but it's less than 0.15% share of all cards used on Steam and that works out at at least 3 or 4 times less units sold than RTX 3090, despite there not being equivalent price increase. So basically RTX 3090 was the highest end SKU that nVidia could ever hope to sell well. Obviously it didn't cost MSRP, so I had to find the range of prices and here I found them:
It'd be great if GPU pricing was normal and we didn't have to update you on the state of the market, but tracking GPUs is useful if...
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Our mission to track GPU pricing trends and look at the current market will continue in 2022, but for now let's see what's been happening in the...
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We can see that over 2021 price range on eBay was between 2599 dollars and 3107 dollars. So what, you were right all along? Well not at all. All data so far seems to indicate that you were right, but let's take a look at 2022 data, basically after ETH croaked:
This month's update is particularly interesting not only because we continue to see a slide in GPU pricing, but it's also the first time Nvidia has officially...
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Basically three month range was just 1270-1700 dollars for RTX 3090 and that's the SKU that is the selling "well" for highest end ones still and after mining haze dissipated, we see that miners made problem worse, but gamers clearly didn't want to pay those high prices and let's talk about RTX 3090 Ti. Its price range was 1470-2000 dollars and market thinks it's clearly too much for it. So on average of 3 months, RTX 3090 cost around 1523 dollars and that was the most gamers would buy. RTX 3090 Ti's average price of 1707 dollars, was already too high for gamers. So basically ~1500 USD is the max that gamers will want to pay for GPU, no matter how fast it is. Meanwhile the most optimal cards for vast majority of people were RTX 3060 and RTX 3070. Those cars are now in 400-600 USD range.
So yeah, 3000 dollar GPU today would make zero sense and no it won't sell well at all, not even at high end. Whether it would work out financially for nV even with low units sold is unknown, but most likely it won't. nVidia can make the most cash with RTX xx80 tier cards, granted they sell well, if that's fails then they have to rely on RTX xx60 or RTX xx70 tier cards for most profit. Also it looks like there may not be RTX xx90 Ti tier card anymore, as RTX 4090 is already huge GPU, which has more cores than their best GPU Hopper H100 and RTX 4090 basically has almost the same transistor count too and no, nVidia won't release even bigger die for consumers (or in SMX form factor). Hopper H100 cannot be given to gamers, because we already have Ampere and Ada archs, having a third arch for the beefiest car just wouldn't make sense, especially when Ada hasn't really paid off yet. It would only tarnish a reputation of nV, not to mention will ruin their next gen of architecture's reputation and they would have to throw together new arch in basically no time without lithography improvement and this time just making dies bigger doesn't work, because we already are at hard power limits.
