The eVGA graphics card maker has made a name for itself by manufacturing and selling Nvidia GeForce GPUs for two decades, including some of the more affordable options on the market. However, according to YouTubers at Gamers Nexus, analyst Jon Peddi, and a post on the EVGA forum, EVGA is officially ending its partnership with Nvidia and will not be producing cards based on the company’s RTX 4000 series GPUs.
Since its inception in 1999, EVGA graphics cards use only Nvidia GPUs, and according to Gamers Nexus, GeForce’s sales account for 80 percent of EVGA’s revenues, making this change a significant and possibly threatening business. But EVGA CEO Andrew Han told Gamers Nexus the decision was about “rules”, not finance – Han complained about Nvidia’s lack of communication about new products, including pricing and availability information.
Nvidia’s pricing strategy was apparently another sore spot for EVGA. Proprietary Nvidia Founders Edition cards often lowered the prices of cards offered by EVGA and other vendors, forcing them to lower prices or lose sales.
Nvidia may not be entirely to blame for this – the broader dynamics of the GPU market is also hard to navigate. As Peddie also points out, despite the increase in GPU costs, profit margins for Nvidia GPU partners have declined. Modern high-end GPUs have significantly higher power, cooling and signaling requirements for PCI Express than cards from a few years ago, making them more expensive to design and manufacture, and reports for the RTX 4000 series show that this trend will continue to grow. to continue.
Likewise, the fact that the GPU market has plunged to the ground this year, after more than a year of limited inventory and inflated prices, probably doesn’t help either. Falling cryptocurrency values and Ethereum’s departure from GPU mining flooded the market with used GPUs, which in turn impacted the demand for new GPUs. In a recent Nvidia appeal, CEO Jensen Huang complained about an “over-inventory” of the RTX 3000 series GPUs, which caused the company to exceed its quarterly revenue forecast by $ 1.4 billion.
On the Nvidia side, her public stance can be summed up as “this is so long and good luck.”
“We have had a great relationship with EVGA over the years and will continue to support it in our current generation of products,” said Tom’s Hardware spokesman for Nvidia, Bryan Del Rizzo. “We wish Andrzej [Han] and our friends from EVGA all the best. ”
The end of the EVGA-Nvidia relationship could hurt Nvidia as well – Peddie says EVGA represents about 40 percent of Nvidia’s North American GPU market share – but in the medium term, the company is unlikely to be too surprised. Nvidia has other partners, and despite the differences in cooler design and timing, GPUs in the same series work similarly regardless of which Nvidia partner made them. In other words, the RTX 3070 is the RTX 3070 and people who want to buy it will simply buy it from a third party if EVGA products are not available.
EVGA will continue to sell its other products, including power supplies, although Han told Gamers Nexus that the company has no plans to return to the GPU market at all – not with AMD or Intel GPUs, or with future generations of GeForce products. Han also said EVGA will continue to sell cards based on older GeForce GPUs, including the RTX 3000 series, until stocks run out in late 2022. The company will also keep enough of these cards on hand to fulfill any warranty repairs or replacements for currently supported cards.
Kyle Orland contributed to this report