News Nvidia revenue plunges 60% in fourth quarter

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/02/11/nvidia-revenue-plunges-60-percent-in-4th-qu/1

Demand for Nvidia GPUs dried up in the fourth quarter, as the company's revenue dropped by a staggering 60 percent.

 

someone should tell them that the incessant refreshing of hardware isn't the most cost effective business model. really, the constant one-upmanship every 3 months can't be bringing decent returns.

 

If nVidia is having problems, then they should stop manufacturing graphics cards for a while and clear their stock... I don't know... maybe renaming the 9800GTX+ to 250GTS will help create an illusion to the consumer that it's a new tech...

And keep collecting $$

 

Because yet even MORE customer confusion is what we need.

 

When compared to ATI's numbers, I don't think anyone can rightly say that the recent recessionary trend is to blame for the total decline in NVIDIA's revenue. They simply don't have enough attractive products.

Honestly, if I was going to buy one card for every market segment, the only segments where NVIDIA would even really be a consideration would be the high-end and ultra-high-end with the GTX260 and the GTX295, and even the GTX295 falls by the wayside when you consider its cost.

NVIDIA just guessed wrong for this generation and ATI guessed right. It's kind of like we're back in the Radeon 9x00/GeForceFX days.

 

NVIDIA blaming it on the credit crunch... nothing to do with a weak product line and a stronger ATI then?

 

+1 to that, my thoughts exactly!!!

 

tbh my 9800gtx can play everything i throw at it why would i need to upgrade

until games push the boundaries of the GPU again i doubt revenue will incease

 

nVidia just says what investors expect to hear to maintain cash flow. Those are just poster words, last year we had "global warming" (so the revenue was smaller because of the need to upgrade manufacturing processes to more "green"), before that there were "infavourable economical conditions" due to the whole "war on terror" crap. As an investor in several companies I hear this crap all the time, month after month, on every summary meeting, in every summary letter.

 

sadly some of this has to do with a lack of games as well, ar there any games that require new GPU's right now if you already habe a 9 series or 4000 series from ATI? No PC games really except console ports, I wish PC gaming would start getting some good exclusives again.

 

Ive done my bit for the GPU economy by upgrading to a 260 Black Edition from XFX in January this year. It will serve me well for probably another year atleast... And even if NVidia did release an uber chip which was x5 as fast as mine... there is simply no money left in the kitty for an upgrade now !!

There must be a ton of people with 8800 GTS models out there though that are itching to upgrade... if it wasnt for this darn recession taking all our pennies away for other such luxuries.. like food (hey.. the UK is almost third world nowadays!)

 

Maybe smaller, more focused dev teams (Get it right or you're fired) will produce better products.

A lot of the games made by smaller teams are better than the games made by small armies, at least.

 

Personally I have held off on buying any new GFX card because I build my computer with an AMD CPU... I'm still up in the air as to what to get a gtx280 or a 4870x2. Since I cant buy a new mobo and not have it support both, I haven't upgraded.

I keep expecting AMD or Nvidia to one up the other soon too.

All I really know is running a single 8800gt on a 30" monitor sucks because for most games I don't have enough umph to run at native anymore..

 

Personally, I believe graphics companies are over-focusing their development giving their graphics systems more horsepower. They're making faster cards, and charging astronomical prices. While the performance market is a very legitimate niche, it seems like there are missed opportunities in other market spaces, such as good but highly efficient performance (good means that integrated doesn't cut it).

With the economy what it is, it's no wonder that people aren't buying graphics cards costing many hundreds of dollars.

 

considering that AMD is the king of the mid range GC market... and that it is there where the money is... it is not recession, it is bad business choices that will harm Nvidia.

 

open up the Sli platform to all intel chipsets and they will have a new income stream, be a cheaper upgrade for people to get another 8800/9600 card rather than a 260/280 card.

 

frankly, that's exactly what AMD did do this time. The RV770 GPU they built is designed around power efficiency, not pure crazy horsepower. They originally planned to position the 4850 against the 9600GT and the 4870 against the 9800GTX.

Apart from those two cards that have gotten all the media attention, they released an excellent range of modern low-cost cards, scaling all the way down to cards that are just a little stronger then their integrated HD3300.

 

The economic downturn is only part of the reason why they did so bad.

Sure, they recently launched new high end cards, but those don't generate much profit on their own, the market for them has always been small and as games run on "crappy" gpus as well due to being mostly console ports the highend market as a whole is shrinking.
What do they have in the midrange? renamed 8xxx cards... great, people who bought a mid - highend card in the last 1-2 years don't have a reason to buy those (especially if you factor in the very attractice prcing of ati's 4670 and 4830 cards) and looking at the low end market, the nvidia products are simply out dated (complete refresh of low end cards is due for first half of 2009 only).

 

When building a new system in this " media histeria, people brainwashed, overhyped" economic crisis. The people's choice would be:
MSI K9A2 Platinum V2 // Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H // Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe
AMD phenom2 720
Kingston value 4gb ddr2
Ati 4870 1gb,
1tb Samsungspinpoint HD.

This would set you back around: 580 euro +/-