Nvidia CEO Says GTX 10-Series Inventory Almost Depleted

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By Zhiye Liu
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently told VentureBeat in a Q&A session that the Santa Clara chipmaker is clearing out the last of its GeForce GTX 10-series inventory. The high-end models, such as the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1070 Ti, and GTX 1070 are already sold out with the GTX 1060 meeting the same fate in a few more weeks.

(Image credit: Nvidia)


When the Cryptocurrency mining boom came crashing down last year, Nvidia found itself stuck with a surplus of GeForce GTX 10-series products. Due to the lack of competition from AMD, and many consumers not convinced with the recently launched Turing offerings, the previous-gen Pascal graphics card continued to sell very well. So, it wasn't all bad news for Nvidia although the chipmaker would probably prefer its customers to purchase a GeForce RTX 20-series graphics card instead. 

Currently, the GeForce RTX 20-series is a hard sell mostly due to its inflated price. Take the GeForce RTX 2060 for example. The performance is there as the graphics card performs faster than a GeForce GTX 1070 Ti. However, with a $350 price tag, the GeForce RTX 2060 doesn't feel like a mid-range product anymore. There are rumors that Nvidia could possibly launch the GeForce GTX 11-series which still use the Turing silicon but without the RT cores for ray tracing. If priced adequately, the GTX 11-series can be a viable option to the RTX 20-series.

Now that Pascal is one foot into retirement, consumers are left with very limited options. If you can live without ray tracing, you can still probably find a Pascal graphics card somewhere. It's either that or biting the bullet and picking up Turing. The other alternative is to wait for AMD's Navi graphics card and see what they offer. Although with the latest announcement of the AMD Radeon VII, it seems that Navi isn't quite ready yet. 

Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

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11 Comments Comment from the forums
  • redgarl
    Well, I guess the reason is because nobody wanted to be part of the punzee scheme that is RTX...
    Reply
  • TechyInAZ
    That was fast, I didn't expect inventory to go out that quickly.

    Goodbye Pascal!
    Reply
  • aragingmonk
    Jensen lied to investors and is being sued for lying. For all I know this is a public (false) statement because of the decline in market share value.
    Reply
  • s1mon7
    The market is literally flooded with Pascal cards, despite the large demand (due to Turing being such a horrible value, and no Vega VII/Navi yet). Maybe they cleared their inventory of chips, but OEMs still surely have cards on their hands.

    There is a rather large market disruption happening next year with new AMD arch and Intel entering the game, which is a huge thing and a threat to Nvidia's dominance by the looks of it. I think Nvidia will have to come up with 7nm cards fast as a very quick follow-up to Turing. They need smaller dies with higher performance for cheaper. Otherwise, people will be left with sour tastes in their mouths and go to Intel/AMD in 2020. Surely they will want to enter the market with a bang - that's the only way to introduce new series and recoup costs of introducing it and supporting it in the future. They will want to sell a lot of units.

    Nvidia will have to launch a great series right before, so people massively jump onto. When competitors launch their products, most people won't have the need to upgrade then. That's the only way out of this predicament that I can see for Nvidia. From the consumer's perspective, I don't see any reason to get Turing. It's a bad value card that's outright weak - they launched with similar ballpark of performance as 3-year old Pascal cards (which were great then), on an outgoing manufacturing node, and right before a large change to the GPU space that surely will be a great time for the consumers.
    Reply
  • aragingmonk
    21686079 said:
    The market is literally flooded with Pascal cards, despite the large demand (due to Turing being such a horrible value, and no Vega VII/Navi yet). Maybe they cleared their inventory of chips, but OEMs still surely have cards on their hands.

    There is a rather large market disruption happening next year with new AMD arch and Intel entering the game, which is a huge thing and a threat to Nvidia's dominance by the looks of it. I think Nvidia will have to come up with 7nm cards fast as a very quick follow-up to Turing. They need smaller dies with higher performance for cheaper. Otherwise, people will be left with sour tastes in their mouths and go to Intel/AMD in 2020. Surely they will want to enter the market with a bang - that's the only way to introduce new series and recoup costs of introducing it and supporting it in the future. They will want to sell a lot of units.

    Nvidia will have to launch a great series right before, so people massively jump onto. When competitors launch their products, most people won't have the need to upgrade then. That's the only way out of this predicament that I can see for Nvidia. From the consumer's perspective, I don't see any reason to get Turing. It's a bad value card that's outright weak - they launched with similar ballpark of performance as 3-year old Pascal cards (which were great then), on an outgoing manufacturing node, and right before a large change to the GPU space that surely will be a great time for the consumers.

    I don't see that helping at this point. Nvidia lost 53% of their market share value and Jensen is being sued for lying to investors. RTX launch did not go well and investors will have an eye on that. Will they (investors) see Turing as another lie with little game support, as well with no true guarantee the 7nm will be received in a better light? Sounds like a gamble to me.
    Reply
  • CountMike
    So, the apparent shortage and resulting high prices were a lie ? Otherwise they would have no stock left and even be behind in orders.
    Reply
  • alan_rave
    No one understands why RTX prices are so high. Without 10xx, Nvidia will lose a large part of the market.
    Reply
  • jcwbnimble
    This is real simple: Nvidia wants to be done with Pascal so consumers will be forced to buy the new RTX cards. By putting this statement out there, all those people that were on the fence about buying a new card will rush out and get the last of the Pascal units. Once the Pascal cards really are gone, consumers will have no choice but to buy the new RTX cards.

    This is what happens when there is a lack of competition in any market segment. We've all seen the frenzy Intel was in when Ryzen was launched. Up until that point Intel could basically slap small improvements on their chips and keep prices high. The Ryzen chips really caught Intel off guard. Now we need AMD to do the same thing for the discrete video card market.
    Reply
  • frank.oldale
    or they inflated the RTX so that consumers would buy the old inventory and not the new. Once PASCAL is done they could respond to AMD by lowering the price of RTX cards. If I had old inventory I certainly wouldnt make my new inventory look attractive until i sold out of the old.
    Reply
  • photonboy
    SIGH... let me be the Devil's Advocate.
    For the RTX2060 6GB at least, the price is very, very good. At roughly $420USD when I just checked an Asus Strix model sometimes beats a GTX1080 though an average I'm not sure.

    I didn't see any AMD cards at that performance level that were a better deal. That's not even discussing the potential of RTX functionality.

    DLSS may boost games by 20% to 40% FPS (I know it's not so simple due to potential artifacts like shimmering which hopefully gets fixed).

    RTRT is likely to get implemented in many more games over time, some of which are sure to be capable of a high FPS and high RESOLUTION at the same time... for example what if a Diablo 3 (2.5D) style game had ray-tracing added? So maybe you could normally get well over 100FPS at 1440p but now get a solid 60FPS that looks prettier?

    Also the DIE SIZE is much bigger so the cost goes up. My only gripe with the RTX2060 is VRAM size since the GTX1070Ti is about the same price (in USA) so deciding between an extra 2GB of VRAM and RTX isn't easy for me as I keep cards a long time. As time goes on more than 6GB should matter, but then the RTX will also get used more.

    *And NVidia did not "inflate" the price of RTX. They have no control over the price. Supply and demand dictate the price. NVidia sells companies like EVGA the GPU processor then EVGA makes cards and sells direct or through resellers like Newegg... even NVidia likely sells cards at their own site using prices set by market demands.

    I don't think NVidia is perfect, but the whining over RTX being too expensive and the functionality being useless due to lack of software support means people don't grasp what's going on... I would have thought PC GAMERS would want something to push us forward.

    I get the knee-jerk reaction to seeing really expensive cards, but let me ask you this: would you be happier if NVidia just didn't sell the top-end cards compared to selling them but at the current prices?

    Again, $420USD gets you a lot IMO with an RTX2060 6GB. I'd of course like to see a cheaper AMD NAVI alternative with 8GB of VRAM but perhaps less advanced hardware for future... anyway, NVidia is making a big bet with RTX so I think they'll need to push hard on the software front to justify it.

    DLSS at 1080p upscaled to 1440p matters a lot. Needs to be in lots of games and work without many distracting artifacts. For now this matters far more than RTRT.
    Reply