Nvidia explains disappointing RTX 2080 / 2070 sales, year-over-year gaming GPU sales down 45%

Surprisingly enough, Nvidia’s latest yearly fiscal report showed that the company performed better than previously projected, with 21% increased yearly gains. The last quarter of 2018 brought in US$2.2 billion in revenues, beating expectations and triggering a slight jump for the company’s share prices. However, yearly revenues from gaming GPUs alone are down 45%.

Besides the crypto mining decline, Nvidia claims that the low gaming revenues are to be attributed to below expectation sales of the new RTX 2070 / 2080 GPUs. This, in turn, was determined by low adoption due to a small RTX-enabled game selection and high prices for the overclocked versions of the high-end GPUs. CEO Jensen Huang points out that the RTX 2000-series is the first one to launch only with high-end products, as the RTX 2060 mid-range GPUs were released 5 months later.

On a more positive note, the green team expects a more profitable 2019. The gaming market should see growth from increased RTX 2000-series adoption thanks to more games supporting real-time ray tracing. Huang is not really concerned with AMD’s Instinct cards, as he expects substantial growth in the data center and AI-driven automotive application markets. Additionally, the Quadro GPUs should bring solid gains in the professional graphics market.