At a recent Investor Day, Nvidia Senior Vice President Jeff Fisher found that people spend about $300 more when upgrading their graphics card, but the company needs to be careful not to get too blissful about it.
"The GPU offers more value than ever," Fisher said, "according to our data, spending $300 more than they paid for the graphics card they replaced."
While Fisher's view was that gamers go higher when they buy a new GPU (going from a GTX XNUMX to an RTX XNUMX, for example), this comment could be taken as rude at the time. current.
While we've started to see graphics card costs drop after multiple years of inflated costs due to stockouts, chip shortages, the pandemic, and the heyday of cryptocurrency (essentially, the apocalypse), many graphics cards are still selling for significantly more. than its original cost. . .
As PCMag points out, the Nvidia RTX 300 Ti is expected to retail for €XNUMX, but still costs up to €XNUMX. Although Fisher may not have talked about people paying an extra €XNUMX in this way, he sure can feel that way.
Analysis: lack of choice
When Nvidia was supposedly bragging about people paying €300 more, they were talking about how gamers choose more powerful and more expensive models. In normal times, this would undoubtedly be remarkable and would prove Fisher's point about how the new RTX XNUMXK GPUs offer better performance and better value that persuades people to spend more on their GPUs.
These are not normal times though, and with graphics cards still pretty hard to come by, it's quite hard to read too much into buying habits. The thing is, there just aren't a lot of options out there, so the minute a GPU goes on sale, people might feel the urge to buy it, whatever GPU they were hoping to get. It's actually possible that quite a few people who paid the extra €300 for a more powerful GPU didn't do so voluntarily, which makes Nvidia's celebrations seem a bit vulgar.
There's no doubt that Nvidia's current generation of graphics cards are generally great products, and there are going to be people looking to upgrade to one of the higher-end cards, like the RTX XNUMX, RTX XNUMX, or RTX three thousand eighty Ti. As Nvidia discovered, XNUMX% of Nvidia owners have upgraded an old GTX card to a new RTX GPU. Now, the trusty Nvidia GeForce GTX XNUMX appears to be the most popular GPU, according to a recent Steam Hardware survey.
Not a bad number, but there are still XNUMX% of people with GTX cards. This has a lot of potential for Nvidia, but it's also going to be quite difficult for some people to upgrade, especially with inventory levels so low and costs so high. Making statements that may annoy certain of your service customers is not going to help.