This is my diatribe on why I am staying away from Nvidia.
There are many facets to this business that go under peoples radars, but the most important from an earnings perspective especially with the state of the general purpose hardware arms race, is the mining metric that they like to throw around and that those numbers are a lie. It's also a flat out deception that they claim to have left the mining space.
Their percentage of sales figures for mining uses comes from cards that were designed specifically for mining (IE the P102 and P106 cards). When they talk about crypto sales declining, they are talking about those cards, when they talk about profits from miners they are talking about those cards.
This has always bothered me; They never discussed this metric openly until recently when they announced they were "leaving" the crypto space, which is something they don't have a choice in. The fact is that their record sales that have created their current bull market are more based in mining operations than in gaming computers, and there is no way they could ever have a metric for mining sales unless they were discussing cards that were designed for mining. Which means they themselves are either in the dark in regard to how their GPUs are being used which I find unlikely or they are misleading the general public because the numbers they are aware of are far more grim than they want to let on.
They have somehow convinced the general public that miners only buy mining specific GPUs and that the "gaming" gpus are not being used by miners. That is a deception, the run on GPUs was not created by gamers but by miners. And with the miners not having a general interest so far in the RTX branded cards due to potential performance and the abhorrent cost there will be a fairly large gap in earnings that will be difficult to make up.
With the mining issues aside, NVDA is making a huge bet on the future of games. They are attempting to become the APPL of GPUs by locking people into their specific architecture for ray tracing performance, Apple can do this because they create a life style around their products, Nvidia will have a more difficult time convincing people to lock themselves into a single part in a PC for the foreseeable future.
Another issue that is present is the performance of the cards for the price you are paying. The 2080 and 2080ti are not showing benchmarks that highly outshine their predecessors on non ray trace specific games. Sure the RT reflections and soft shadows are really cool and add a really pretty flare to your overall gaming experience, but does it completely change the games enough for a person to spend $1200 on a single GPU? Let alone a person who is a hardcore gamer who cares more about their kill count than if they can admire themselves in the window they just ran buy. If the FPS in something like GTAV which is not optimized for ray tracing is 90 with a 2080ti and is 80 with a 1080ti the benefits are obviously not strong enough for a person to spend $1200 on.
The final thing that was bothersome to me was the tear down and benchmark embargo that Nvidia placed on the reviewers they sent early cards to, this to me would indicate that they knew the overall numbers would be disappointing and that they wanted to keep people on the hook for their preorders without trying to get a refund.
I think overall earnings are going to be disappointing, and there will be a resulting painful realization for NVDA holders. Only the future will tell, but right now things are not looking great on the horizon.
This is not investment advice, only my personal outlook on nvidia and their current state of affairs.
There are many facets to this business that go under peoples radars, but the most important from an earnings perspective especially with the state of the general purpose hardware arms race, is the mining metric that they like to throw around and that those numbers are a lie. It's also a flat out deception that they claim to have left the mining space.
Their percentage of sales figures for mining uses comes from cards that were designed specifically for mining (IE the P102 and P106 cards). When they talk about crypto sales declining, they are talking about those cards, when they talk about profits from miners they are talking about those cards.
This has always bothered me; They never discussed this metric openly until recently when they announced they were "leaving" the crypto space, which is something they don't have a choice in. The fact is that their record sales that have created their current bull market are more based in mining operations than in gaming computers, and there is no way they could ever have a metric for mining sales unless they were discussing cards that were designed for mining. Which means they themselves are either in the dark in regard to how their GPUs are being used which I find unlikely or they are misleading the general public because the numbers they are aware of are far more grim than they want to let on.
They have somehow convinced the general public that miners only buy mining specific GPUs and that the "gaming" gpus are not being used by miners. That is a deception, the run on GPUs was not created by gamers but by miners. And with the miners not having a general interest so far in the RTX branded cards due to potential performance and the abhorrent cost there will be a fairly large gap in earnings that will be difficult to make up.
With the mining issues aside, NVDA is making a huge bet on the future of games. They are attempting to become the APPL of GPUs by locking people into their specific architecture for ray tracing performance, Apple can do this because they create a life style around their products, Nvidia will have a more difficult time convincing people to lock themselves into a single part in a PC for the foreseeable future.
Another issue that is present is the performance of the cards for the price you are paying. The 2080 and 2080ti are not showing benchmarks that highly outshine their predecessors on non ray trace specific games. Sure the RT reflections and soft shadows are really cool and add a really pretty flare to your overall gaming experience, but does it completely change the games enough for a person to spend $1200 on a single GPU? Let alone a person who is a hardcore gamer who cares more about their kill count than if they can admire themselves in the window they just ran buy. If the FPS in something like GTAV which is not optimized for ray tracing is 90 with a 2080ti and is 80 with a 1080ti the benefits are obviously not strong enough for a person to spend $1200 on.
The final thing that was bothersome to me was the tear down and benchmark embargo that Nvidia placed on the reviewers they sent early cards to, this to me would indicate that they knew the overall numbers would be disappointing and that they wanted to keep people on the hook for their preorders without trying to get a refund.
I think overall earnings are going to be disappointing, and there will be a resulting painful realization for NVDA holders. Only the future will tell, but right now things are not looking great on the horizon.
This is not investment advice, only my personal outlook on nvidia and their current state of affairs.