Nvidia’s “overstock” means that a GPU shortage is officially a GPU surplus.

How quickly things are changing: A year ago, it was almost impossible to buy a GeForce GPU at the suggested retail price. Now the company has the opposite problem. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during the company’s Q2 2023 earnings call yesterday that the company is dealing with “surplus stock”of RTX 3000-series GPUs ahead of the next-gen RTX 4000-series release later this year.

To deal with this, Huang said Nvidia will cut the number of GPUs it sells to graphics card and laptop makers so those makers can clean up their existing inventory. Huang also says that Nvidia has “introduced price positioning programs for our current products to prepare for the next generation of products.”Translated from C-suite to English, this means that the company will lower the prices of current generation GPUs to make room for the next generation. In theory, these price cuts should be passed on to consumers in some way, though that would depend on Nvidia’s partners.

Earlier this month, Nvidia announced that it would miss its $1.4 billion quarterly guidance, largely due to declining demand for its gaming GPUs. Huang said the “end-to-end”of GPUs, or the number of cards sold to users, is still “up 70 percent from pre-COVID,”although the company still expects GPU annual revenue to decline in the next quarter.. .

Demand for PCs and PC components has mostly declined across the board, partly because of recession fears and partly because people bought so much computer hardware early in the pandemic. Nvidia is also selling fewer GPUs to cryptocurrency miners due to both falling prices and Ethereum’s long-awaited move away from GPU mining. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress insisted that the company “cannot determine exactly to what extent the reduction in cryptocurrency mining contributed to the decrease in demand for games,”in particular because Nvidia had problems with the SEC due to hiding the number of GPUs. to whom she sold. cryptocurrency miners in the past.

The upshot for consumers is that prices for new and used GPUs should continue to drop, as they have for most of the year, and that we can expect at least a few RTX 3000 series cards to remain on sale after launch. RTX. 4000 series. People who want the best performance should probably wait for these cards to launch (AMD and Intel also plan to release new processors soon). However, this is the best time to overhaul or replace your gaming desktop for those who are still using older GPUs and looking to upgrade.