GPU maker EVGA parts ways with longtime partner Nvidia, exiting the GPU market

The eVGA graphics card maker has made a name for itself by manufacturing and selling Nvidia’s GeForce GPUs for two decades, including some of the most compelling options on the market. But according to YouTubers Gamers Nexus, analyst John Peddy, and a post on the EVGA forum, EVGA is officially ending its relationship with Nvidia and will not be making cards based on RTX 4000-series GPUs.

EVGA graphics cards have exclusively used Nvidia GPUs since its founding in 1999, and according to Gamers Nexus, GeForce sales account for 80 percent of EVGA’s revenue, making this an important and possibly dangerous change for the company. But EVGA CEO Andrew Khan told Gamers Nexus the decision was about “principles”and not finance: Khan complained about Nvidia’s lack of information about new products, including pricing and availability information.

Nvidia’s pricing strategy seems to have been another sore point for EVGA. Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards have often been able to drive down the prices of cards offered by EVGA and other vendors, forcing them to either cut prices or lose sales as a result.

Perhaps Nvidia isn’t entirely to blame here – the broader dynamics of the GPU market aren’t easy to understand either. As Paddy also points out, while the cost of GPUs has risen, the profit margins of Nvidia’s GPU partners have declined. Today’s high-end GPUs have significantly higher power, cooling, and PCI Express signaling requirements than cards released just a few years ago, making them more expensive to design and manufacture, and reports on the RTX 4000 series show that this trend is only Continue.

From Nvidia’s side, her public stance can be described as “all the best and good luck.”

“We’ve had a great partnership with EVGA over the years and will continue to support them in our current generation of products,”Nvidia spokesman Brian Del Rizzo told Tom’s Hardware. “We wish Andrew [Khan] and our friends at EVGA all the best.”

It probably doesn’t help either that the GPU market has plummeted this year after more than a year of limited supply and inflated prices. The depreciation of cryptocurrencies and the withdrawal of Ethereum cryptocurrency from GPU mining flooded the market with used GPUs, which in turn affected the demand for new GPUs. In Nvidia’s latest earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang complained about “overstock”of RTX 3000-series GPUs, which is causing the company to miss its $1.4 billion quarterly revenue guidance.

Ending the relationship between EVGA and Nvidia could hurt Nvidia as well – Peddy says EVGA represents about 40 percent of Nvidia’s GPU market share in North America – but the company is unlikely to be too worried over the medium term. Nvidia has other partners, and despite differences in cooler design and clock speeds, GPUs in the same series tend to perform the same regardless of which Nvidia partner actually made them. In other words, the RTX 3070 is the RTX 3070 and people who need it will just buy it from another company if EVGA products aren’t available.

EVGA will continue to sell its other products, including power supplies, although Khan told Gamers Nexus that the company has no plans to return to the GPU market at all — neither with AMD or Intel GPUs, nor with future generations of GeForce products. Khan also said that EVGA will continue to sell cards based on older GeForce GPUs, including the RTX 3000 series, until stocks run out by the end of 2022. Warranty repair or replacement of currently supported cards.