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This really makes no sense: > This in turn sparked rumors about NVIDIA purposefully keeping stock low to make it look like the cards are in high demand to driv

• kbolino 1y ago
  Scalping and MSRP-baiting have been around for far too many years for nVidia to claim innocence. The death of EVGA's GPU line also revealed that nVidia holds most of the cards in the relationship with its "partners". Sure, Micro Center and Amazon can only do so much, and nVidia isn't a retailer, but they know what's going on and their behavior shows that they actually like this situation.
  • amatecha 1y ago
    Yeah wait, what happened with EVGA? (guess I can search it up, of course) I was browsing gaming PC hardware recently and noticed none of the GPUs were from EVGA .. I used to buy their cards because they had such a good warranty policy (in my experience)... :\
    • theshackleford 1y ago
      In 2022 claiming a lack of respect from Nvidia, low margins, and Nvidia's control over partners as just a few of the reasons, EVGA ended its partnership with Nvidia and ceased manufacturing Nvidia GPUs. > I used to buy their cards because they had such a good warranty policy (in my experience)... :\ It's so wild to hear this as in my country, they were not considered anything special over any other third party retailer as we have strong consumer protection laws which means its all much of a muchness.
      • kbolino 1y ago
        The big bombshell IMO is that, according to EVGA at least, nVidia just comes up with the MSRP for each card all on its own, and doesn't even tell its partners what that number will be before announcing it to the public. I elaborate on this a bit more in a response to a sibling comment.
    • izacus 1y ago
      EVGA was angry because nVidia wouldn't pay them for attempts at scalping which failed.
      • kbolino 1y ago
        I've never seen this accusation before. I want to give the benefit of the doubt but I suspect it's confusing scalping with MSRP-baiting. It's important to note that nVidia mostly doesn't sell or even make finished consumer-grade GPUs. They own and develop the IP cores, and they contract with TSMC and others to make the chips, and they do make limited runs of "Founders Edition" cards, but most cards that are available to consumers undergo final assembly and retail boxing according to the specs of the partner -- ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, formerly EVGA, etc. MSRP-baiting is what happens when nVidia sets the MSRP without consulting any of its partners and then those partners go and assemble the graphics cards and have to charge more than that to make a reasonable profit. This has been going on for many GPU generations now, but it's not scalping. We can question why this "partnership" model even exists in the first place, since these middlemen offer very little unique value vs any of their competitors anymore, but again nVidia has the upper hand here and thus the lion's share of the blame. Scalping is when somebody who's ostensibly outside of the industry buys up a bunch of GPUs at retail prices, causing a supply shortage, so that they can resell the cards at higher prices. While nVidia doesn't have direct control over this (though I wouldn't be too surprised if it came out that there was some insider involvement), they also never do very much to address it either. Getting all the hate for this without directly reaping the monetary benefit sounds irrational at first, but artificial scarcity and luxury goods mentality are real business tactics.
        • izacus 1y ago
          Then you didn't follow the situation, since majority of EVGA anger was because nVidia wouldn't buy back their chips after EVGA failed to sell cards at hugely inflated price point. Then they tried to weaponize PR to beat nVidia into buying back their unsold cores they thought they'll massively profit off with inflated crypto hype prices.
          • 1y ago
• rubyn00bie 1y ago
  > Scalpers are a retail wide problem. Acting like Nvidia has the insight or ability to prevent them is just silly. Oh trust me, they can combat it. The easiest way, which is what Nintendo often does for the launch of its consoles, is produce an enormous amount of units before launch. The steady supply to retailers, absolutely destroys folks ability to scalp. Yes a few units will be scalped, but most scalpers will be underwater if there is a constant resupply. I know this because I used to scalp consoles during my teens and early twenties, and Nintendo's consoles were the least profitable and most problematic because they really try to supply the market. The same with iPhones, yeah you might have to wait a month after launch to find one if you don't pre-order but you can get one. It's widely reported that most retailers had maybe tens of cards per store, or a few hundred nationally, for the 5090s launch. This immediately creates a giant spike in demand, and drove prices up along with the incentive for scalpers. The manufacturing partners immediately saw what (some) people were willing to pay (to the scalpers) and jacked up prices so they could get their cut. It is still so bad in the case of the 5090 that MSRP prices from AIBs skyrocketed 30%-50%. PNY had cards at the original $1999.99 MSRP and now those same cards can't be found for less than $2,999.99. By contrast look at how AMD launched it's 9000 series of GPUS-- each MicroCenter reportedly had hundreds on hand (and it sure looked like by pictures floating around). Folks were just walking in until noon and still able to get a GPU on launch day. Multiple restocks happened across many retailers immediately after launch. Are there still some inflated prices in the 9000 series GPUs? Yes, but we're not talking a 50% increase. Having some high priced AIBs has always occurred but what Nvidia has done by intentionally under supplying the market is awful. I personally have been trying to buy a 5090 FE since launch. I have been awake attempting to add to cart for every drop on BB but haven't been successful. I refuse to pay the inflated MSRP for cards that haven't been been that well reviewed. My 3090 is fine... At this point, I'm so frustrated by NVidia I'll likely just piss off for this generation and hope AMD comes out with something that has 32GB+ of VRAM at a somewhat reasonable price.
  • pshirshov 1y ago
    W7900 has 48 Gb and is reasonably priced.
    • 1y ago
• lmm 1y ago
  > Nvidia doesn't earn more money when cards are sold above MSRP How would we know if they were?
  • sidewndr46 1y ago
    Theoretically they'd need to make a public filing about their revenue and disclose this income stream. More to your point, I think it's pretty easy to obscure this under something else. My understanding is Microsoft has somehow always avoided disclosing the actual revenue from the Xbox for example.
• adithyassekhar 1y ago
  Think of it this way, the only reason 40 series and above are priced like they are is because they saw how willing people were to pay dueing 30 series scalper days. This over representation by the rich is training other customers that nvidia gpus are worth that much so when they increase it again people won't feel offended.
  • Mars008 1y ago
    Is AMD doing the same? From another post in this thread: > Nowadays, $650 might get you a mid-range RX 9070 XT if you miraculously find one near MSRP. If yes then it's industry wide phenomena.
  • KeplerBoy 1y ago
    Did you just casually forget about the AI craze we are in the midst of? Nvidia still selling GPUs for gamers at all is a surprise to be honest.
• thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > Nvidia doesn't earn more money when cards are sold above MSRP, but they get almost all the hate for it. Why would they set themselves up for that? If you believe their public statements, because they didn't want to build out additional capacity and then have a huge excess supply of cards when demand suddenly dried up. In other words, the charge of "purposefully keeping stock low" is something NVidia admitted to; there was just no theory of how they'd benefit from it in the present.
  • rf15 1y ago
    which card's demand suddenly dried up? Can we buy their excess stock already? please?
    • thaumasiotes 1y ago
      I didn't say that happened. I said that was why NVidia said they didn't want to ramp up production. They didn't want to end up overextended.
      • bigyabai 1y ago
        I don't even think Nvidia could overextend if they wanted to. They're buying low-margin, high demand TSMC wafers to chop into enormous GPU tiles or even larger datacenter products. These aren't smartphone chipsets, they're enormous, high-power desktop GPUs.
• whamlastxmas 1y ago
  Nvidia shareholders make money when share price rises. Perceived extreme demand raises share prices
• solatic 1y ago
  Scalpers are only a retail-wide problem if (a) factories could produce more, but they calculated demand wrong, or (b) factories can't produce more, they calculated demand wrong, and under-priced MSRP relative to what the market is actually willing to pay, thus letting scalpers capture more of the profits. Either way, scalping is not a problem that persists for multiple years unless it's intentional corporate strategy. Either factories ramp up production capacity to ensure there is enough supply for launch, or MSRP rises much faster than inflation. Getting demand planning wrong year after year after year smells like incompetence leaving money on the table. The argument that scalping is better for NVDA is coming from the fact that consumer GPUs no longer make a meaningful difference to the bottom line. Factory capacity is better reserved for even more profitable data center GPUs. The consumer GPU market exists not to increase NVDA profits directly, but as a marketing / "halo" effect that promotes decision makers sticking with NVDA data center chips. That results in a completely different strategy where out-of-stock is a feature, not a bug, and where product reputation is more important than actual product performance, hence the coercion on review media.