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The demand of GPUs is decreasing. Following the bursting of the mining bubble, sales at Nvidia and AMD continued to decline significantly in Q4 2018.

Bursting of the mining bubble causes Nvidia and AMD to struggle

The last two years have been marked by the mining hype and the associated shortage of graphics cards. For a while, graphics cards were generally hard to get. In the second wave there were still graphics cards to buy, but only because the dealers simply corrected the prices upwards. The Radeon RX Vega GPUs, which were quite new at the time, were hit hard by this, as they were almost nowhere available and if they were, then only at massively high prices. Also the GPUs of the Pascal series like the GTX 1060, GTX 1070 or the GTX 1080 were sold out by the dozen.

However, the graphics card manufacturers Nvidia and AMD have mainly earned from the mining-hype. In addition to the normal retail graphic cards, there even were special cards for mining. After the collapse of the mining bubble, however, the two companies had a more or less serious problem. The warehouses were still filled with many unsold graphic cards. Also the board partners remained on many graphic cards, which were sold afterwards in some promotions clearly more cheaply. The graphics card market has therefore recovered significantly and prices are once again reasonable. However, an analysis shows that Nvidia and AMD also sell significantly fewer graphics cards in the end customer market at present.

20 percent lower demand for desktop GPUs in Q4 2018

Market research institute Jon Peddie Research recently published a quarterly report for Q4 2018 on the graphics card market. In it, the company lists the three manufacturers of graphics cards, AMD and Nvidia with dedicated and Intel with integrated graphics units. According to this analysis, the overall market fell by 7.6 percent for Nvidia and 6.8 percent for AMD compared to the previous quarter. Intel had a minus of 0.7 percent, but is not exposed to such extreme fluctuations due to the iGPUs on which it is not possible to mine.

The bursting of the mining bubble has caused sales of desktop graphics cards to crash. At the beginning of 2018, the crypto currency prices reached their all time high. Nvidia and AMD tried to satisfy the increased demand with a stronger production. The manufacturers thus produced filled warehouses which could no longer be sold after the bursting of the bubble. Demand for desktop graphics cards fell by as much as 20 percent in 2018, and according to Jon Peddie Research, the consequences will be noticeable until the first two quarters of 2019. However, since there will be no mining boom in the foreseeable future, the market situation should stabilize again.