Graphics card sales have been through the roof ever since the advent of the blockchain and crypto. Crypto miners have flooded graphics card sale joints, stacking up on various types of graphics cards. Crypto miners shop for only graphics cards that satisfy their immediate need. Yesteryear, graphics cards were most popular when it came to gaming and also other computing aspects. Today, they are popular mostly because of the cryptocurrency craze that reached fever pitch mid last year. Leading consumer graphics card makers such as AMD and Nvidia have made a killing in the last two financial quarters.
Nvidia boasted of great profits displayed by the financial results of their second fiscal quarter which ended on the 29th of July. These huge profits were as a result of the great demand for Nvidia products for data center applications and artificial intelligence (AI). The bad news though is that crypto related demand plateaued and then crashed soon after. Colette Kress, CFO of Nvidia, remarked that they had seen sales of crypto specific products dip to about 18 million in that quarter while they had projected sales of about 100 million. Kress further stated that Nvidia would no longer bank on crypto specific product sales and that the company expects negligible sales going forward.
The CEO of the company Jensen Huang also chimed in by saying that Nvidia no longer expected any crypto mining activities. The story was very similar with fellow giant firm AMD. AMD financial results were quite good as well posting very strong profits on their product offerings. The “computing and graphics division” recorded lower profits though, with a 3 percent decline compared to the previous quarter. The reason for this dip in graphics card sales is clear as day, cryptocurrencies are in a state of decline.
When it comes to crypto mining, the most popular crypto mined with GPUs is ether. This explains the slump in sales for graphics cards since the value of ether has dropped by 80 percent. Ether has slumped from $1400 in January to $300 today; Litecoin has dropped from $320 in January to $60 today. This slump in value has also had an effect on the prices of high-end AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. Nvidia’s GeForce 1080 has dropped in price from $800 in January to $600 today. The slump in crypto prices is quite a bummer to crypto enthusiasts and investors. The story is entirely different for gamers though. The slashed price of graphics cards is music to the ears of all in the gaming community.
