The gaming industry has been abuzz with the news of Nvidia’s meteoric rise in the stock market this year. The chip maker has seen its market cap soar
Key Highlights :
Nvidia is the most dominant player in the gaming graphics card (GPU) market, with more than 76% of users owning one of the company’s products according to the most recent monthly hardware survey conducted by Steam. But gamers have been increasingly vocal in their criticism of the company’s gaming products, citing the lack of features, confusing marketing, and the fact that the upper-tier RTX 4080 and flagship RTX 4090 launched last year were priced at $1199 and $1599, respectively, compared with $799 and $1499 for similar-tier products in the previous generation.
The rollout of the new GPUs was also marred by Nvidia “unlaunching” one of its upper-mid-tier GPUs, after backlash over its naming scheme from reviewers and gamers who accused the company of trying to mislead consumers into paying top-tier prices for a mid-level product. The “unlaunched” GPU—which was confusingly also named RTX 4080—was eventually released to the market more appropriately named as the RTX 4070Ti but it was still met with negative reviews for offering a relatively small performance uplift from a previous generation GPU, despite costing more.
The company’s most recent gaming product, the RTX 4060Ti—usually its value tier GPU—hasn’t fared much better in reviews and is not selling well. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has responded to criticism about Nvidia’s gaming products by proclaiming that Moore’s law—the phenomenon where the number of transistors in a chip of a certain size doubles every year—“is dead.” The Nvidia chief then added, “the ability for Moore’s Law to deliver twice the performance at the same cost, or at the same performance, half the cost, every year and a half, is over…so the idea that a chip is going to go down in cost over time, unfortunately, is a story of the past.”
Despite the backlash, Nvidia’s dominance in the gaming GPU market has hardly seen a dent compared to the same survey from last year. This is due in part to the fact that the company’s advanced chips are also AI powerhouses, which has prompted both Nvidia and analysts to project that it could emerge as one of the big winners in the ongoing race to build more sophisticated generative AI tools.
The gaming community’s anger toward Nvidia stems from the company’s steep prices, confusing marketing, lack of features, and a lack of gaming performance uplift from its latest generation of gaming GPU—the RTX 4000 series. Despite the criticism, Nvidia’s market cap is still approaching $1 trillion as the value of the company’s shares continues to surge.
Forbes Business Breaking: Gamers Are Angry At Stock Market Darling Nvidia—Here’s Why
