EVGA’s graphics cards have exclusively used Nvidia GPUs since its inception in 1999, and according to Gamers Nexus, GeForce sales account for 80 percent of EVGA’s revenue, making this a significant and arguably risky shift for the company. However, EVGA CEO Andrew Han told Gamers Nexus that the decision was about “principles” and not economics – Han complained about a lack of communication from Nvidia about new products, including information about pricing and availability. Nvidia’s pricing strategy was apparently another sore spot for EVGA. Nvidia’s first-party Founders Edition cards could often undercut the prices of cards offered by EVGA and other vendors, forcing them to either lower prices or lose sales as a result. Nvidia may not be entirely to blame here – the broader dynamics of the GPU market are also difficult to navigate. As Peddie also points out, even as GPU costs have increased, profit margins for board partners that make Nvidia GPUs have decreased. Modern high-end GPUs have much higher power, cooling and PCI Express signal requirements than cards of just a few years ago, making them more expensive to design and manufacture, and reports of the RTX 4000 series indicate that this trend will to continue. Advertisement Enlarge / Profit margins for Nvidia’s plug-in board partners like eVGA have been falling for a while now. It also probably doesn’t help that the GPU market has come crashing back to earth this year, after over a year of limited inventory and inflated pricing. Sliding cryptocurrency prices and Ethereum’s move away from GPU mining have flooded the market with used GPUs, which in turn has affected the demand for new GPUs. In Nvidia’s latest earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang complained about “excessive inventory” of RTX 3000 series GPUs that caused it to miss its quarterly revenue forecast by $1.4 billion. For Nvidia’s part, its public stance can be summed up as “so long 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 spokesperson Bryan Del Rizzo told Tom’s Hardware. “We wish Andrew [Han] and our friends at EVGA all the best.” The end of the EVGA-Nvidia relationship could also hurt Nvidia—Peddie says EVGA accounts for about 40 percent of Nvidia’s GPU market share in North America—but in the medium term the company is unlikely to be too troubled. Nvidia has other partners, and despite differences in cooler design and clock speeds, GPUs from the same lineup tend to perform similarly, regardless of which of Nvidia’s partners actually built them. In other words, an RTX 3070 is an RTX 3070, and people who want one will just buy one from another company if EVGA’s products aren’t available. EVGA will continue to sell its other products, including power supplies, although Han told Gamers Nexus that the company has no plans to return to the GPU market at all – not with AMD or Intel GPUs, and not with future generations GeForce products. Hahn also said that EVGA will continue to sell cards based on older GeForce GPUs, including the RTX 3000 series, until they run out of stock towards the end of 2022. The company will also keep enough stock of these cards to fulfill any warranty repairs or replacements for currently supported cards. Kyle Orland contributed to this report
