This past year was a tough one for gamers who found themselves in need of a GPU upgrade. The cryptocurrency mining boom ravaged the consumer graphics card market, leaving in its wake depleted inventories and jacked up prices. To put it plainly, the situation sucked. It also appears to be over, at least for now, and Nvidia does not anticipate that changing in the coming months.
Nvidia reported its second quarter earnings, and while it performed well overall, cryptocurrency GPU sales fell well short of expectations.
"Our revenue outlook had anticipated cryptocurrency-specific products declining to approximately $100 million, while actual crypto-specific product revenue was $18 million. Whereas we had previously anticipated cryptocurrency to be meaningful for the year, we are now projecting no contributions going forward," Nvidia said (PDF).
We bolded that last bit for emphasis, and celebration for anyone who has no interest in mining digital currency. What it essentially means is that we should not see another shortage of graphics cards in the near future. There is still a chance that memory production could wreak havoc on prices, but according to the latest data from DRAMeXchange, that is not a concern either.
There is no need to shed any tears for Nvidia either, in case you felt compelled. Miners made up only a small portion of the company's bottom line. Even with only $18 million in crypto-GPU sales, Nvidia saw a healthy 40 percent jump in overall revenue to $3.12 billion last quarter, more than half of which came from gaming hardware sales (PDF).
"Growth across every platform—AI, Gaming, Professional Visualization, self-driving cars—drove another great quarter," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. "Fueling our growth is the widening gap between demand for computing across every industry and the limits reached by traditional computing. Developers are jumping on the GPU-accelerated computing model that we pioneered for the boost they need."
Looking ahead, Nvidia is expected to announce a new round of consumer graphics cards based on its Turing architecture. It remains to be seen what kind of performance jump they will introduce and where prices will settle. Regardless, one thing we won't have to worry about is another shortage.
