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AMD Radeon RX Vega 56

New data on the GPU market has put formal numbers behind the visible touch on of cryptocurrency mining on GPU prices. Unfortunately, nosotros've also got fresh information suggesting the GPU price inflation cycle isn't ending any time presently.

Jon Peddie Research has released information on GPU sales in Q4 2022 showing that GPU shipments decreased 1.5 percentage in Q4, in-line with normal seasonal expectations. Yr-to-year GPU shipments decreased by four.8 pct, driven mostly by declines in laptop shipments (desktop dropped 2 percent, but notebooks fell 7 percent).

PR-1

AMD'south market share rose past 8 pct from Q3 to Q4 2022, suggesting an explanation for why Vega and Polaris chips are so over-priced (we noted this in our coverage earlier this week). If cryptocurrency miners are preferring Vega over Nvidia's Pascal, it would explain why prices on AMD cards are diddled heaven-high — information technology reflects increased demand for those parts. JPR notes, "Over iii million add-in boards (AIBs) were sold to cryptocurrency miners worth $776 one thousand thousand in 2022. AMD was the primary distributor of those sales."

Nosotros tin can brand some very rough estimates well-nigh how many additional GPUs AMD might take sold by referring back to some previously published figures about AMD's graphics sales. In Nov 2022, JPR also released a chart with quarterly graphics sales for AMD:

JPR-QuarterlyShipments

If we presume that AMD's RX 500 and Vega launches pushed its quarterly GPU sales back to an average of iv.nine million units shipped per quarter, that would work out to ~xix.half dozen 1000000 GPUs shipped per year. If nosotros care for the cryptocurrency sales equally an adjunct to gaming sales (every bit JPR suggests) it means those 3 meg boosted shipments are a feather in AMD's cap. But they aren't driving enormous profits to the company, given its contracted GPU prices weren't calibrated to account for enormous cost inflation.

There's another reason we included this graph. Dorsum in 2022, we speculated that the surge in AMD GPU prices could ultimately harm the company long term. As its share of the gaming market brutal, it lost the opportunity to put brand-new Hawaii cards in the hands of gamers at a time when information technology was quite competitive (or even superior) to Nvidia on raw performance. And equally the graph above shows, that's exactly what happened. High prices on AMD GPUs drove sales downward, and past the time the market prices were stabilizing, Maxwell cards were hitting the streets.

"Gaming has been and will go along to be the primary driver for GPU sales, augmented by the demand from cryptocurrency miners.," said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie inquiry. "We wait need to slacken from the miners as margins drop in response increasingly utilities costs and supply and demand forces that drive up AIB prices. Gamers can offset those costs past mining when non gaming, but prices volition not drop in the near future."

JPR-2

Discrete GPUs shipped in 36.88 per centum of all PCs, down two.67 percent from the previous quarter and JPR'south assertion on long-term price trends seems to confirm what Massdrop said earlier this week. Gamers hoping for a quick resolution to this event would be best-served past looking elsewhere, whether that means taking a run a risk on a used GPU, investigating using an AMD APU, or optimizing games to squeeze the most performance possible out of your electric current menu.