Nvidia: sales of GeForce RTX video cards disappointing

Nvidia indicates that sales of the GeForce RTX video cards are lower than expected. Partly for this reason, the company has revised its revenue forecast for the past quarter considerably downwards.

Nvidia had originally expected to achieve revenue of $2.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2018, but now the video card maker has adjusted that to $2.2 billion. The final figures will be announced on 14 February when the quarterly figures are presented.

As an explanation for the lower turnover, Nvidia specifically mentions that the sales of certain high-end GPUs with the new Turing architecture were disappointing. In the statement, Nvidia states that consumers may be waiting for the new video cards to be cheaper or waiting for RTX support in games.

Nvidia released the GeForce TX 2080 Ti and the RTX 2080 in September last year and the GeForce RTX 2070 followed in October. The video cards are characterized with special RT cores for ray tracing, but also with a high price.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the fourth quarter was disappointing and “unusually turbulent.” In addition to disappointing RTX sales, he states that ‘deteriorating macroeconomic conditions’, especially in China, also reduced consumer demand for gaming GPUs. In addition, revenue from GPU sales for data centers was also lower than expected.