Nvidia recently opened up about the state of RTX at the Credit Suisse Annual Technology Conference. Speaking at the event, Nvidia’s Chief Financial Officer, Colette Kress, had this to say about RTX sales:
Overall of boards that we sell in desktop, two-thirds of it are now with ray tracing. So we are really pleased with the market adoption of it and of course, there is absolutely more room to grow. We have cards that fit every single type of price points as well as every single type of overall gamer. So you can overall buy a card in the $100 and as well as all the way up to $1000 to participate in ray tracing.
We’re not quite sure which $100 GPU she’s talking about unless of course, it’s that second-hand GTX 1060 you bought off OLX to run Metro Exodus at 8 frames per second.
However, the RTX adoption figures Kress talks about are impressive: if two-thirds of all cards they’ve sold this year support ray-tracing, it’s not a failed endeavor. Other factors need to be considered too, though: year on year sales volumes, and differences in selling price (RTX cards are marked up substantially relative to Pascal) among others.
Kress also cleared the air about the potential impact of Intel’s supply shortages on Nvidia. Team Blue’s been experiencing a widely publicized supply issue which they actually apologized for. An analyst at the Credit Suisse event asked if Intel’s supply shortage would impact Nvidia since so many OEMs ship laptops and pre-built systems sporting Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. This is what Kress had to say:
In the case of the overall CPU shortages, we are probably going on about a year of talks of CPU shortage pieces. As I’ll remind you, in terms of where we are in both the desktop and or notebook, we tend to be in more high-end types of systems. We find that our OEMs are generally targeting more of that high-end as well. So we haven’t seen any real impact this last quarter from overall CPU shortages. Going into Q4, we’ve taken into account what we know and is incorporated in our guidance as well.
All in all, things seem to be looking good for Nvidia. It’s still too early to tell whether or not RTX is here to stay. But for the moment, we’re cautiously optimistic.
