It’s the best time. It’s the worst of times. . . when it comes to graphics cards anyway.According to Chinese tech news site My Drivers, shipments of graphics cards in mainland China are 42 percent decrease (opens in new tab) January 2023 and year-over-year. However, in reality, he has increased his sales by 9% since December 2022, indicating a recent upward trend.
The numbers seem to come from bobangtan (board channel), Chinese blogs and communities. In the graph below, you can see that the green bar represents his December 2022 shipment and the orange bar represents his January 2023 shipment. The best-selling AIB brand here is Colorful, followed by Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Galax, Gengsheng, Maxsun, and Zotac.
The year-on-year decline is consistent with other data we’ve seen recently. Discrete GPU shipments dropped significantly as we reported in December (opens in new tab) Q3 2022 year-over-year (down 15.4% on desktop cards alone), according to the company. John Peddy Research.
Graphics card sales may be shrinking in China for the same reasons as elsewhere in the world. Cryptocurrency mining using PC GPUs is no longer profitable, and miners accounted for a significant portion of the demand until the Ethereum merger was completed last year. The pandemic and ensuing lockdowns also caused a major upgrade cycle for PCs, which has now calmed down.
Consumers may also view current graphics products as in transition. The latest generation of GPUs from Nvidia and AMD are only available in expensive high-end SKUs, out of reach for those on a tight budget. Nvidia’s cheapest 4000-series graphics card right now is the RTX 4070 Ti at around $800, while the Radeon 7900 XT card (the bottom of AMD’s RDNA 3 stack) is about the same price.
People may be waiting for more affordable options like the RTX 4060 and Radeon RX 7600 to hit the market before making their next upgrade. If you can afford it, the Nvidia RTX 4090 and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX currently dominate the list of best graphics cards.
