For the past two months, AMD and
Nvidia have been launching new GPU families and pushing fresh hardware into
market. While this makes for interesting reviews, it’s not worth much if
consumers can’t actually buy the hardware they’re reading about.
We’ve swept the Internet in the US
and even checked some relative sales figures in Europe, courtesy of
mindfactory.de. Let’s see how AMD and Nvidia rank — and whether or not the
hardware they’ve launched is actually on sale. We’ve used the website NowInStock.net
for this analysis, which performs minute-by-minute inventory checks on
websites. We’ve seen its contents vary while putting this article together, so
don’t be surprised if the totals don’t exactly match our own. Trends, however,
are easy to spot.
AMD’s
RX 480:
The RX 480 launched over a month ago
to strong reviews, though the GPU’s debut was
disrupted by a power delivery issue (since resolved by driver updates). AMD made it
clear that the company was targeting the mass market for its first 14nm refresh
cycle, which means it needs to ship enough GPUs to satisfy buyers looking for
cards.
Right now, it looks as if
manufacturers are having trouble keeping cards in stock. NowInStock.net had one
RX 480 listed in-stock when
I began this story and ran out of stock while I was writing it. Of the 20 SKUs
listed by the tracking service, 15 of them have been in stock at some point in
the past 15 days, implying that the GPUs are generally moving as quickly as
they hit shelves.
List prices on the RX 480 generally
match AMD’s recommendation, with 4GB cards hitting the $200 mark while the 8GB
cards are priced at $239 – $249.
Nvidia’s
Pascal family
Nvidia has launched three GPUs in
the past three months, so we’ll take them all in turn. The GTX 1080 is available in limited quantities (five SKUs at NIS as of this
writing), with a minimum price of $700. These aren’t Founder’s Editions, either,
which suggests that OEMs are still exploiting limited stock to keep prices high
(the non-Founders edition of the GTX 1080 is supposed to start at $600, but
there are no cards available at that price). The 1080’s performance is
unquestionably best-in-class, but we aren’t seeing as many cards on shelves as
we would like, and Nvidia appears to be having some trouble meeting demand
based on the price behavior we’re still seeing two months after launch. Of the
67 tracked SKUs, 60 have been in stock at least once in the past 15 days.
The GTX 1070, in contrast, is now widely available from a
number of companies, but again, not at its suggested MSRP. The cheapest 1070
we’ve seen is a $409 card from Asus (MSRP on the 1070 was $379 for the base
card and $459 for the Founder’s Edition). NowInStock lists more than 30
separate SKUs on the 1070 currently in-stock. Interestingly, both the 1080 and
1070 are still selling for almost the same premium — about 20% over list price.
As for the 1060, which launched nine days ago, NIS.net lists four SKUs —
three from Zotac and one from Nvidia itself. As with the other NV GPUs, list
prices are running above MSRP — Zotac’s non-Founders GPU is $279 (12% above
list price) with a $299 part available as well. The GTX 1060 hasn’t been out
long enough for us to compare its inventory refresh the same way as the other
cards, but it looks as though NV has kept a steady trickle of these cards
moving out to market.
Popularity and sales
There’s no way to provide a comprehensive set
of data on which GPUs are selling best, but we can check trends and concrete
data from one European website that discloses individual GPU sales. First, over
at Amazon, the RX 480 has nailed down the #1 GPU sales spot, while various
incarnations of the 1070 hold spots 2-4. Only one other AMD card makes the top
ten — an RX 480 4GB card from Sapphire, at #8.
Data from Mindfactory.de suggests
that the RX 480’s uptake has been fairly modest thus far. When we checked
Mindfactory last week, we counted a total of 2,270 RX 480’s sold through the
site. Seven days later, that number stands at 2,605, for a net gain of 335
cards. The GTX 1080 had sold 4,305 cards on 7/21 and 4,965 cards on 7/28, for a
net gain of 660 cards.
This is more or less the opposite of what one might
expect, since high-end cards tend to sell in much smaller figures than low-end
GPUs do, but there are caveats in play. As we noted last month, the GTX 1080 was in very
short supply, implying that some of what we’re seeing is pent-up upgrades from
people still snapping up cards. Nvidia’s market share is also significantly
larger than AMD’s, which will skew sales — very strong sales of a chip when you
only have 20-25% of the overall market is a much smaller piece of the pie than
it would be if the situation were reversed. It’s also possible that some
customers are holding off on buying the RX 480 until third-party OEM cards are
available, since those are expected to use eight-pin PCI Express connectors and
may feature better overclocking.
Mindfactory reports that they’ve shipped more than
8,000 GTX 1070s since that card launched, and 1,780 GeForce 1060s in the past nine
days. We’ll keep an eye on how these figures evolve over the next few weeks. As
always, keep in mind that data reported from any single sales outlet can’t be
generalized to the entire GPU business — we’re checking to see how things are
evolving overall, not trying to make absolute pronouncements on relative sales
figures.
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