One of the things that we missed at this CES is an affordable graphics card for the mainstream market, which makes us think that GPU manufacturers could bet on Cloud Gaming to sell their hardware directly to the providers of these services. . , rather than to the end consumer.
El auge del Cloud Gaming
Cloud gaming or cloud gaming is booming, especially after the appearance of several new services from various companies such as Google Stadia, Amazon Luna, NVIDIA GeForce NOW, Microsoft XCloud, etc. Who saw in the growth of Internet bandwidth an opportunity to make viable a concept that until years ago was almost a utopia.
The advantage of cloud gaming for the user is that it avoids having to buy the hardware that reproduces the game since it goes to the server side, which is apparently a disadvantage for the manufacturer of said hardware, but this is really not so, given that this is sold to cloud service providers, so from the perspective of Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and other companies in the industry, it is nothing more than a change of customer.
Where are NVIDIA’s low-end GPUs?
After the CES presentation, there is a question that many haven’t asked: where are the GeForce RTX 3050s? Let’s not forget that the RTX 2050 never appeared and instead we received the GTX 1660 and 1650, but NVIDIA after presenting its RTX 3060 did not announce any other models below, indeed, if we let’s look at the list of leaked GPUs, we can see how there is no mention of a graphics card under the RTX 3060.
If we add to this NVIDIA’s interest in promoting GeForce NOW, it makes us think that Jensen Huang has completely left the GPU race for the low-end consumer range. but what could be the reasons for th is gradual abandonment of NVIDIA towards the lowest range on the market?
The answer may lie in the increased cost of the chips in the new nodes and the very low margins that exist in the low consumer lineup, for NVIDIA and others it is much easier and more profitable to sell the GPU to a service provider. games. in the cloud with a high economic capacity that does not reach a group of users from which it has obtained very little or nothing per graphics card sold.
The PC sector dedicated to education
One of the changes in consumption patterns produced by COVID-19 is the rise of what you might call distance learning, which requires every student to have a computer. Since computers tend to exceed the average capital available for school supplies, this made it necessary to implement a new type of PC.
These PCs are generally not based on the x86 platform and if they are based they don’t have enough power to play high caliber games or expandability to do so. The situation is that a significant portion of gamers are minors and once they get their computer from school and institute for their parents, who really control their children’s capital, there will be no no more motivation to buy a new or more powerful PC.
The only way to reach this audience is through cloud gaming, which needs data centers with GPUs to run and this is where the business is very profitable for hardware manufacturers as the margins at the time of selling a graphics card to a cloud service provider is much higher than doing it at the lower end of the mass market.
