Some dude with a mighty ‘tache as soon as mentioned, “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The latter is what we have been offered with by Nvidia and its claims of doubling the gross sales of its RTX Blackwell playing cards over its earlier technology playing cards in the identical timeframe definitely look good on paper, however completely deserve somewhat extra contextualising.
Essentially, what Nvidia needs you to know is that within the first 5 weeks of the brand new RTX 50-series launch it outsold the RTX 40-series 2:1 in the identical time interval. The Ada technology of graphics playing cards was comparatively positively acquired, regardless of comprehensible consternation over pricing and place of the $1,200 RTX 4080 and the subsequently unalived RTX 4080 12 GB. So, that appears good, no?
But we ought to be trying on the variety of playing cards truly launched in these relative time intervals. With the brand new RTX Blackwell technology, Nvidia launched the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 on January 30 this 12 months, with the upper quantity RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 launching on February 20 and March 5 respectively. That’s 4 discrete playing cards launching in 5 weeks and just about every of them offered out in minutes.
Even as inventory vanished typically earlier than we even noticed playing cards listed, that ought to equate to a good variety of gross sales, particularly because the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 have been decrease priced and may have had bigger volumes of playing cards within the channel.
The RTX 40-series, then again, solely had two separate GPUs launching in these first 5 weeks. The RTX 4090 launched on October 12 method again in 2022, when my beard was much less gray and stomach much less protrusive, after which 5 weeks later the RTX 4080 was launched.
That means, compared, there was simply the low quantity, $1,600 RTX 4090 on sale for almost all of that 5 week time interval, and perhaps we’re together with the launch day numbers of the $1,200 RTX 4080 to be beneficiant.
You may nearly then rewrite that statistic to learn: Nvidia offered twice as many RTX 50-series playing cards because the RTX 4090 within the first 5 weeks of gross sales. Though that does not actually sound fairly so spectacular, does it?
