Nvidia is totally ruling the GPU roost over AMD right now, at least based on Newegg’s graphics card sales chart, with Team Green dominating its rival to a seemingly unprecedented degree.
Tom’s Hardware pointed out that the top 10 best-selling graphics cards listed by the US retailer are GeForce models at the time of writing.
In fact, all of the top 20 models are all Nvidia products, with one exception: an AMD entry at number 15, which is the MSI Mech Radeon RX 6600. To put it another way, 95% of the top 20 graphics cards are made by Nvidia and those are all Ampere GPUs (RTX 3000), with the exception of the RTX 2060 at number 17.
What is also interesting to note is that the best sellers are the rather expensive Nvidia GPUs, namely the RTX 3070 Ti, a trio of models that holds the top three positions, and are followed by a 3060 Ti, then an RTX 3050 – a ‘ affordable option, of course, but at number six is an RTX 3080 Ti.
There’s a bit of weirdness here as the RTX 3060 Ti at number 4 is actually a little more expensive than the RTX 3070 Ti at second place (both are Gigabyte cards), but the latter had a big Price cut to $ 700 and the former is now only offered by a third-party seller, so presumably Newegg was selling it a lot cheaper until recently when it ran out of stock.
Analysis: a real headache, don’t make mistakes
This is certainly a surprising situation. Nvidia’s dominance in desktop GPUs is consolidated if you look at any ratio, beware – it’s generally around the 80% or 70s market share level – but Team Green ownership is currently being taken to new heights at Newegg.
So what’s going on here? Obviously, the prices of Nvidia graphics cards have dropped recently and as a result there are some attractive offers right now, but AMD’s price tags have also gone down and likewise there are also some tempting price cuts for the Team Red.
That RX 6600 – which is the only AMD GPU to make the cut for the top 20 – is not far off its MSRP now and is just over 10% cheaper than the most affordable RTX 3060 in Newegg’s charts at the time of writing – with both cards they are fairly consistent in terms of overall performance, as we noted in our review. In fact, that RX 6600 doesn’t cost much more than the much higher RTX 3050 on the list (you’re looking at 10% more for the AMD GPU).
We’re not really sure why AMD’s RX 6000 products are being held out of the top 20 so convincingly right now. Tom’s suggests that this could be due to Nvidia’s mind-sharing, but as noted, Team Green has always had that edge and there are no real reasons why anything would have changed that much in this regard lately.
Perhaps there has been serious pent-up demand for the more robust Nvidia RTX 3000 models, and with prices finally starting to normalize, those buyers are making a move. While that still doesn’t explain the extent of Nvidia’s dominance here, even further down the price tiers and all in all, that’s a bit of a headache.
Of course, we can’t put too many shares in one source – this is just a snapshot of a retailer’s market, after all – but one thing that could indicate, perhaps, is more convincing price cuts by AMD to go back. in the game a little more. Particularly as it is rumored that new RDNA 2 updates are expected to be forthcoming, including the RX 6950 XT, which is expected to bring down the price of existing graphics cards against which these revamped models will be one step ahead (namely the RX 6900, 6700 and that 6600).
All of this should be good news for gamers looking for a further drop in GPU prices …