This makes me feel all funny inside. I guess because I always like to think of my PC as a complete unit. I mean, my PC is a total unit as it’s jammed right into my chonky desk and therefore built like a tank on legs, but to me it’s a single device with a bunch of discrete parts inside it to make up the whole.
To Nvidia, however, “GeForce is essentially a game console inside your PC.” At least that’s how CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang sees it.
That’s fine on the one hand, where it sees its own product as the most important piece of the gaming PC puzzle, and the component which has the most bearing on just how slick a gaming experience you’re going to get. But where I feel uncomfortable is when Huang is talking about the fact that Nvidia’s targets are for the average price of a GeForce graphics card to be the same as a current gen games console.
“We’ve always believed that the ASP of GeForce should drift towards the average selling price of a game console,” says Huang in the recent Q2 2023 earnings call (opens in new tab). “And so it should be something along the lines of $500 or so roughly at this time.”
If people are willing to spend that much on an Xbox then surely they’ll pay that for a single graphics card to stick into their PC? I guess that’s the theory, and honestly, he’s probably right—if the past couple of years have taught us anything it’s that people are prepared to pay a ridiculous amount of money for a GPU if they really want it.
But if we’re looking at the mainstream, biggest selling graphics cards, I don’t want them to be priced at a level where they can’t compete with Microsoft or Sony’s game boxes. But pricing is going that way, though fingers crossed when Nvidia unveils the RTX 40-series GPUs (opens in new tab) there will eventually be some worthwhile ~$300 cards that offer more than the previous generation.
To be completely fair to Jen-Hsun, the above quote is in reference to a question on whether the average selling price (ASP) across the Nvidia GeForce GPU stack would remain the same as it has over the last couple of years, or whether it would go down “because of the absence of that crypto tightening dynamic?”
“I would say that without dynamic crypto,” Huang answers, “the mix would go down. However, the overall trend long term, the ASP is drifting up.”
That’s when he goes on to say Nvidia’s always felt it should stick its ASP at the same level as a whole games console. With console prices rising on the whole, and Sony just now announcing a spike in the cost of its PlayStation 5 (opens in new tab)Jen-Hsun’s only going to be focusing on an ever rising target price.