Steam Data: Nvidia Turing Adoption Lagged Compared With Pascal
When Nvidia warned on earnings last week, the company noted that one reason for the unexpected ~$500M shortfall was lower-than-expected sales of its Turing GPUs. The RTX family, which debuted in September, was significantly more expensive than the Pascal GPUs it replaced. Nvidia justified the price increases by appealing to the features these GPUs included, like RTX ray tracing (that’s Nvidia’s name for the DirectX DXR ray tracing capability) and its DLSS anti-aliasing.
Data from the Steam Hardware Survey suggests that Turing cards haven’t sold as well as their Pascal counterparts did — but before we dive into the data, we need to acknowledge some caveats.
Because Steam’s user base grows, percentile changes between periods do not automatically reflect the absolute number of GPUs being sold. If 5 percent of 10,000 customers own one card in 2016 and 2.5 percent of 20,000 customers own a card in 2018, the absolute number of GPUs sold would remain the same.
Second, there’s the fact that Pascal availability was sharply constrained during the summer of 2016, while Turing had far fewer problems. Pascal GPUs were genuinely difficult to find during the periods we’ll be examining (immediately post-launch), which ought to work in Turing’s favor when it comes to comparing uptake.
In short, the data we’re going to examine should be treated as interesting and useful, but not the absolute final word on the topic.
One advantage of comparing Turing and Pascal is that both families had to live side-by-side with their older siblings for quite some time. In Pascal’s case, this was caused by 14nm production problems. Turing had to contend with a supply glut of Pascal GPUs. But in both cases, Nvidia didn’t immediately pull its older GPU family in the manner you’d expect from a more traditional launch.
A table of the graphed results is below:
I don’t want to read too much into these graphs. We have a limited number of Turing data points to pull from and only a few months of data to work with. But the pattern suggests that Turing sales are indeed lagging Pascal in ways that may not be entirely explained by either higher prices, previous models still being in-market, or a larger user-base of Steam gamers.
Turing adoption should improve now that Pascal cards are exiting the market, but the GPU family appears to be off to a slow start. All of this is in-line with Nvidia’s market warning, but it’s interesting to see what the differences might be. There is a little good news in the SHS for NV, however — the RTX 2070 posted strong growth, nearly doubling its market share. Other strong movers (in terms of share gain) include the GTX 1070 (up 0.18 percent) and AMD’s RX 580 (up 0.15 percent)
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