01-31-2017, 07:51 AM
http://wccftech.com/nvidias-founders-edi...aibs-2017/
Wow. Even back when there were still AMD-branded graphics cards, they were made by Sapphire.
Wow. Even back when there were still AMD-branded graphics cards, they were made by Sapphire.
Quote:Something pretty interesting has been happening lately, NVIDIA’s interest in its own line of Founders Edition graphics cards has been steadily rising and it has plans to continue producing them in 2017 going forward. This will of course mean that NVIDIA will be competing with its very own add-in-board partners for the market share of GeForce graphics cards. The Pascal Founders Edition variants of the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 were more expensive than the custom variants but still managed to be wildly successful.
The company plans to continue its foray into self-manufacturing a complete GeForce graphics card in 2017 (NVIDIA is primarily a chip designer and has traditionally supplied the GPU to AIBs who then build their own graphics card). Since the market has a limited size, it basically means that any additional profit NVIDIA makes from its Founders cards will have to come from the market share of their AIBs. Needless to say this will affect their profitability and I assume they wont be too happy about this.
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So what does this mean for the average gamer or prosumer? Well, if their past actions are any indication this would mean that NVIDIA would continue to release the Founders Edition graphics cards to the market first, only allowing AIBs to reveal their custom variants once a certain guarantee period of sales (for NVIDIA) has passed. On the other hand, this isn’t the first time NVIDIA has used tactics like this to increase profits.
Restricting the release of custom variants for a given period of time is a fairly common thing to do for the company. The only thing that’s changed this time however, is that the Founders Edition is produced entirely by NVIDIA and is one of the glowing indicators of the company’s excellent strategic and risk management. That said, we are also fairly sure that the amount of market share NVIDIA will be able to acquire is significantly smaller than the market size and quite limited in size.
This is because Founders Edition cards are usually not built to an exacting and demanding specification (even though they may look like it) and enthusiasts will usually wait for their favorite AIB to produce a custom variant than risk buying a reference one from the green team.