Former EVGA product manager Brandon Ray Hedrick ( Brendon Ray Hedrick ) reviewed his experiences during his tenure at EVGA in his personal blog, revealing some insider information and unwritten rules of the graphics card industry.
Firstly, since NVIDIA began launching Founders Edition ( FE ) open-source graphics cards from the Pascal generation, there have been a series of concerns within EVGA regarding changes in their cooperative relationship, graphics card pricing, and product strategy.
He stated that when the Pascal series was released in 2016, EVGA began to realize that the situation had changed internally. In the past, EVGA could directly sell graphics cards with publicly available designs, but the widespread promotion of FE meant that NVIDIA as a supplier also got directly involved in selling finished graphics cards to end-consumers. This led to a more direct competitive relationship between partners and suppliers.
He recalled that the confidentiality measures before NVIDIA's new product releases were very strict; EVGA could only obtain complete specification information about the GTX or RTX series almost at the same time as the general public.
Due to NVIDIA's tough stance on data leakage incidents, EVGA once adopted a special data leakage tracking scheme (proposed by Jacob Freeman): different retailers were provided with different render images (with dots of different colors in the corners), which allowed for tracing the initial source of the leakage once the images were leaked.
In terms of pricing, EVGA needs to launch at least one model that meets the requirements of NVIDIA MSRP; otherwise, there is a risk of a reduction in GPU quotas. Since the profit margin for such products is extremely thin, they may even have to be sold at a loss. In this situation, EVGA can only rely on high-end models with better materials, higher-spec PCB, and more advanced cooling solutions to generate profits. However, these products are costly and come with high premiums, which many consumers find difficult to accept.
At the same time, he believes that in the subsequent generations of products after NVIDIA, the design of the public version of PCB has been continuously optimized, and automatic frequency management technologies such as GPU Boost have been introduced. As a result, the performance improvements that third-party manufacturers have achieved through investing substantial costs in enhanced power supply and cooling solutions are becoming increasingly limited in actual gaming, further weakening the selling points of high-end non-public graphics cards.
Hedrick also mentioned that when the RTX 20 series was first released, ray tracing technology support was not yet widespread (Battlefield 5's ray tracing update didn't come out until November 2018), and it was difficult to fulfill the promises regarding the gaming experience. Moreover, the initial price of the RTX 20 series was much higher than that of the GTX 10 series, which led to significantly weaker demand for the RTX 20 series. However, for players, this meant that graphics cards were easier to purchase at that time.
At the same time, after the craze for cryptocurrency mining subsided, there was a backlog of older models such as the GTX 1060 3GB. Coupled with the difficulty in selling Intel X299 motherboards due to intensified competition in the AMD sector, EVGA faced pressure on both graphics cards and motherboards, and power supply products were not sufficient to fill all the gaps.
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