Nvidia has just revealed its latest financial results, which exceeded the expectations of analysts, with the company noting that the success was driven by its high-end gaming graphics cards as well as data center sales.
In total, Nvidia managed to rake in $3.01 billion (around £2.3 billion, AU$4.4 billion) in Q3 (the quarter running up to the end of October), close to 4% better than the revenue expected by analysts.
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CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, made a statement to say: “Our gaming business and demand from hyperscale customers powered Q3’s results. The realism of computer graphics is taking a giant leap forward with Nvidia RTX.”
As VentureBeat reports, Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, observed: “It appears the company is getting improved traction in both RTX and new Super GTX discrete GPU cards.”
Certainly at the premium end of the market, it’s not surprising that Nvidia would be capitalizing on the current vacuum of competition from AMD, which hasn’t launched its high-end Navi GPU yet (it’s expected mid-2020). And RTX dominating here no doubt means a lot of profit…
It could also mean that Nvidia feels its strategy of launching expensive RTX graphics cards is paying off, which means it's unlikely we'll see budget RTX GPUs any time soon.
As to the new GTX Super cards apparently performing well, at least according to Moorhead, we assume that’s mistyped and should refer to RTX Super offerings – given that the new GTX Super spins weren’t out in time to make an impact for Q3 (and that Huang singled out RTX in his comment, too).
The GTX 1660 Super wasn’t on sale until October 29, and the Q3 results go up to October 27 (with the 1650 Super not due until November 22).
GTX superstar
That said, it’s likely the new wallet-friendly GTX Super offerings will make themselves felt in the next quarter’s results, given that we billed the 1660 variant as a “superstar in the entry-level graphics card market” in our review.
Nvidia noted that its highlights were announcing GTX Super cards – and note that’s announcing, not selling – as well as the announcement of bringing ray tracing to Minecraft, the best selling PC game ever.
As for the data center, Huang commented: “This quarter, we have laid the foundation for where AI will ultimately make the greatest impact. We extended our reach beyond the cloud, to the edge, where GPU-accelerated 5G, AI and IoT will revolutionize the world’s largest industries. We see strong data center growth ahead, driven by the rise of conversational AI and inference.”
Moorhead further observed: “In the future, I am most interested in seeing how the company takes advantage of newer edge data center and cloud opportunities with its EGX and Jetson AI platforms as it has a unique offering with a mature AI software platform.”
The analyst also noted on Twitter that Nvidia’s CEO said the company shipped more Tesla T4s (Turing) than Tesla V100s (Volta) in Q3.
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