Recently, the US Department of Commerce announced the final rules for semiconductor export controls to China, and this news quickly spread to the consumer market. Many netizens have found that Nvidia RTX 4090 series graphics cards seem to be out of stock across the network overnight. In addition, individual sellers with inventory directly start from the ground, with a premium level beyond imagination.
In fact, for "graphics card dealers", this is just a common means of hoarding and profiteering; For domestically produced graphics cards, it is an excellent opportunity to gain insight into the consumption habits of game players and gain insight into market demand.
Prices skyrocketing
A reporter from Financial Investment News noticed that at present, Nvidia's official online store has removed RTX 4090 graphics cards from multiple e-commerce platforms. At the same time, Nvidia partners such as Asus and Rainbow have also taken down non-public graphics cards of this model, and their stores all display out of stock or reservation status.
At the same time, related topics such as "4090 graphics card fully removed" quickly made headlines. In addition, parallel to the popularity, there is a wave of price increases caused by individual sellers.
As the market sentiment of "fear of out of print" continues to ferment, many merchants have sold inventory of RTX 4090 graphics cards at high prices, mostly priced between 20000 to 30000 yuan. Moreover, it has been sold for nearly 50000 yuan. You should know that the price of public graphics cards on NVIDIA's official website starts at 12999 yuan, while the price of non-public graphics cards starts at 16999 yuan.
According to screenshots of e-commerce platforms
On October 20th, a reporter from Financial Investment News approached an individual seller who had sold 600 orders a month as a consumer. The seller claimed that the new RTX 4090 graphics card was priced at 29999 yuan and was currently out of stock, with only one opened graphics card priced at 23000 yuan.
Industry insiders have stated that the shortage and price increase of NVIDIA RTX 4090 graphics cards are not due to a sudden increase in market demand, but rather to the emergence of a large number of intermediaries such as channel merchants, individual sellers, and scalpers in the market, attempting to raise prices. In order to obtain windfall profits.
Star graphics card
Why does a graphics card trigger a series of market reactions such as panic buying, price increases, and even public opinion? The reason for this is the "hard core" strength behind it, which has attracted many game players.
According to NVIDIA's official website, the RTX 4090 graphics card was released in 2022, achieving a qualitative leap in performance, efficiency, and AI driven graphics. It has 76 billion transistors, 16384 CUDA cores, and 24GB high-speed Micron GDDR6X graphics memory, capable of continuously running at over 100 FPS in 4K resolution games.
Nvidia once publicly introduced the graphics card as the world's fastest gaming GPU. According to relevant evaluation videos, the RTX 4090 graphics card has demonstrated excellent performance in games such as Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, Wilderness Daredevil: Redemption, and Tomb Raider: Shadow.
In addition, improvements have been made in terms of heat dissipation. Public information shows that its fan adopts a large area of fan blades, which can provide a 20% increase in air volume; The radiator is equipped with new heat dissipation fins and airflow design, bringing better heat dissipation effect.
Therefore, as the most configured and powerful graphics card in the consumer product industry, the RTX 4090 is referred to by esports players as the "Dream Love Card".
Future prospects for domestic graphics cards
When the consumer market faces a huge gap, from another perspective, more market space will emerge. Therefore, in this industry chain, opportunities and challenges coexist for domestic manufacturers.
Recently, the International Data Corporation (IDC) released a report titled "China's Half Year Accelerated Computing Market (First Half of 2023) Tracking", which showed that the computing power gap faced by the Chinese market due to multiple factors has brought new opportunities for chip development in China.
The above report points out that the development of local AI chip manufacturers in China is in a stage of rapid growth. In the first half of 2023, the market size of China's acceleration chips exceeded 500000 units. From a technical perspective, GPU cards hold a 90% market share; From a brand perspective, Chinese local AI chip brands have shipped over 50000 copies, accounting for about 10% of the entire market share.
In recent years, manufacturers such as Jingjiawei, Moore Threads, Core Technology, and Granphy have gradually broken through in this field, striving to create a domestically produced graphics card that can have a global say.
Specifically, Jingjiawei's latest graphics GPU product is JM9. According to the company's testing results, this graphics processing chip meets high-performance display requirements such as geographic information systems, media processing, CAD assisted design, gaming, virtualization, and artificial intelligence computing needs; The latest product of Moore Thread is MTTS80, which officially supports over 60 games and nearly 50 motherboards. It is reported that MTTS80 can already benchmark against NVIDIA's RTX3060 in some performance aspects.
Industry insiders have stated that with the continuous technological breakthroughs and optimization of domestic graphics cards, their performance and stability have reached a level comparable to or even surpassed that of international brands. With the continuous advancement of domestic graphics card technology innovation, in the future, relying on its strength to seize the domestic market, it will once again grandly enter the international stage.
