It is the best of times; it is the worst of times . . . when it comes to graphics cards anyway. According to Chinese tech news site My Drivers, graphics card shipments in mainland China fell by 42 percent (opens in new tab) in January 2023 versus the prior year. However, sales are actually up by 9 percent since December 2022, showing that there is a recent upward trend.
The numbers apparently come from Bobantang (Board Channels), a Chinese blog and community. You can see in the chart below, that the green bars represent December 2022 shipments while the orange bars show January 2023. The top-selling AIB brand here is Colorful, followed by Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Galax, Gengsheng, Maxsun and Zotac.
The year over year drop is consistent with other data we’ve seen recently. As we reported back in December, shipments of discrete GPUs were down significantly (opens in new tab) year-over-year in Q3 2022 (down 15.4 percent on desktop cards alone), according to Jon Peddie Research.
Graphics card sales are likely shrinking in China for the same reasons they have fallen elsewhere in the world. Crypto Mining with PC GPUs is no longer profitable and miners accounted for a significant portion of demand up until the Ethereum merge was completed last year. Also, the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns led to a major PC upgrade cycle which now has subsided.
Consumers may also be looking at the current graphics offerings as in transition. The latest-generation GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD are only available in expensive, high-end SKUs that are beyond the reach of anyone with a modest budget. Nvidia’s cheapest 4000 series graphics card right now is the RTX 4070 Ti, which goes for around $800, while Radeon 7900 XT cards — the bottom of AMD’s RDNA 3 stack — go for about the same price.
People may be waiting to see more affordable options such as an RTX 4060 or Radeon RX 7600 come to market before they do their next upgrades. However, if you are looking for high performance and can afford the premium, the Nvidia RTX 4090 and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX currently dominate our list of the best graphics cards.