Nvidia is blowing away AMD for GPU sales right now

Nvidia is totally ruling the GPU roost over AMD right now, at least going by Newegg’s ranking of graphics card sales, with Team Green dominating its rival to a seemingly unprecedented extent.

Tom’s Hardware pointed out that the top 10 best-selling graphics card listed by the US retailer are GeForce models at the time of writing.

In fact, the entire top 20 models are all Nvidia products, with one exception – an AMD entry at number 15, which is the MSI Mech Radeon RX 6600. To frame that another way, 95% of the top 20 graphics cards are made by Nvidia, and those are all Ampere (RTX 3000) GPUs, except for the RTX 2060 at number 17.

What’s also interesting to note is that the top dog sellers are quite expensive Nvidia GPUs, namely the RTX 3070 Ti, a trio of models of which hold the top three positions, and they’re followed by a 3060 Ti, then an RTX 3050 – an affordable option, of course – but at number six there’s an RTX 3080 Ti.

There’s a bit of an oddity here given that the RTX 3060 Ti at number 4 is actually a tad more expensive than the RTX 3070 Ti in second place (both are Gigabyte cards), but the latter has had a big price cut to $700, and the former is only being offered by a third-party seller now, so presumably Newegg was selling it a good chunk cheaper until very recently when it ran out of stock.

Analysis: A real head-scratcher, make no mistake

This is certainly a surprising situation. Nvidia’s dominance in desktop GPUs is well-established if you look at any report, mind – it’s generally at around the 80% market share level, or high 70s – but Team Green’s ownership is taken to new levels at Newegg currently.

So what’s going on here? Of course, Nvidia graphics card prices have been dropping recently, and there are some compelling looking deals right now as a result – but AMD’s price tags have also been heading downwards, and equally there are some tempting price reductions for Team Red, too.

That RX 6600 – which is the only AMD GPU to make the cut for the top 20 – is not far off its MSRP now, and is just over 10% cheaper than the most affordable RTX 3060 in Newegg’s rankings at the time of writing – with both of those cards being fairly even in overall performance terms, as we observed in our review. Indeed, that RX 6600 doesn’t cost much more than the RTX 3050 much higher up in the list (you’re looking at 10% more for the AMD GPU).

We’re really not sure why AMD’s RX 6000 products are being kept out of the top 20 so convincingly right now. Tom’s suggests this could be down to Nvidia mindshare, but as noted already, Team Green has always had that advantage – and there are no real reasons why anything would have changed in that regard all that much in recent times.

Perhaps there has been some serious pent-up demand for beefier Nvidia RTX 3000 models, and with pricing finally starting to normalize, those buyers are making a move. Although that still doesn’t explain the extent of Nvidia’s domination here, even further down the pricing tiers, and all-in-all, this is a bit of a head-scratcher.

Naturally, we can’t put too much stock in a single source – this is just a snapshot of the market from one retailer, after all – but one thing it might point to, perhaps, is more compelling price cuts from AMD to get back into the game a bit more. Particularly as new RDNA 2 refreshes are rumored to be due imminently, including the RX 6950 XT, which should knock down the pricing of the existing graphics cards that these revamped models will be a step up from (namely the RX 6900, 6700 and that 6600).

All of this should be good news for gamers looking for GPU prices to come down further still...