Nvidia trims quarterly revenue forecast as its RTX cards undersell

The PC hardware company Nvidia has shaved 19 percent off its estimates for Q4 revenue ahead of next month’s financial reveal, dropping the estimate from $2.7 billion to $2.2 billion. 

The company had, as reported by Ars Technica, already endured a dip in demand following a decrease in cryptocurrency interest, but this latest reduction is driven primarily by lower-than-expected sales of its RTX GPU line and some amount of “economic uncertainties.”

Nvidia now says that sales of the RTX line were below the company’s initial expectations, something that could boil down to the fact that not many released games have taken advantage of some RTX-exclusive features quite yet. As pointed out by Ars, currently Battlefield V is the only PC game on the market that makes use of the RTX’s raytracing tech.

"These products deliver a revolutionary leap in performance and innovation with real-time raytracing and AI, but some customers may have delayed their purchase while waiting for lower price points and further demonstrations of RTX technology in actual games," explains Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a letter to investors.

Those aforementioned economic uncertainties hit both the consumer and datacenter segments of Nvidia's usual business. "As we worked through Q4, the global economy decelerated sharply, particularly in China, affecting consumer demand for Nvidia gaming GPUs," explains Huang. Later on in the letter, he notes that a handful of deals for companies that handle things like cloud computing or deep learning AI models failed to close toward the end of the quarter as "customers around the world became increasingly cautious due to economic uncertainties."