NVIDIA Cuts Fermi Quadro Pricing by 50%

Being as hyped as it was, AMD’s Radeon HD 6800 series launch last week didn’t need to be made more exciting, but NVIDIA decided to make it so anyway by dropping the prices of its hugely popular GeForce GTX 460 and GTX 470 graphics cards. It appears now that things didn’t quite end there, as multiple sources are reporting that the company also dropped the prices of its Fermi-based Quadro line-up by 50%. Yes, fifty freaking percent.

Quadro pricing isn’t something I’ve been keeping up on, and so far, I can’t see actual evidence of the 50% figure, although in comparing the prices of some models, such as the Quadro 4000 and 5000, we’re seeing rather large decreases in price compared to the launch SRPs. But given that GPUs degrade in value over time anyway, it’s hard to know whether this pricing is accurate or not, or if it will get even better. It could be that only the people close to NVIDIA’s partner programs have access to this kind of information.

If true, and there is no reason I’d believe otherwise, the move by NVIDIA is a strange one. Tech site KitGuru has provided a quote from NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang as saying that Fermi fell “Significantly short of expectations” – which given NVIDIA’s general lack of transparency, is one for the books. So what’s the reason? Is NVIDIA scared of the potential dominating appeal of AMD’s next FirePro line-up?

The answer is that there is no answer, until NVIDIA provides one. When companies drop prices like this, it means one simple thing – the product isn’t selling. If the product was selling, it’d make zero sense for a company to drop the pricing, because you’d essentially be throwing money away. Or, it could also be that the next FirePro does have extreme potential, and as a preemptive strike, the company has decided to take the loss, but at the same time flood the professional market with its cards. Either solution doesn’t make NVIDIA look good, however. 

Then of course there’s the possibility that NVIDIA has an overstock of its current cards, and as the company is preparing its next Quadro launch, it might not want to take an even greater loss on all of its left-over cards. At this point, it’s truly hard to say, and as mentioned, it could really be anything. It’s an interesting move though, that goes without saying.

Specifically, he said “We expect to drive revenue and grow market share with new products that are gaining momentum in each of our businesses”. That’s also nice and upbeat. Exactly what Wall Street and nVidia customers everywhere wants to hear. Sure, nVidia has (in Huang’s own words) fallen “Significantly short of expectations”, he also said that he expects market conditions to change rapidly.