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Nvidia just lost a billion dollars in gaming business as AMD continues to thrive

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Nvidia’s second-quarter earnings look as if the company lost over a billion dollars in revenue since last year, according to preliminary numbers released by the company today. All this while AMD grew its gaming business by over a billion dollars.

Nvidia reported $2.04 billion in gaming revenue for the first half of 2022, down from $3.06 billion a year ago. That’s a whopping 33 percent loss.

An Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics card seen from the side.
Kiklas/Shutterstock

“Our gaming product sell-through projections declined significantly as the quarter progressed,” Founder and CEO of Nvidia Jensen Huang said in the release. “As we navigate these challenges, we remain focused on the once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvent computing for the era of AI.”

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Huang blamed the loss on component shortages and “ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty.”

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But those factors haven’t seemed to affect AMD, whose gaming business has been thriving. The company grew its revenue by $6.6 billion, with $1.7 billion of that coming from gaming. Gaming is now AMDs second-biggest cash cow after computer processors.

“We delivered our eighth-straight quarter of record revenue based on our strong execution and expanded product portfolio,” Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, said in the earnings report. “We see continued growth in the back half of the year highlighted by our next-generation 5nm product shipments.”

The GTX 1060 is still the most common GPU in gaming computers around the world.

AMD has an edge over Nvidia when it comes to gaming unit shipments thanks to strong partnerships with Sony, Microsoft, and Asus. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series gaming consoles use AMD GPUs, and both saw increased sales from 2021. Gaming laptops also saw an increase in sales, with AMD Radeon GPUs among the most popular units shipped.

Meanwhile, Nvidia GPUs continue to dominate the extreme high end of gaming power, which translates into high prices. The Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti is one of the most powerful graphics cards on the market, but it costs nearly $2,000. Nvidia didn’t say how many units it shipped, but it’s obviously not enough.

Tellingly, a Steam survey in March found the old GeForce GTX 1060 was still the most common GPU in gaming computers around the world. This 2016 card is the bare minimum needed to play Elden Ring and can’t handle high-intensity graphical needs such as PCVR.

No matter the reasons for Nvidia’s billion-dollar loss, it is clear AMD has a winning formula for continued growth.

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Nathan Drescher
Nathan Drescher
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Nathan Drescher is a freelance journalist and writer from Ottawa, Canada. He's been writing about technology from around the…
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