Nvidia CEO warns of “extraordinary, unusually turbulent, disappointing” Q4

Enlarge / Nvidia's RTX 2080Ti launched in September 2018 at an MSRP of $1,199. Nvidia's latest financial estimates indicate that this thing didn't exactly fly off of store shelves. (credit: Nvidia)

On Monday, Nvidia took the unusual step of offering a revised Q4 2019 financial estimate ahead of its scheduled disclosure on February 14. The reason: Nvidia had already predicted low revenue numbers, and the hardware producer is already confident that its low estimate was still too high.

The original quarterly revenue estimate of $2.7 billion has since dropped to $2.2 billion, a change of roughly 19 percent. A few new data points factor into that revision. The biggest consumer-facing issue, according to Nvidia, is "lower than expected" sales of its RTX line of new graphics cards. This series, full of proprietary technologies like a dedicated raytracing processor, kicked off in September 2018 with the $1,199 RTX 2080 Ti and the $799 RTX 2080.

"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," Nvidia said in a statement. As of press time, only one retail game, Battlefield V, has tapped into the RTX-only raytracing system.

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