Nvidia has been taking a beating lately with its graphics cards, at least if you believe the reviews. On the financial side, however, Nvidia is still bringing in the cash with its controversial RTX 4060 family.
The company released its earnings for the second quarter of fiscal 2024 (or, in real life, the third quarter of 2023). Unsurprisingly, Nvidia brought in a ton of money overall — a new record at $13.51 billion, which is 101% higher than a year ago, largely due to the AI boom. What’s surprising is that Nvidia’s gaming revenue is up, too.
It made $2.49 billion in gaming revenue over the last quarter. That’s not quite the peak for Nvidia at the height of the GPU shortage — in November 2021, the company reported $3.22 billion — but it’s close. For instance, in the first quarter of fiscal 2022 (second quarter of real 2021), Nvidia reported $2.76 billion in gaming revenue.
Since the GPU shortage, Nvidia (along with AMD and Intel) have seen a steady drop in income from CPUs and GPUs while dealing with the fallout from the pandemic. It isn’t surprising to see Nvidia claw some of that money back, but it comes on the back of three GPUs that weren’t received well.
In its earnings press release, Nvidia highlights its RTX 4060 family of graphics cards, all of which have been met with some controversy. The RTX 4060 Ti takes center stage, with most reviewers saying it’s too expensive for the performance it offers (read our own RTX 4060 Ti review for our full thoughts). The 16GB RTX 4060 Ti stirred up even more controversy, costing $500 and only offering a benefit over the base model in select games.
The RTX 4060 Ti was almost universally panned, but it’s fair to say the RTX 4060’s reception was mixed. In our RTX 4060 review, we said “it’s not a bad graphics card, just not a particularly good one, and certainly one that’s hard to recommend given the wide swath of last-gen options.”
Despite the reception, the RTX 4060 family seems to be moving the needle for Nvidia. The company says its gaming revenue is up 22% compared to the last year.
That still pales in comparison to the money brought in from the AI boom, though. The company reported $10.32 billion in its data center business, which is 171% higher than it was a year ago.