NVIDIA partners stuck with a lot of mid-range Pascal GPUs

In the third-quarter earnings call with financial analysts, NVIDIA provided an update about the fallout of the cryptocurrency bust. The company says inventory of its high-end Pascal-based cards like the GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 series has largely sold through ahead of the launch of the GeForce RTX series.

However, both channel prices and inventory levels of mid-range Pascal cards remained higher than expected. NVIDIA says they will work down channel inventories over the next two quarters:

Although the cryptocurrency wave has ended, the channel has taken longer than expected to normalize. Pascal high-end cards have largely sold through ahead of RTX. However, on midrange Pascal gaming cards, both channel prices and inventory levels remained higher than expected. Pascal is well positioned as the GPU of choice in the midrange for the holidays, and we expect to work down channel inventories over the next quarter or 2.

In a follow up comment, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang reveals the company decided not to sell anymore GeForce GTX 1060 GPUs into the channel in the current quarter, to allow the channel to sell through the inventory it has. Pricing declined slower than NVIDIA expected, which resulted in lower-than-expected demand for these cards.

Huang confirmed there's more than 12 weeks of inventory between NVIDIA and "the other brand" (aka AMD). He further elaborated that part of the reason for the excessive channel inventory is that there was a lot more "other brand" inventory than NVIDIA estimated.

These comments seem to suggest that next-gen mid-range cards aren't coming anytime soon, although NVIDIA did confirm they plan on bringing Turing deeper into the mainstream. But at the moment, there's likely too much inventory of mid-range Pascal GPUs.