14 DAY TRIAL // After years of production values improvements, China has finally grasped a taste for true product quality, moving away from cheap quality products and controversial clones.
As a sign of improved revenues and quality lives, Chinese customers also want better, more powerful products. Being one of the largest IT markets in the world, China also presents a strong interest in large GPU manufacturers like AMD and NVIDIA. Although the refocusing effort is moved from entry-level products to high-end GPUs, it also means that China has more money to spend, pricey products will become the norm, and entry-level products will become harder to find and will have even worse performance.
Historically, China wasn’t a place where expensive merchandise sold well, except the extremely rich elite. The huge Chinese market always went for cheap products with bad performance ratings. From entry-level GPUs to integrated graphics solutions, Chinese PCs were mostly a quantity-over-quality situation that forced large IT market swaths to stagnate for years, with apps and video games popular in China keeping the same graphics standards for a very long time. Although they did well financially, this economically driven conservatism held in place years of potential progress in video entertainment, something that helped only the tens of millions of low-performance PC users.
Better life standards means more money and more demand for luxury
Apparently, the production values improvement, better revenues and also much more graphically demanding Chinese games are driving the GPUs sales increase, KitGuru, claiming that the recent Tencent games are convincing the public in getting higher-end video cards, increasing NVIDIA and AMD sales tenfold.
It’s also believed that the new choice also comes from the shrinking performance gap between entry-level graphics cards and the integrated graphics solutions that simply render cheap dedicated graphics cards useless. A popular deal in China today is to run games on systems with mediocre CPUs but equipped with really powerful graphics cards that guarantee good enough performance in the latest games available.
How this will affect future financial plans of the two major graphics solutions manufacturers like AMD and NVIDIA is to be seen, but if AMD is to redress itself financially after its current economic crisis, it should address the Chinese market as vigorously as possible, with excellent marketing and its already typically affordable prices. Becoming a popular brand in China will allow AMD to gain a foothold in very lucrative markets against NVIDA’s typical success areas like Europe and the US.