Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card to drop in October for $1,599

Yahoo Finance’s Daniel Howley joins the Live show to discuss Nvidia’s RTX 4090 graphics card.

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BRAD SMITH: Welcome back, everyone despite a global pandemic and supply chain problems, Nvidia is on-track to release an entire new graphics card line, but it comes at a high price. The flagship RTX 4090 card is dropping in October for the hefty cost of-- get this-- $1,599. Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley is here to explain it all to us.

OK, the significance of this card? And is the pricing fair around it too?

DAN HOWLEY: Well--

JULIE HYMAN: Like, how does it compare? I have no context for how much a graphics card costs.

DAN HOWLEY: So you figure that this is a price jump from prior generations, right? You would figure the $1,599 card would be the epitome of what's available. And sometimes they'll release something called a Titan card, which is beyond what the average person needs. But use it because you're feeling a little extra bougie, beyond bougie. I don't even know.

But usually these cards are less expensive. These are the cards that gamers will put into their PCs. So not only is it the card, but you have to still build the rest of the machine around it. So it's making this far more expensive.

Now, we already knew that prices were higher during the pandemic because these cards were very hard to get. So that was shooting up demand and pricing as a result. These though, are launching at a much higher MSRP than the prior generation. We're talking about the $1,599 for the top RTX 4090, $1,199 for the RTX 4080 and $899 for the RTX 4080 with 12 gigabytes of RAM.

There's also some discontent among gamers because they're calling two of these cards 4080s, right? But just give you a background, usually Nvidia releases a 90 series, an 80 series, and a 70 series. They're not doing that here. They're just calling the lesser version of the 80 an 80, which they shouldn't. And it's kind of a little deceptive. And I think gamers are expressing that online already, along with the pricing.

I mean, look, $899, that should really probably be the middle ground for those kinds of cards. You're talking probably $599, $499 for an entry level card for something like that. You can go get a PS4 for that. And you don't have to build the rest of the system around it.

So I don't know how gamers are really going to respond as far as when this goes on the market. I'm not going to buy one because I am not made of money. I wish I was. But I do think the benefits of these are going to be clear once you put them into your system. They're saying 2X performance in certain situations.

We haven't seen a new card in two years. So this is the first one that's running on the Ada Lovelace version of their technology. Prior to that, they were using Ampere. So these, they're big improvements, yes. But I don't know if that means that gamers are going to want to take that jump, especially when you consider what's going on with the economy right now.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah. And to that point, I mean, you sort of zoom out. All of this news, it's coming out of Nvidia's GTC Conference, where they tend to announce all of these things. But sort of hanging over the industry is what's going on with fundamental chip demand. And on that front, we got a downgrade for Micron today from Mizuho, a price target cut at another firm because there's a little more pessimism there, although the shares are trading higher.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, I believe BMO and Wells Fargo went ahead and changed the price target. And it's just because people aren't buying PCs, or they were going from the absurd demand we saw during the pandemic. And that's just fallen off a cliff. You don't need to buy a PC every year.

Look, we talk about smartphones, right? I mean, these are more expensive than PCs, for the most part, right? $999 for a base model of an iPhone Pro. But people are willing to do that for smartphones because it's the one device that they always have on them. Even during the pandemic, I'm sure you were walking around your home with this. This thing is in the bathroom with me all the time.

JULIE HYMAN: Unfortunately, yeah.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah. But your PC, that doesn't do it. It stays there. You use it for work, and then you're like, I'm done, unless you're gaming, in which case it's gaming, work. And then the rest of the time you have this on you. So people just don't see the need to go out and buy those.

We're also talking about smartphone demand dropping though. And that's the other issue. They have NAND chips, and they have DRAM chips. Those are in both PCs and smartphones. And just the demand is now dropping, as we see, obviously, the economic issues that people are going to be dealing with as well as inflation. So I don't know how much this will bode for-- or how well this will vote for Nvidia.

Obviously, they had those prior cuts to their outlook in the prior quarter. And so I don't necessarily know that that's going to mean that these pricier cards will end up selling. But I mean, I'm a giant dork. I love video games. I would love to be able to drop one of those big boys into my machine, but it's not happening any time soon.

BRAD SMITH: Well, we know you're going to continue to be tracking the Nvidia conference that's taking place all throughout this week, the 19th through the 22nd here. So we've got a few more announcements to take place. And we're going to hear from the CEO later on once he speaks today too. Also we'll keep a close eye on shares of MU, everyone. Thinks, Yahoo Finance's own Dan Howley.