In a move that will have significant repercussions for the video card industry in North America and Europe, EVGA today has announced that the company is parting ways from NVIDIA. As a result, the company will not be producing video cards based on NVIDIA’s next-generation of GPUs – and won’t be immediately switching allegiance to AMD or Intel, either. Consequently, NVIDIA is losing their largest add-in board (AIB) in North America, and the broader North American video card market is losing one of its biggest and best-known vendors.

In a brief announcement posted on EVGA’s forums, the company outlined their parting from NVIDIA, while underscoring that this affects the next-generation of video cards, and that EVGA will continue to provide current-gen products and support existing customers.

Meanwhile, in a briefing attended by Jon Peddie Research and Gamers Nexus, EVGA’s CEO (and founder) Andrew Han laid out some further details about the transition. These are both great pieces and as I’m not going to simply rehash them point by point, I’d encourage readers looking for a first-hand recounting of the briefing to check them out.

As laid out in both pieces, EVGA’s parting from NVIDIA comes as the company’s relationship with NVIDIA has, according to EVGA, soured over the years. Most notably, AIB margins have been slowly shrinking over the past couple of decades, with JPR publishing that gross margins at the AIB partners have fallen from 25% in 2000 to 10% in 2015, and finally an estimated 5% this year. Meanwhile, as NVIDIA has slowly ramped up its own efforts to directly sell its Founders Edition (reference) video cards in Best Buy and other retailers, AIBs like EVGA have been put in a position of directly competing with their partner-turned-supplier.

Jon Peddie Research: AIB Gross Margins v. NVIDIA Gross Margins

This, in turn, has put EVGA in a position where they are taking a loss on selling high-end NVIDIA cards, a significant shift from what are normally the highest…