A former EVGA product manager, Brendon Ray Hedrick, has described the growing friction between EVGA and Nvidia before the company abandoned the GPU market in 2022. Hedrick, who left EVGA in 2019, says he predicted the partnership would eventually collapse within four or five years — a timeline that proved almost exact, as EVGA exited when the RTX 40-series launched.
Hedrick points to several turning points, starting with Nvidia's Founders Edition cards in 2016, which put Nvidia in direct competition with its own board partners. He also says Nvidia forced partners to sell some models at the announced MSRP even at a loss, with reduced chip allocations for those that refused. That made EVGA's higher-priced custom models look overpriced by comparison, even though they used better components and cooling.
The introduction of real-time ray tracing with the RTX 20-series added more strain. Hedrick says Nvidia could afford a long technological bet, but a lean company like EVGA had to absorb the cost of convincing customers to upgrade for a feature with almost no games supporting it. By the end, Nvidia GPUs made up 78% of EVGA's revenue but contributed only a tiny share of its profit, with reports saying EVGA lost hundreds of dollars on every RTX 3080 and higher model sold.
Hedrick's account largely blames Nvidia's policies, but the source notes that other analyses also fault EVGA's own decisions, such as contracting manufacturing to third parties, generous customer service, and a narrow focus on North America and Europe. Those factors, combined with thin margins, left EVGA vulnerable even before its final break with Nvidia.