It might be one sliver of a larger revenue pie and seemingly only worth a brief mention during Nvidia's Q2 earnings call, but the PC gaming market seems to be doing just fine if Nvidia's latest proclamations are anything to go by.
The AI GPU giant has just announced its financial results for Q2 fiscal 2025, and in its earning call the company said that "gaming revenue of $2.88 billion increased 9% sequentially and 16% year-on-year." Nvidia also says it's seen "sequential growth in console, notebook, and desktop revenue and demand is strong and growing and channel inventory remains healthy."
Of course, the company is now, by a very large margin, an AI and datacentre one. So it would be remiss if it didn't mention gaming's links to AI, mentioning Nvidia's ACE game-related AI generation tech and stating, "Every PC with RTX is an AI PC. RTX PCs can deliver up to 1,300 AI TOPS and there are now over 200 RTX AI laptop designs from leading PC manufacturers."
AI is what's driving most of Nvidia's overall success, of course. Looking at the bigger picture, Nvidia's results show a $30 billion Q2 revenue which is "up 15% from the previous quarter and up 122% from a year ago," this being "well above our outlook of $28 billion." Earnings per share have gone up from $0.25 in Q2 2024 to $0.60 in Q1 2025 and now $0.67 in Q2 2025. It's a slowdown in growth, but big growth nonetheless.
This growth continues to come from datacentre demand as everyone looks to try and remain on the bleeding edge of AI processing. Nvidia says that demand "is coming from frontier model makers, consumer Internet services, and tens of thousands of companies and startups building generative AI applications for consumers, advertising, education, enterprise and healthcare, and robotics."
The company's currently pushing even more bleeding-edge changes, too, in the form of its next-gen Blackwell GPUs of which there are already "functional samples".
Blackwell, by the way, Nvidia CEO Huang says is "an AI infrastructure platform, not just a GPU. It also happens to be in the name of our GPU, but it's an AI infrastructure platform."
Huang explains, "Nvidia designed and optimized the Blackwell platform full stack end-to-end from chips, systems, networking, even structured cables, power and cooling, and mounts of software to make it fast for customers to build AI factories." Factories which, by the way, are "building-sized computers."
Blackwell in this context refers not just to the GPU, but the "Grace CPU, …coVS package, ConnectX DPU for East-West traffic, BlueField DPU for North-South and storage traffic, NVLink switch for all-to-all GPU communications, and Quantum and Spectrum-X for both InfiniBand and Ethernet can support the massive burst traffic of AI."
Infrastructure aside, Blackwell is a GPU, and it's this that we gamers are excited about because Blackwell-architecture GPUs should come packaged in some of the best graphics cards of the next generation when the RTX 5000-series launches. And if Nvidia's growing gaming revenue is anything to go by, we can be at least a little hopeful.
