What the hell Nvidia. Post EVGA breakup, this is a bad look. Seems like they're setting MSRP ridiculously high in order to undercut board partners down the line.
It’s funny, I just had to have 40 feet of wood fence replaced and paid ~4K for parts and 1 day of labor. They also took away the old fence. My point, electronics are cheap. I know this point will not be received well though.
I had a similar sentiment when I had to purchase a set of new tires for my car. It is amazing how an assembly of rubber and steel can cost roughly as much as a device that has billions of transistors on it.
Bigger and thinner tires looks ridiculously expensive than it should (as a noob). I don't know the reason, does every tire manufacturers want to earn more from riches (who can buy a car with bigger and thinner tires)? This is important factor when I choose car.
I paid 1600€ for my last full PC (kept the old chasis and GPU) and 1700€ for my current work laptop. No, 1600$ (1900€ in Europe) is not cheap by any stretch of imagination.
I feel like both of those might be frivolous, but wood and labour are a more easily arguable expenditure. They're physical and do something physical with finite resources. A gpu often just gives you imaginary shadows faster. TVs just show you stuff, but for the same price of a nice one you could eat food for a year or travel overseas.
For $2000 you could get better light beams in a game you're already playing, or if you're physically capable you could take a mountaineering course and get a helicopter to and from a remote climb
So if you're in the business of having almost anything else to do with the money, it's going to seem like a really tenous financial choice.
It's why people pay thousands of dollars for a handbag cost maybe tens of dollars to produce. People like playing status games.
This effect is why third richest person on the planet is Bernard Arnault of Louis Vuitton, someone you've likely never heard of. He's currently wealthier than Bezos. He didn't actually improve our lives or revolutionize industry. He just latched into our primitive status seeking behavior.
To be fair to Arnault, he isn't just CEO of Louis Vuitton but LVMH which owns something like ~100 brands, ranging from clocks, wines, fashion, cosmetics, boats, jewelry and other retailing. Although to be fair to you, most of what they sell could go into the "luxury" category.
It's likely he wouldn't be the third richest person with just Louis Vuitton and it's probably mostly because of LVMH.
Graphics cards are not some idiotic luxury good. They are a tool, used for work or leisure, whose price points seem to be set at luxury level for essentially arbitrary business reasons.
It absolutely can. There's only 2 players in this business, 3 if you count Intel but their GPU future doesn't sound promising.
Nvidia sets the bar and AMD follows. AMDs prices have slowly crept up as well. So no matter what, you're paying much more for a top spec GPU today than you ever have before.
It's in the best interests of both Nvidia and AMD to keep these prices high, and it's a detriment to the consumer.
AMD did it with their CPUs as well. They undercut Intel with some great price/performance deals. Grabbed their market share back and are now bumping those prices back up to parity with Intel. Now neither company has to cut their prices.
Nvidia will use artificial scarcity to push these prices. We know they can produce a shit tonne of GPUs, they did it for years.
While what you say is correct, the recent Ryzen 7000 announcement has shown that AMD remains much less greedy than NVIDIA, because with the top Ryzen 9 7950X at $700, the price per core has remained less than $50, about the same as it has been since the first Ryzen, even if the cores are now much faster.
Before the first Ryzen, only Intel Atom CPUs had a price around $50/core, while the better Intel Core CPUs had prices around $100/core. Then Intel had to also follow AMD and drop the prices for the top models to around $50/core (the "efficiency" cores in Alder Lake and Raptor Lake count as a half core).
So there is still hope that the RDNA 3 GPUs will have a more decent performance/price ratio, even if it is unlikely that they will be faster than the RTX 40 Series.
>Wasnt like half of all US dollars printed in last 3 years ?
No. "Printing Money" is a shortcut term used for many of the measures used by the federal reserve recently, but it's not literally printing money in this case (significantly less than trillion has actually been printed since 2019). Going into the details of the economics of this is a mess, and inflation is absolutely high and causing problems right now, and very likely is higher than official CPI numbers but it's not anywhere near 100% in 3 years. Keep in mind lots of prices dropped in 2020 and were still recovering/suffering in 2021, so that paints a skewed picture vs comparing 2022 to 2019 before covid wrecked things.
> It feels more like 700$ in 2013 would be worth now 1400$??
USD$700 circa 2013 adjusted for inflation is USD$890 in 2022. Feel free to pay more if you feel like it should be more though.
When it's not a phone, but an always-on 6.5" tablet computer with an excellent camera, persistent wireless high-speed internet, amazing screen, thousands of incredibly useful apps that obviate the need for dozens of other electronic devices, and near-desktop performance for web browsing anywhere, I don't mind paying mid-range laptop prices every few years when I use it literally 4-6 hours per day, every day.
I’m a little envious of people that can get away with that. I never will as a developer. But I would definitely switch from Apple to Samsung if I only had a phone. Life would be a lot easier with Dex docking.
In the US, at least, its common to simply pay that $1k phone over time on a plan - or simply never stop paying off a phone through an upgrade program, either through their carrier or direct (e.g. iPhone Upgrade Program).
$30/mo doesn't hit as hard as $1100 up front. For some consumers, its a fundamentally different way of thinking.
I wish there was a more open adoption of CUDA like functionality. I use an astrophography imaging tool called PixInsight and it's very parallel math heavy. It supports CUDA, and you can offload some tasks to the GPU and it makes a world of difference (computing a mask of stars takes seconds instead of 5-15 minutes). It's certainly got me locked into NVIDIA.
Kind of. Vendor lock-in is only a part of why it's the only game in the town. Another, larger part is that AMD's software support is awful, and also that ATI/AMD were ignoring GPGPU/ML stuff for a while, letting Nvidia indoctrinate academia into using their stack.
As a side-note, the X-Box series S was the cheapest and most effective way for me to buy a 4K-UHD blu-ray player.
I did try to do some CUDA based AI rendering stuff on my 2080S but 8GB didn't seem to be enough.
Its weird to comprehend the 'stretching' of technology advance over time as I age, especially on the value side. There hasn't ever been the same 'feel' for me from the first leap of moving from software rendered Quake to a 3D-card - despite the various advances since, although I remember bump-mapping as another massive leap.
It's totally unfair in some ways. As an example the control you have over lighting a scene (either in a game or something you're rendering) is way beyond what multi-million dollar studios were using in my younger years.
What happens to society/reality when technology capable of producing video content indistinguishable from reality is affordable to many? Its already happening. Its going to become more commonplace.
The problem of 'truth' becomes massive - is the thing presented to you something that actually happened or was it fabricated?
24GB is enough for some serious AI work. 48GB would be better, of course. But high end GPUs are still used for other things than gaming, from ML/AI stuff to creative work like video editing, animation renders and more.
I completely agree. In the past I dropped a ton of money on gaming rig hardware that aged like milk. With a console you get the advantage of exclusives, majority of PC game releases, and a longer upgrade cycle versus a gaming rig. If you own a PS5, you got the PS VR2 coming out soon at a decent price point. If you own an Xbox, add in the amazing value of the Xbox Games Pass and I just don't see the need to be subsidising Hardware Manufacturers' bottom lines anymore.
I have a desktop PC that I sometimes use for gaming, everything from demanding simulators (like Flight Simulator and X-Plane) to grand strategy games and other more mainstream games. Last GPU I bought was a 2080ti that still is my GPU, and I bought that something like 3 years ago. I can still game mainstream games on very high settings without issues. So not sure why your setup aged like milk but mine didn't...
On my home machine, I'm running SLI'd GTX480's. They still do 99.9% of the gaming I want to do. I have only found ray tracing (which I don't like anyway) and for some reason water reflections to cause problems. But I can still run most games on high or better settings.
I don't know why OP's setup would age like milk. As long as you keep them clean, games haven't really advanced that much in the last few years, in terms of graphics requirements.
Also, if anyone has advice on building a new machine, I'm listening. I've been out of the game so long that I don't even know where to start, and have children that want towers built.
Yeah, it's kinda bizarre - I've been running GTX970 for 5 years and it still runs things acceptably today (although I've replaced it with 3080 at launch).
It really didn't last any less time than PS4 or any other console.
Consoles are subsidized and benefit from quantity. PC gaming has always been more expensive and benefitted from more cutting-edge technology. I love that consoles make gaming more accessible to more people, especially now with online multiplayer, which was once reserved for PC gamers. Even phones can do VR now, but PC is still the highest resolution, best texture quality, most detail, etc. Driving games in particular, with a Fanatec wheel, IEMs, Index or Vive Pro 2, and TOTL GPU + CPU are pretty damn spectacular, but the fact that you can get something 50-70% as good for ~1/5th the cost with a console is impressive.
ps5 hardware is sold at a profit (they hit profitability within 6-9 months of launch) and while microsoft claimed to a court that their hardware was subsidized as a justification for refusing to open the platform to alternate stores (so, somewhat self-interested of course), if you believe the production costs are fundamentally similar to PS5 then this is most likely "hollywood accounting".
It's real easy to have the xbox division license their branding from a parent company and if we set that at $100 a console then oops, there went all the profit.
It's not the PS3 days anymore where sony is losing 30% of the value of the console on the initial sale (and actually that wasn't the case for the other vendors even back in the PS3 days). Consoles are sold at a slight profit these days.
That said, having a "big APU" where everything shares a single bank of RAM and a single cooler/etc is a massive cost advantage. There is a lot of redundant cooling and memory in an ATX/PCIe spec PC and it all adds up. A console is one product with one assembly/testing line and one cooling/fan system and one set of memory. Clearly there is a market for "console-style PCs" which apply similar cost-optimizations, with a similar model to Steam Deck. Just so far there's nobody who's been willing to do the up-front cost and yet will choose not to lock down the resulting platform - Valve is somewhat unique on that front.
A Series X will not render very many AAA games at 4k/120fps (if any at all). And it definitely won't do at Ultra level settings.
PC gaming at the high end has always been about spending a lot of money to get the best graphics possible. Consoles always have much better bang for the buck early in a new console generation.
The 4K 144hz you get on the Xbox Series X is almost certainly lower graphics settings than you could run at 4K 144hz on the RTX 4080. I don't think the difference is enough to justify the price difference but comparing resolution and framerates isn't apples to apples.
And you'll still be playing the same game. If you want to spend almost a thousand dollars so your game renders more eyelashes that's your choice. My point is that NVidia's pricing is making PC gaming inaccessible to people who don't have wads of disposable cash to spend on diminishing returns. I would strongly recommend anybody who's looking into getting into current gen gaming to steer clear of playing on PC as the pricing of PC components is completely out of control and console pricing is looking increasingly more reasonable.
How is it making PC gaming inaccessible? You don't need top of the line hardware to play even the most recent PC games. You need top of the line hardware for "more eyelashes", but that's very much a choice (that you get with PCs but not with consoles).
4K 120hz is merely the limit of the HDMI standard used on the Series X. It is not a hard requirement needed to publish on the platform. This would be akin to claiming that the PS3 was a 1080p 60Hz console, when the vast majority of the library managed closer to 720p 30hz.
While developers are free to make 4K 120hz their target, few games attempt it, and the ones that do, often make significant graphical compromises or are graphically undemanding to begin with.
Raising MSRP doesn't undercut board partners, it allows board partners to charge more which is what they want.
Personally I think what they're doing is maximizing launch profit without totally crashing the 30x0 market which has a supply glut, something else board partners are worried about.
I'm really not sure why you think this is bad for board partners - you haven't really explained your reasoning and what you did say doesn't make much sense. This is all positive for board partners. It's the cheap founders edition cards that undercut board partners.
> Raising MSRP doesn't undercut board partners, it allows board partners to charge more which is what they want.
My understanding regarding the EVGA debacle is that Nvidia sets really high MSRP along with charging for the chips & giving themselves a headstart and the partners can't go above the MSRP then Nvidia comes in and slashes prices that only Nvidia can compete at (since they can give themselves discounts on the chips along with all of the other advantages they have).
What board partners likely want is either: Nvidia is time-limited to a few months with Founder Cards or Nvidia allows them to sell cards for more money and Nvidia can't make any card except Founder.
GPU prices will trend towards market prices either way. I'd rather them somewhat overshoot MSRP rather than undershoot, which is what happened with the 30-series GPU. It's not fair that scalpers were getting rich while EVGA was operating at a loss.
I am pretty sure EVGA sold directly to miners, likely at a good margin: my day-one EVGA queue was never fullfilled, while miners showed warehouses full of EVGA cards.
Mine was, something like 9 months later. But I got my queue email & had 24 hours to buy. Maybe dig through your emails to see if you just missed it? Or maybe the model you waitlisted on was basically cancelled.
wonder if he's one of the people who clicked the "I don't want to convert my queue to the LHR model, and I'm aware EVGA expects all future production to be LHR so this queue probably will never be fulfilled" button.
For awhile some of the Titan lines though got major features unlocked from their workstation graphic cards. I specifically bought a Titan XP used after the last crypto crash in 2018 for 350$ because I needed 10 bit colour output to a special 10 bit capable monitor for video editing and colour correction. I probably would have bought a 1080 ti instead with a much nicer cooler (for overclocking) which is a pretty similar card but that card was locked out of these features.
While I expected about $1600 for 4090, for the other two, whose GPU sizes are 9.5/16 and 7.5/16 of the top model, I expected prices proportional to their sizes, i.e. about $1000 and $700.
However, NVIDIA added $200 for both smaller models making them $1200 and $900.
It is debatable whether 4090 is worth $1600, but in comparison with it the two 4080 models are grossly overpriced, taking into account their GPU sizes and their 2/3 and 1/2 memory sizes.
They will price the 4080 at $1200 to push people over the line for the 4090. After all, the performance difference for "just" $400 is quite significant.
They are probably working towards cleaning out the 30 series stock given that crypto demand is dying off. It takes a lot to put 3060 prices on a marketing slide for 40 series.
That sort of make sense... I was thinking of upgrading when the 40 series came out, but looking at these prices, it makes the 30 series look a lot more affordable for what I need, even if it's less performant.
Not with even 50% of the FLOPS. The 4090 won't be the best perf/$, but considering how much perf/$ and perf/watt you can get these days, I think it's pretty hard to complain that these are available. If you don't play games, get a Ryzen 5 7600X for $300 with an iGPU more than capable of high-quality desktop computing.
You can also get a brand new laptop for $130 right now https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-14-0-laptop-intel-celeron-... , which is $57.37 in 1990 dollars. (according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ ). The high-end is more expensive than ever, and the low-end is cheaper than ever. The Apple Lisa was $10k in 1983, which is about $30k today. You can get a Boxx Apex with multiple $10k Quadro GV100 GPUs and 8TB SSDs for that money today, or roughly a dozen high-end (but not TOTL) gaming PCs.
Yea this is insane. Screw Nvidia and wait for the second hand market to hit rock bottom (I would estimate this will start to happen in 1 to 3 months) and buy a used card for dirt cheap.
they're setting prices high (and delaying the launch of the mainstream and lower-tier cards) because they have huge stockpiles of Ampere chips they need to burn through. Launch the stuff at the top to get the sales from the whales (VR, enthusiast gaming, etc) who are willing to pay for performance and delay the lower cards that would compete with your ampere inventory.
It's the Turing strategy all over again - when you have a stockpile of older cards, you don't make your new cards too attractive. And yes, they also have a big TSMC allocation too - but they gotta get rid of the Ampere stuff first, the longer it sits the more it will have to be marked down, launching new cards that obsolete the inventory they're trying to sell would just make things worse.
AMD is going to be doing the same thing - they pushed back the midrange Navi 33 and will be launching only the high-end Navi 31 until that miner inventory burns through a bit. Similarly to NVIDIA, that likely implies they'll be launching at a high price, they'll undercut NVIDIA by $100 or $200 or something and take the margins but they're not gonna be the heroes of the $700 market either.
---
The EVGA thing is a tempest in a teapot though, the losses he's talking about are something that's happened in the last month (he supposedly decided to quit back at the start of the year) and not representative of the (large, 10x normal) margins that board partners have been making in recent years. I personally didn't see much evidence of "price caps" with partner's first-party storefronts selling 3080s at 2.50-3x FE MSRP either.
And yes, jensen is an asshole and being a partner is a low-margin business, everyone already knows that.
EVGA is losing money because of some of it's CEO's ridiculous prestige side-projects (custom motherboards, enthusiast monitors, video capture cards that turned out to be falsely advertised, pcie sound cards, etc) and generous warranty support (long and transferable with absurdly cheap extended warranties) coupled with a higher-than-average failure rate (because they contract out assembly) and a generally lower-than-industry margin (because they contract out assembly) and they're just being drama queens on the way out.
Especially when they've been have lower than expected revenue because of the crypto crash. You'd think that they would drop the price a bit to entice the people who've been waiting for GPU prices to drop to buy the new version.
Reminder that the 780ti was $700. The top spec SKU.
Nvidia has took the GPU shortage and now set that pricing as the norm. And people will eat it up like suckers.