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Grandparent seems to have forgotten about 4070 Ti (only $800, what a bargain!) but yeah, $800 is currently the floor for current-gen hardware in the sense that nothing has launched below $800 despite being almost 6 months into this product cycle. AMD's cheapest is a $900 MSRP (but starting to fall below that) and NVIDIA's cheapest is an $800 MSRP. That space is currently filled by older, slower, less efficient, less-featured last-gen products. Both companies have some significant amounts of inventory they want to burn through after the mining thing and it's going slow because of the general declines in shipments. Generally though I think people are remembering the past with rose-colored glasses... not saying OP said this in particular, but a lot of people have latched onto the idea of the "$300 x70 tier", and the x70 tier has literally never been $300 MSRP for the entire time it's existed. It's bounced back and forth between $350 and $400 even 10 years ago, $329 was the lowest price it's ever launched at and people have latched onto that one as being the price x70 has to match forever, plus a little extra. GTX 680 (full-die GK104) was $499 10 years ago, for a 300mm^2 chip, GTX 670 was a GK104 cutdown for $399 for example, and GTX Titan was where you got the full GK110 at a mere $999 (in 2012 dollars). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces... Ampere was somewhat below the baseline, using Samsung was an attempt to make cheaper cards and push down the cost, so by $499 being a "bargain" price (for 3070) before pandemic cost spirals got too bad, and factoring in the more expensive TSMC 5nm node, I think the realistic price for a 4070 (GA104 cutdown, whatever you call it) is probably $600-700 at this point. So there's definitely some gouging taking place, but, a lot of people are fixated on that $300 number and that's just not going to happen. Costs have just spiraled a lot more than people realize, Pascal was not cheap either and that was 7 years ago (!) this june, and everything since then has been on older, cheaper nodes to help keep the costs down... until now. Throw in the pandemic generally blowing a lot of costs up, and yeah things are expensive now. And yes, 4850/4870 were good cheap cards, but AMD could do that because they got onto 55nm ahead of NVIDIA, and that was back in the days when shrinking first was a real advantage, you could match a high-end card with a cheap midrange card if you got to a newer node first. That's not how it works anymore, higher wafer costs and R&D costs mean newer nodes are better but they're not really cheaper even considering you get more chips per wafer. Costs are growing fast enough to eat up the increases in density. |