Dr_b_hard to justify Ampere.

-power hungry, hot

-launch didnt have enough VRAM on all of the cards except the 3090, and that card was a joke, even now 3070ti still has 8GB vram, when my many year old 1080ti has 11GB. what? I dont care if i ever use it or it "just works", why less vram and ask for more $?

-LHR, you want me to pay inflated prices for a card that is gimped in some way and selling me that as a feature that makes it more appealing how? Are you smoking something at nvidia HQ

Lastly, competition and next gen. Even if the new cards are somehow problematic or not immediately available, why would i spend so much $ now on an older gen card, these things are 2 years old now. Take 50% off the prices and maybe sure, for example, Strix 3080ti available at local microcenter for 1600 USD. Id pay 800 for it, because that is really all its worth at this point, and then id have to buy a new power supply and beef up cooling in my system. And the final point to all of this, if you wanted to kill PC gaming, bravo, you have done it, there goes your market, im not that committed to gaming to spend $1000+ on a piece of tech to enable that

Ampere is kind of fine if you don't buy dumb or overpriced models.

Sure, the RTX 3060 12GB may be underwhelming in the performance charts compared to the GA102 silicon but I can find it in stock at MSRP or lower in The UK, France, and Germany now from major retailers. Compared to the previous generation 2060 6GB it's priced similarly, it performs about 20-25% faster in raster-basted games than the 2060 it replaces for the same power consumption, it underclocks and undervolts better than the RTX 2060 card it replaces, and it absolutely annihilates the RTX 2060 in any kind of DLSS or RTX title thanks to the 2nd-gen RTX hardware, generally matching a 2070S or 2080 in RTX titles. Due to changes in the economic landscape that I explained just here the 3060 12GB is actually cheaper in relative terms than the original 2060. Yes, in absolute terms it costs more dollars to you, but Nvidia are getting less of those dollars than before and those dollars are worth less to Nvidia as well.

So whilst it's disappointingly cut down to around 1/3rd the hardware of a 3080Ti, it's also a very viable GPU for the masses if you're not being greedy and playing the "gotta have a flagship" game. Nvidia are rightly milking that profitable market for all its worth, but it's not a market you're forced to participate in.

Dr_b_You sound like Avram Piltch... "When you die and your whole life flashes before your eyes, how much of it do you want to not have ray tracing? Just buy it!"

As a matter of fact, they did release a new version of DirectX, and actually told everyone about it, to great fanfare. Your 1080 Ti does not support feature level 12_2 for DX12 Ultimate, it has an outdated media engine (it cannot decode AV1 so you are going to have to do CPU decoding, and the format is finally taking off), the median performance of a RX 6600/XT (Navi 23) guzzling triple the power, and it is the RTX 3090 that's a joke. Come on, you can't be serious. My point is that technology did move forward, at the time Avram wrote that ridiculous piece, Turing was priced to the moon because AMD offered no competition in any front. It was far too early, none of the current API models were finalized and it frankly did not matter at the time. Turing is now four years old. A lot has happened since then, and prices are high today because of the semiconductor market being practically belly up right now with insane lead times and overwhelming demand.

For the love of God never use UserBarkmench to ever justify yourself again... The 6600 XT is decidedly faster than the 1080 Ti in general, you can look at virtually all reviews, the 6600 might not be in terms of absolute performance but it still does 85-90% of its performance at a much lower wattage... and you are talking about a low-end design with a 128-bit memory bus. That is how much technology has progressed in the long years since Pascal. A flagship GPU is no longer needed to have an excellent experience, for the reasons Chrispy outlined on the post above. But it is quite clear that you have no willingness to acknowledge that technology has moved forward (and especially chose to ignore the point I initially made - that these GPUs are about finesse and efficiency over raw power) and that I am just a shill, so this will become unproductive fast... so it will be my only and final reply on this subject.

Think of a Titan Z... it is a phenomenal GPU? Yes... but it's old as dirt and literally less useful than a RTX 3050 these days. Your card is heading down that alley fast, and while I literally acknowledged it remains a pretty good card, its shortcomings are becoming more apparent each and every day.