SisyphusThe 3090, 4090 etc. are for semiprofessionals, creative people, not for gamers, nobody needs 24 GB VRam in gaming. Buts its nice for mixed use and a lot cheaper than the quadro series.

The only explanation for me: Gamers love to have the "best" card, naming/PR is everything. AMD isn't much better, neither much cheaper. So there is room for a good margin.

oxrufiioxoTechnically the 4090 is 400 cheaper than the launch 3090ti given that it's 2-4x faster depending on what you're doing with it thay isn't bad

kiakkNot a smart way to count the perfromance gain into the price. With this logic... a GTX **60 middle category could be 20-30% higher price from generation to generation. With this logic from GTX 260 untill rtx 3060, the rtx 3060 should be 1000-1100USD at least, or even more...
So by this logic, if we should pay 700-800USD to an RTX 3060 we should be happy, by a 400usd "discount" as it should be? I do not think so....
Only moderate price increase acceptable, that covers inflation, design and manufacturing complexity. But by the age of mining and high margin of nVidia, the last years of price increasing is not acceptable.

Just simply look at the financial balance of these companies nVidia, AMD... Can you realize a similar financial increasement in your personal live, or in your familly or friends? They are growing as hell while an average person in the society have even less financial possibilities than years before.

kiakkNot a smart way to count the perfromance gain into the price. With this logic... a GTX **60 middle category could be 20-30% higher price from generation to generation. With this logic from GTX 260 untill rtx 3060, the rtx 3060 should be 1000-1100USD at least, or even more...
So by this logic, if we should pay 700-800USD to an RTX 3060 we should be happy, by a 400usd "discount" as it should be? I do not think so....
Only moderate price increase acceptable, that covers inflation, design and manufacturing complexity. But by the age of mining and high margin of nVidia, the last years of price increasing is not acceptable.

Just simply look at the financial balance of these companies nVidia, AMD... Can you realize a similar financial increasement in your personal live, or in your familly or friends? They are growing as hell while an average person in the society have even less financial possibilities than years before.

oxrufiioxoI don't really care what they price the 60 tier cards at I'd never buy one regardless if they were 50 usd or 1000 usd.

I don't care what others can or can't afford if they're too expensive for you or anyone else don't buy them it's simple these aren't necessities in life we are talking about.

Same with me if the 80/90 tier ever goes out of my price range guess what I'll stop buying them life goes on...

oxrufiioxoI don't really care what they price the 60 tier cards at I'd never buy one regardless if they were 50 usd or 1000 usd.

I don't care what others can or can't afford if they're too expensive for you or anyone else don't buy them it's simple these aren't necessities in life we are talking about.

Same with me if the 80/90 tier ever goes out of my price range guess what I'll stop buying them life goes on...

ValantarThat is an incredibly privileged and myopic point of view. Which is of course your right to have - but it also demonstrates a severe lack of perspective and base level compassion on your part. These not being "necessities" doesn't make the potential consequences of not affording them any less real - from losing access to a preferred way of relaxing/unwinding, to losing access to a social group, to even limitations on future job opportunities (if you're not able to play games, it's extremely unlikely that you'll ever end up working in or around game development). And more. Are any of these things world-ending? No, but very few things in life are. That doesn't make them any less painful or real to the people experiencing them. Sure, videogames are ultimately trivial for the vast majority of people playing them. That doesn't mean their potential positive effects on social and mental well-being in an increasingly precarious world are any less real. And losing access to a social circle, an activity shared with friends, or a way of unwinding and relaxing after an exhausting and draining workday can indeed be downright horrible.

THU31This sounds like EA's Battlefield V logic "if you don't like our game, don't buy it", or Don Mattrick's "if you don't have internet, stick with Xbox 360".

I think we all know how both of these turned out.

NVIDIA can do whatever they want. But I will listen to this advice and simply do not buy it. If they drop prices at some point, I might. If not, I will wait for the next generation (or at least consider a Radeon card, although I do want great RT performance and I do love DLSS).

oxrufiioxoDon't get me wrong if I could wave a magic wand and make gpus affordable for everyone I would but that's not reality. Everyone has to decide with their own hard earned money what they can afford or what they would tolerate as far as pricing to me 1200 and 1600 usd is ok assuming the performance uplift justifies it to others it's a slap in the face neither of us is wrong.

oxrufiioxoBut what other choice do we have? I mean if you don't like the price the only option is don't buy it.

ValantarYou're not wrong about this in a vacuum, but you're entirely ignoring the causes and power relations behind these developments. Nvidia could keep per-tier GPU pricing entirely fixed if it wanted to, while increasing performance each generation - it would just need to prioritize differently when laying out their GPU dice and making their reference designs. It would make per-generation gains look less impressive most of the time - but Turing demonstrated that this really isn't a problem for Nvidia. The point being: it would be entirely possible for them to design $200 6-tier GPUs, and more - if they wanted to. Instead, they're prioritizing absolute peak performance and gradually increasing average sale prices, mainly because that makes shareholders happy. But this also intrinsically pushes away their customer base - just look at how many people are still using GTX 1060s - and I can't help but think this is going to come back to bite them in the long run. For now, they're being propped up by AMD not wanting to compete on price but instead also wanting to raise average sale prices - which is understandable when AMD hasn't had any free fab capacity for something like three years now. But if that changes, if TSMC's drop-off in orders means AMD now has capacity to spare, we might be looking at a new market share/sales volume push for AMD. This is clearly me hoping for something to happen rather than necessarily thinking that it will - AMD's shareholders also love high average sale prices - but there's definitely an opportunity here for AMD.

oxrufiioxoI definitely see your point. I personally would prefer they push absolute performance. You're not wrong though.

oxrufiioxoI don't really care what they price the 60 tier cards at I'd never buy one regardless if they were 50 usd or 1000 usd.

I don't care what others can or can't afford if they're too expensive for you or anyone else don't buy them it's simple these aren't necessities in life we are talking about.

Same with me if the 80/90 tier ever goes out of my price range guess what I'll stop buying them life goes on...

Getting upset over how a company prices their own products is pointless... They're not a charity or your friends they will all try to make the most money possible.

DarllerPretty much this. It's like complaining Ferraris are too expensive; if they're too expensive you're not the target market.

I have worked extremely hard my entire adult life(I am now 44) to be in the position where my hobbies aren't a financial hardship, and this is just one example where that work has paid off.

ValantarTo me, this is part of why I tend towards believing EVGA's version of their split: their description is consistent with Nvidia's behaviour towards only caring about increasing margins, ASPs and per-tier pricing for more than half a decade now. It's likely not the full story, but that glove definitely does seem to fit nonetheless.

ValantarWhat does this mean? That GPUs are getting increasingly unaffordable, and the main culprit is that GPU makers simply aren't making and selling affordable GPUs, instead insisting on artificially inflating margins. The RTX 3050 could easily be $150 if Nvidia was focused on designing an affordable GPU. These are conscious product segmentation choices made on the level of chip design and tiering. Instead, Nvidia is working concertedly towards increasing prices across the board. And sadly, so far AMD is happy to follow suit.

BlueberriesI noticed something about the DLSS 3 demonstration. See if you can spot it.

80-watt HamsterI've complained about this before, but the 3050 is a 6-series card wearing Groucho glasses. Its power consumption is in line with earlier xx60, as is the generational performance uplift (well, outside of the huge 960-1060 leap). The best we could have hoped for was ~$200, the general historical price point for that level of card (again excepting the $300 1060). Two factors preventing what we know as the 3050 launching as a 3060: Nvidia's obvious campaign to push what's considered entry-level and midrange ever higher, and the existence of the 1660S/ti. The 3050's raster performance is right on top of those two, at a higher TDP, no less! Naming it the 3060 would have been branding suicide.

DarllerPretty much this. It's like complaining Ferraris are too expensive; if they're too expensive you're not the target market.

I have worked extremely hard my entire adult life(I am now 44) to be in the position where my hobbies aren't a financial hardship, and this is just one example where that work has paid off.

BlueberriesI noticed something about the DLSS 3 demonstration. See if you can spot it.

THU31But maybe it is time to change things. If cards are too expensive to manufacture, then they should make smaller GPUs with simpler PCBs and coolers. Maybe we should go back to 200 W being the maximum power consumption. Make smaller performance increases, but make it possible for people to actually buy cards in the range of $200 to $500.

All other PC components are super affordable, including CPUs, which have had gigantic leaps in performance in the last 5 years, but prices have basically stayed the same. So it can be done.

ValantarBut that's precisely where this specific interpretation falls apart: Nvidia specifically cancelled the Titan programme, and renamed the Titan-equivalent cards Geforce. Geforce, crucially, is a gaming GPU series. So, they removed a "prosumer" class designation and instead included these cards in the consumer-facing Geforce series (yes, early Titans were Geforce; later ones were not). Literally the only logic to explain this is that they saw the Titan branding as something that discouraged gamers from buying these GPUs - which makes sense, as Geforce is the gaming brand, so by calling them Titan they were saying "well, you can use these for gaming, sure, but that's not really what they're for". As such, the move from Titan to Geforce is an explicit attempt at presenting these GPUs as consumer or gamer oriented, not prosumer cards (despite their technical details definitely making more sense in that context). Through removing the Titan brand and instead creating the 90 tier, Nvidia is preying on the exact mechanism you're describing - of gamers wanting "the best", no matter what it is.

Outside of this being a marketing/branding move that borders very close on being exploitative in and of itself, this has other problems: the Titan branding also brought with it price separation. Titans were wildly expensive compared to their close Geforce siblings, which was defensible through these being for business, not for gaming. Through including these same cards into the Geforce lineup, they now have the "freedom" to lift pricing for the rest of the Geforce lineup up so that instead of being a major step upwards in price, it's instead continuous with lower tier cards. That's how you go from $1200 Titan X(p) and $700 1080 Ti (+71% price) to $1600 RTX 4090 and $1200 4080 16GB (+33%). The net effect of this is not the Titan-class card being "a lot cheaper than the Quadro series" - they always were - but instead the entirety of the Geforce lineup becoming more expensive through a persistent lifting of the price ceiling for such cards, and thus slowly shifting the marketing/pricing equivalent of the Overton window - the window of what is seen as acceptable and reasonable pricing for a GPU.

There is no other explanation of this that makes any type of sense other than Nvidia wanting to increase prices and squeeze more money out of gamers.

ValantarThat's quite interesting. Do they mention what GPU that's running on though? It might not be the 4090.


Exactly this. These are conscious design decisions on GPU makers' parts, and decisions that could have been made differently. Yes, there are other factors in play - increasing materials prices, faster I/O requiring more expensive PCB materials, etc. - but this can be accounted for to various degrees. Instead, they're consciously pushing for higher prices in every way they can.

dyonoctisThere's something interesting happening right now: we used to have a lot of computers that where expensive, but still sold because they were the best thing around by a long shot(like silicon graphic) . Wintel won and became mainstream because it was cheap and comparable. But now it seems like Nvidia is determined to turn the PC into a niche that's more about bleeding edge technological display over affordability. And while it seems that AMD got a huge margin to increase their price as well, I get the impression that it would be unwise for them to do because of the perceived value of Radeon against Geforce. Nvidia made it clear that ADA is so great because of the whole closed software ecosystem around it. The Rtx 3070 is going to stay a representation of the 500$ market for a long time, so when AMD will present the successor of the RX 6800 they have the opportunity to strike a low blow. The "new RTX family still include Ampere 3060 -3080 who haven't dropped in price. History showed that people like a good deal, and now consoles also have High refresh rate, and it's easier to have a good HDR experience with a TV. The PC is betting all on ray tracing at a very heavy cost, at some point people might wonder if it's really worth it ? (especially with engines like UE 5 not relying on conventional ray tracing)

dyonoctisThere's something interesting happening right now: we used to have a lot of computers that where expensive, but still sold because they were the best thing around by a long shot(like silicon graphic) . Wintel won and became mainstream because it was cheap and comparable. But now it seems like Nvidia is determined to turn the PC into a niche that's more about bleeding edge technological display over affordability. And while it seems that AMD got a huge margin to increase their price as well, I get the impression that it would be unwise for them to do because of the perceived value of Radeon against Geforce. Nvidia made it clear that ADA is so great because of the whole closed software ecosystem around it. The Rtx 3070 is going to stay a representation of the 500$ market for a long time, so when AMD will present the successor of the RX 6800 they have the opportunity to strike a low blow. The "new RTX family still include Ampere 3060 -3080 who haven't dropped in price. History showed that people like a good deal, and now consoles also have High refresh rate, and it's easier to have a good HDR experience with a TV. The PC is betting all on ray tracing at a very heavy cost, at some point people might wonder if it's really worth it ? (especially with engines like UE 5 not relying on conventional ray tracing)

dyonoctisThere's something interesting happening right now: we used to have a lot of computers that where expensive, but still sold because they were the best thing around by a long shot(like silicon graphic) . Wintel won and became mainstream because it was cheap and comparable. But now it seems like Nvidia is determined to turn the PC into a niche that's more about bleeding edge technological display over affordability. And while it seems that AMD got a huge margin to increase their price as well, I get the impression that it would be unwise for them to do because of the perceived value of Radeon against Geforce. Nvidia made it clear that ADA is so great because of the whole closed software ecosystem around it. The Rtx 3070 is going to stay a representation of the 500$ market for a long time, so when AMD will present the successor of the RX 6800 they have the opportunity to strike a low blow. The "new RTX family still include Ampere 3060 -3080 who haven't dropped in price. History showed that people like a good deal, and now consoles also have High refresh rate, and it's easier to have a good HDR experience with a TV. The PC is betting all on ray tracing at a very heavy cost, at some point people might wonder if it's really worth it ? (especially with engines like UE 5 not relying on conventional ray tracing)

80-watt HamsterMaybe they see the discrete market contracting long-term, and are laying the groundwork to pull the same net out of fewer units. Still crappy from our perspective, but with a much lower "Wut!?" factor. Or it's an allocation thing. The chips are more valuable for HPC, so it's got to be worth Nvidia's time to even make consumer-bound chips.



Desktop market share is only going to shrink, with or without NV's influence. Laptops are more convenient, phones even more so. I feel a little gross defending NV even a little, but they may not have much of an option, broadly speaking.

ValantarBut that's precisely where this specific interpretation falls apart: Nvidia specifically cancelled the Titan programme, and renamed the Titan-equivalent cards Geforce. Geforce, crucially, is a gaming GPU series. So, they removed a "prosumer" class designation and instead included these cards in the consumer-facing Geforce series (yes, early Titans were Geforce; later ones were not). Literally the only logic to explain this is that they saw the Titan branding as something that discouraged gamers from buying these GPUs - which makes sense, as Geforce is the gaming brand, so by calling them Titan they were saying "well, you can use these for gaming, sure, but that's not really what they're for". As such, the move from Titan to Geforce is an explicit attempt at presenting these GPUs as consumer or gamer oriented, not prosumer cards (despite their technical details definitely making more sense in that context). Through removing the Titan brand and instead creating the 90 tier, Nvidia is preying on the exact mechanism you're describing - of gamers wanting "the best", no matter what it is.

Outside of this being a marketing/branding move that borders very close on being exploitative in and of itself, this has other problems: the Titan branding also brought with it price separation. Titans were wildly expensive compared to their close Geforce siblings, which was defensible through these being for business, not for gaming. Through including these same cards into the Geforce lineup, they now have the "freedom" to lift pricing for the rest of the Geforce lineup up so that instead of being a major step upwards in price, it's instead continuous with lower tier cards. That's how you go from $1200 Titan X(p) and $700 1080 Ti (+71% price) to $1600 RTX 4090 and $1200 4080 16GB (+33%). The net effect of this is not the Titan-class card being "a lot cheaper than the Quadro series" - they always were - but instead the entirety of the Geforce lineup becoming more expensive through a persistent lifting of the price ceiling for such cards, and thus slowly shifting the marketing/pricing equivalent of the Overton window - the window of what is seen as acceptable and reasonable pricing for a GPU.

There is no other explanation of this that makes any type of sense other than Nvidia wanting to increase prices and squeeze more money out of gamers.

ValantarYeah, I think that's spot on. And I also think that if Nvidia were to get their will with going that way, it'll be the end of PC gaming - barring someone else stepping in to fill their shoes. PC gaming as a hyper-expensive niche just isn't sustainable as a business. If anything, the Steam Deck has demonstrated that the future of gaming might lie in the exact opposite direction, and that we might in some ways be reaching a point of "good enough" in a lot of ways.

I also agree that this situation presents a massive opportunity for AMD. Regardless of where RDNA3 peaks in terms of absolute performance, if they flesh out the $300-700 segment with high performing, good value options relatively quickly, they have an unprecedented opportunity to overtake Nvidia - as this pitch from Nvidia (as well as their earnings call) confirms that they've got more Ampere stock than they know what to do with, and they don't want to stomach the cost of cutting prices unless they really have to. If RDNA3 actually delivers its promised 50% perf/W increase, and die sizes and MCM packaging costs allow for somewhat competitive pricing, this could be the generation where AMD makes a significant move up from their perennial ~20% market share. That's my hope - but knowing AMD and their recent preference for high ASPs and following in Nvidia's pricing footsteps, I'm not that hopeful. Fingers crossed, though.