Saturday, February 1st 2025
Edward Snowden Lashes Out at NVIDIA Over GeForce RTX 50 Pricing And Value
It's not every day that we witness a famous NSA whistleblower voice their disappointment over modern gaming hardware. Edward Snowden, who likely needs no introduction, did not bother to hold back his disapproval of NVIDIA's recently launched RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 gaming GPUs. The reviews for the RTX 5090 have been mostly positive, although the same cannot be said for its affordable sibling, the RTX 5080. Snowden, voicing his thoughts on Twitter, claimed that NVIDIA is selling "F-tier value for S-tier prices".
Needless to say, there is no doubt that the RTX 5090's pricing is quite exorbitant, regardless of how anyone puts it. Snowden was particularly displeased with the amount of VRAM on offer, which is also hard to argue against. The RTX 5080 ships with "only" 16 GB of VRAM, whereas Snowden believes that it should have shipped with at least 24, or even 32 GB. He further adds that the RTX 5090, which ships with a whopping 32 GB of VRAM, should have been available with a 48 GB variant. As for the RTX 5070, the security consultant expressed desire for at least 16 GB of VRAM (instead of 12 GB).
But that is not all that Snowden had to say. He equated selling $1000+ GPUs with 16 GB VRAM to a "monopolistic crime against consumers," further accusing NVIDIA of "endless next-quarter" thinking. This is debatable, considering that NVIDIA is a publicly traded company, and whether they stay afloat does boil down to their quarterly results, whether we like it or not. There is no denying that NVIDIA is in desperate need of some true competition in the high-end segment, which appears to be the only way to get the Green Camp to price their hardware appropriately. AMD's UDNA GPUs are likely set to do just that in a year or two. The rest, of course, remains to be seen.
Source:
@Snowden
Needless to say, there is no doubt that the RTX 5090's pricing is quite exorbitant, regardless of how anyone puts it. Snowden was particularly displeased with the amount of VRAM on offer, which is also hard to argue against. The RTX 5080 ships with "only" 16 GB of VRAM, whereas Snowden believes that it should have shipped with at least 24, or even 32 GB. He further adds that the RTX 5090, which ships with a whopping 32 GB of VRAM, should have been available with a 48 GB variant. As for the RTX 5070, the security consultant expressed desire for at least 16 GB of VRAM (instead of 12 GB).
132 Comments on Edward Snowden Lashes Out at NVIDIA Over GeForce RTX 50 Pricing And Value
"There is no denying that NVIDIA is in desperate need of some true competition in the high-end segment, which appears to be the only way to get the Green Camp to price their hardware appropriately. AMD's UDNA GPUs are likely set to do just that in a year or two."Show me these charts when neural rendering becomes more established (in a year or two perhaps)
*that's one AAA title that requires it at this point. More are coming, yes - but it's still a long time.
Anyway, the 5080 is present-day technology for present-day games. When neural rendering really kicks off, it'll probably long be obsolete, just like Turing is for RT.
Plain "minimum requirement" force you to buy RT capable card, you simply get what you can afford and adjust game settings to make it playable (Low, DLSS, 720p, etc.). I assume though, someone wants to play this XYZ game badly enough (since getting GPU + game combo is more expensive than just buying game).
Note : Slowest RT capable GPU cards are 3050 6GB and RX 6400 ;)
Yes, people are buying these GPUs, and no, they're not all idiots. All the complaining like you believe in getting something for little to nothing, or forgetting how a business works, is much worse.
Also reminds me of a HWUB video, RT in their testing was a mix of it's hardly noticeable unless you look for it, difficult to tell but different, and they thought some games did look better.
I believe Navi 41 was canceled to put more engineers on UDNA because all indication seems to point that UDNA is way ahead of schedule. For some reason, I'm getting the feeling UDNA might be a Zen. Not to derail ...
Best for my use-case would be a badass X3D-APU. No graphics card in the PC, just a 420mm-watercooled CPU that's efficient and still powerful enough to run modern games. What a dream. ^^
TwitterX :rolleyes:This should limit NV gaming business, and eventually force them to move on due to not generating enough profits.
And yes, this kind of thing will kill ALL GPU gaming business after a while (not only NV).
Good thing it's impossible to do at this stage ;D