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
And a competitor delivering the best they can within their R&D budget doesn't equal giving their customer the scraps, it isn't the same thing at all. I'm not even going to get into what the 9070XT should cost compared to the 5080, because you'll buy Nvidia anyway and so will everyone else even though Nvidia is withholding RTX 50 series supply to keep prices high.All of that tech and Blackwell is just minor uplift over Ada, and the architecture itself hasn't changed much since Turing, instead of improving raster they just add more tensor cores.
And Nvidia does have plenty else to do, but that isn't for the gaming market, Jensen hasn't cared about the gaming market since before the crypto boom, and it's obvious they started to shift away from the focus on gaming since the Titan card.
Please do not reply to me and leave me on ignore.
I swear you just sit on this website to troll anyone that comments you.
Reminds me of the saying that you can educate an ignorant individual, but you can’t fix stupid.Didn‘t you get the memo? AMD is too expensive because of Nvidia!
Snowden didn't want to run away to Russia but unfortunately another country doing fellate to the US government refused to grant him diplomatic asylum.
As for the card, it is a very weak version of the XX80, very weak because it is supposedly the highest model for gamers, a card for $ 1000 released two years after the debut of the RTX 4000. 10% for $ 1000+ 2 yeas ? Probably only because Nvidia has 90% of the market and AMD said it will not fight for the most efficient card on the market and will focus on the mid-range.
www.techpowerup.com/326415/amd-confirms-retreat-from-the-enthusiast-gpu-segment-to-focus-on-gaining-market-share?cp=7
And no, these are not good cards because the requirements of games do not stand still. And the new games that will come out, UE5 itself and 4K, RT require powerful cards and vram.
Too bad, because the RTX 5080 is not a serious competitor as it was RTX 4090, 5090 or even 4080. Its hard to believe that AMD would not be able to release something faster then 5080 - even just for the of competition itself.
I'm shaking my head a bit at the 5 pages of comments that may as well have been in response to MLID or some YT shoutyhead. Like, whoosh.
So, anyone here tried running Ollama?
It takes a very special kind of person to be so biased and so fond of a multi-trillion dollar company to call others names, reminds me of diehard fans of a certain fruit branded company.
It's sad some people can't see past their own hubris in reaction to a thread of their favorite company being called greedy assholes.Exactly, Nvidia are the ones controlling the market.
As did every Microcenter.
Yep and they're still there.... Not the 10 5090s but yeah you can buy a 5080 if you want.It's similar to the 4xxx launch in this regard where the 4090 was unobtanium and the 4080 was available.Also i cant read websites apparently.
IOW, I'm so happy rn, you guys. :laugh:
Thanks 'Edward'!
Doing God's work, right there, imo. :toast: :roll:
Looking at the opening comments: how can one call people idiots for buying something they decided they wanted - using their money?
All that aside: I use mine for earning money and I got mine fair and square.
::toast:: edited original post.
There was a separate chip for the 2080 that simply doesn't exist now, that would be a 4090 derivative with 14336 cores. Either Nvidia got lazy or it wasn't wort it.
Getting anything like this there right now is probably not great $/fps.