And misinformation chess pretty please.
4070 and 4070 Super are greatly balanced GPUs with lots of performance and capable VRAM buffers. What makes them awful is how expensive they are. Imagine the same SKUs for 380 and 450 USD respectively. It would've left zero reason to whine about VRAM because, seriously, this much performance is awesome at this pricing and some scenarios where it's bad to "only" have 12 GB would've been left as "whatevers" more than anything else.
4070 Ti, however, despite being just a tad faster than 4070 Super, is a little bit of a waste and not because it "only" has 12 GB but because it only has 500ish GBps bandwidth. Should've had faster VRAM chips, it's really bandwidth starved, especially at 4K. And yeah, too expensive. Even if we make it a 16 GB GPU, it's still too expensive.
The market is going full monopoly mode so what can we do other than thank AMD and Intel for constant underdelivery coupled with out of mind management and ignoring the dGPU area for too long, respectively.
We agree for a large part. It is indeed mostly the price that makes the 4070 (S) bad. The 4070ti non S though yeah that one is truly badly balanced, much like the 4060ti is.
Still, buying ANY 12GB GPU with that performance is not optimal. Core is still going to outlast the VRAM. It still won't have good resale value. This is the class of GPUs I stay away from entirely, because its bad value for money in a world where the perf/$ metric of GPUs in the midrange versus the top end has crawled to similar levels. In that world, what you want is something that holds value. 12GB GPUs do not. They're obsolete by the time you want to sell them. If you replace your GPUs, this is the segment you don't wanna be in. Just get something better, resell it when it still holds value, and upgrade for less than the price of an x60, but still keep playing in high end.
You can stretch that principle to larger budgets too, I just don't want to buy an x90. But realistically, look at it now. You can
still sell a 4090 for 1499,-. Its the street price. In a market that's going full monopoly, I say, make the most of your $$$. Irrespective of brand.
In the end what resolution you play on and what FPS you want are a completely abstract thing these days, especially with upscale and FG. Its a non argument. There are no 1080p, 1440p 'cards', there are just games with varying loads that you either do or don't want to play. Even at 1080p a new one can bring your super well picked midranger to its knees. And then what? You're gonna spend money
again even if you didn't plan to? The reality often is that you will, at least sooner than you anticipated, and then you could've done better right away.
