I...think I should start out with an anecdote. I worked in an industry where we made large plastic parts. A fuel tank might take $40 in materials and labor. We'd sell that tank for $50. If I was to try and purchase that tank from the inventory holders it'd be a $125 tank. Yes, the markup between the manufacturer and consumer was 150%. The best part is that some of the technology was patented, so that $40 was closer to $30. Yep, the patent holder got $10 from every $125 sale. They did nothing, except patent a little plastic bit and manage to convince a large company that they needed that bit.
Apply that anecdote to AMD. They design the GPU core, and help to define a standardized layout. As such they know that each GPU costs some amount, and thus work with the intermediary manufacturer and sellers to establish a fair pricing scheme. If this was true, then the pushback here is like having the sellers state that the $125 tank was too expensive, and the problem is that the $50 they spent on it was the problem. Can you even imagine that?
Let me then point gently in the direction of software development...specifically video games. Publishers are doing exactly the same thing, and killing video games. There, it's a travesty...but it's also a comedy since you don't actually own your games anymore.
That divine comedy is reaching for our GPUs. They don't have huge node gains, so they are charging astronomical prices for what is functionally software interpolation. Cool, paying for guess work that's mostly good enough...instead of the much tougher finding new ways to improve performance genuinely. That's not going to bite us in the backside at all...
All of this is to say AMD and Nvidia are only as greedy as we allow. The AI boom has allowed Nvidia to get lazy, AMD has decided to functionally focus on high margin business, and the real loss is consumers. If the 5070 and 9070 compete at exactly the same price, the market will have AMD reduce prices, because they aren't competing at the same performance. I...have seen rumors of everything between 4080 raster, and 7900 performance. I've seem rumors of $500 pricing, and $600 pricing. It's all a huge amalgam of nothing. AMD needs to compete with cost for performance, or value. If their value is lower than Nvidia, then this generation will be a bloodbath. Their raw performance figures don't matter...which is why pricing is so critical. Just tying Nvidia is unlikely to move the needle here....and moaning about "knowing business" is stupid. People who "know the market" and still sell to move units are the people who sell at a loss per unit.
Let me frame this in the simplest way. What is the most successful video game company? It's not Sony, despite having the arguably best hardware. It's not MS, despite having the most resources and largest parent company. It's not Valve, because they have nothing that is their own. The most successful game company is Nintendo, who make money on every sold console. Nintendo, who is in 1920x1080 land when everyone else aims for 4k. Nintendo, whose IP means they never need to release a new game and could continue to resell 20 year old games at full modern prices. AMD just needs to price themselves into a good value proposition, that Nvidia doesn't care about, and they can have their success in volume. Intel has that figured out in the B570 and B580...because those things suck when placed against a 3070, but still sold like mad in 2024 because they were a good value.
I say all of this while looking at eBay...where 3060 cards are going for about $300 regularly...which is what you can buy them for new. This just screams that the value market is being overlooked, and AMD/Intel can take that away from Nvidia. But what do I know? I'm just a consumer, who has spent 4 years waiting for a real upgraded card. Heck, the 1050ti is still plenty enough for video transcode... But, that's just me observing that a $550 card used to be top of the stack, not middle of the range. Transistors have gotten smaller, 1080p is still the most common target, but prices have outpaced inflation to a silly degree. I hope the 9070 bucks that...but we'll see. Rumors are only as good as the truth they conceal at best...and with the current expected 23rd launch, I can wait for the haze of FUD to disappear.
