So...I have three things to say.
1) No, "things get more expensive" is not justification. Allow me to elaborate. Inputs into these processes absolutely get more expensive. Processes have high fallout, labor gets more expensive, and technologies take money to develop. That said, when critical components stagnate then these costs fail to account for the obvious decay in prices over time related to efficiencies and the volume of manufacture. Let me put it like this. If I wanted to farm chickens individually they'd be expensive. If I wanted to farm a dozen I'd have more costs, but my overhead per chicken decreases and buying stuff in bulk would further decrease the per chicken cost. If I then made an industrial farm I could pump chickens out at 1/7th the price of the individually raised chickens (per pound), but I'd have millions of dollars to recoup. Thing is, and 18+ month production cycle can make that easy...because as I pay more for farmhands I will pay less for everything else. How else do you think chicken is so cheap per pound?
2) I like the x40 performance named x50 with an x60 price tag comment. Thing is, the pricing here basically so Nvidia can develop software for their hardware that is stagnating. That isn't my theory, Nvidia already admitted they are a software company. It's funny that, it's almost like their business strategy was to start with artificial dividers at the top (where 4k is the driver), and push their pricing up one rung. They based new pricing off of the bad days of hardware availability, because if they never lowered the price then it "wasn't seen as gouging," but reaction to a market force. AMD didn't develop software as heavily, but they did focus on raster performance and giving consumers the biggest hardware bang for their dollar...which translated into using enormous amounts of cheap RAM chips to pad out their performance. I don't love AMD or Nvidia...but it seems like the difference between the two is how they extend their performance, without significant pushes in transistor density to simply brute force results. AMD went for RAM and Raster, Nvidia went for DLSS and Ray Tracing. I...applaud their desire to push the industry forward...but anything short of $1000 makes these benefits functionally detrimental to basic performance...which is a bad look.
3) I don't want a 4060, 4060ti, or a 4070. Nvidia has stated their future is software. That means all of these cards have no future,
