"For the first time, the price increase was larger than the performance uplift.
Nvidia tried to sweep this issue under the rug with promised technologies such as ray tracing and upscaling. We all know how well that played out for the GeForce 20 series."
Is there somebody here that know’s what they’re talking about because I very much do not know “how well that played out?”
Nvidia focused more on the ability to perform real time ray tracing (RTX) than on the raw performance of the cards. At the time the RTX performance of the cards was hardly passable and the amount of games that even supported the technically was VERY limited but the fact that they could perform ray tracing in real time at all was a bit of a marvel.
Nvidia leaned hard into this and tried very hard to get everyone on board with this paradigm shift. As reviewers tested these cards and found out that this technology is still very immature, most of them decided to highlight the performance per dollar instead of the new technology. This meant that informed gamers didn’t really consider RTX part of the equation when buying the 2000 series cards.
When you looked at it from a pure rasterization perspective the massive increase in price for the marginal increase in gains made these cards really unappealing. Especially to those who already had 1000 and even 900 series cards. As a result this was a generation a lot of gamers skipped or instead choose to go with 1600 series cards later on. These were basically 2000 series cards without the ray tracing and a cheaper price point making them more appealing.
Why should anyone take ray tracing into account when ray tracing, especially for the first two or three generations of RTX cards, was a pointless gimmick that could not run well enough to be realistically desirable and was supported by practically zero games?
No, because this article appears to have been AI written.
The analysis comparing GPU flagships and price/wattage is somewhat shallow because it hides another thing that has been going on, the reduction of fundamental specs of the various classes of card. It used to be the case that a x80 chip meant it had a 512 bit memory bus, that it was ~500mm^2 die and hence a fully maxed out GPU and you got all that for ~$400-500 or so. Then the 680 came out and its specs were more like an x70 card from the prior generations, its only 294mm^2 and a 256bit bus, it was a rename of the lower class card, they never produced a flagship for that particular generation and some of that degradation in specs carried over to the 780 ti as well which now only had a 384 bit bus but its die size was ~561mm^2.
An RTX580 is now 378mm^2, which is about an x70 in pre 2012 terms and 256bit bus which is also x60-x70 class.
That process has resulted in the titans and the x90 and the x80 ti all slipping above the x80 as its specs gradually decline and its price is still going up compared to the historical picture, enormously more than inflation. During the same period CPUs on the other hand have stayed fairly similar in price with a steady increase in performance at a price point. That 680 oddity in the historical area was the moment things changed and AMD had a big part to play in the reason why with their 7970 being priced so much higher. This process started then in 2012 and its been getting worse as time goes on.
TL;DR:
But really, I don’t buy that Nvidia can’t regularly release improved GPUs for consumers. Consumer hardware is reaching a peak but there’s still a lot more that can be done in terms of efficiency. Just look at how great modern flagship phone chips are. The M5 Max macbook pro for example is sooooooooo much more efficient than a typical gaming laptops, and it’s in a slim chassis.
Nvidia just stopped caring because they make too much money selling to data centers now, and they are releasing regular improvements for their high end server hardware. Consumer GPUs are just pocket money to them now, and there’s practically no competition so why would they bother releasing something new?
You can’t really blame a shortage of DRAM without acknowledging that you caused the shortage by pre-ordering two years worth, and allocating it only to data center customers. Louis Rossman has a few good takes on it. One is the, “I’m suing Samsung” video. The recent Gamer’s Nexus piece where he’s talking with that unboxing YouTuber is pretty spot on too.
Companies chase the money. Nvidia was never for gamers, it was for investors and gaming just happened to be where the money was. Now it’s not and people are realizing the truth of it all. To corporations we are nothing other than disposable profit margins. If the corporations can find a better profit elsewhere they will gladly do so. It’s been that way for a while.
The real reason
NVIDIAbig tech has abandonedgamersall personal computing250W and $1000 is plenty for a GPU and I am willing to die on this hill, apparently with an AMD card in my hand.
Unrelated to the topic of the article, looking at the graph made me realize that GPUs didn’t use to be so expensive, and the change is not so recent.
I have been gaming on PCs since I was a kid, first on a 286 in DOS. I don’t remember what were the first games, but I think it was ASCII graphics. Sprites were of course even better.https://cdn.mobygames.com/screenshots/2255336-prehistorik-dos-level-1-begins.png
I have been building my own computers for decades. I never wanted to spend more than necessary, so I only updated things every now and then, and I always picked a good value GPU from the budget to mid tier. I always understood that PC gaming has a niche where people build monster configurations with powerful GPUs to run games at max settings with unnecessary high resolution and frame rates. It makes sense for a hobby, it’s cool. But you don’t actually need that much power to enjoy games, right?
What I just realized is that the slice of people who look for high performance GPUs for games is likely much bigger than I thought. At some point the industry made consumers believe that you need 4k and 120 fps (or maybe more). That the point of PC gaming is to beat the specs of consoles. But that’s so not true. A PC is great because it’s a general purpose open platform to run whatever software you want. If a game is not fun at mid setting full HD 30 fps, it’s not fun. How many of the people dishing out north of $300 on a GPU are competitive e sports players or popular streamers? Probably most of them are not. 90% of the progress in GPU hardware is likely spent on generating frames that are not perceived at resolutions that are not seen.
This is essentially why I’ve bought consoles for decades. GPU prices just reached remarkably stupid territory way too fast.
That means you remember the thrill of getting the Diamond Multimedia Viper SVGA card (or similar)and being able to “crank up” the resolution beyond 800x600.
Or:
Set Blaster= A220 I5 D9Enjoy your day, fellow vintage builder.
This is a really good take, i’ve just been living off friends hand me down hardware and having a great time playing non demanding indie stuff on my 980ti
You just accurately spelled out what my intuition was yelling, but I lacked the contextual vocabulary to describe. Thank you! (Adventure on my dad’s Leading Edge 286 was a blast!)
The actual reason is executive bonus structures.
How can you know why that is? Looks like technological limitations and diminishing gains to me.
Perhaps, but lack of competition ain’t helping. It’s not like anyone can just start making them.
Intel, the
small, newcompany to the GPU space is now 4% owned by Nvidia…
Looks like there’s a limit on how much disposable income people are willing to pay for technology… 🤔 Well what if we didn’t have games anymore! Instead maybe we should put AI on everything and try to get their money? Nah… equal amount of disposable income regardless.
