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Did they just think it was too good to be a 70 level card? It’s not like they had a 4070 and a 4070Ti and a Super 4070 already and had to figure out another way

Did they just think it was too good to be a 70 level card? It’s not like they had a 4070 and a 4070Ti and a Super 4070 already and had to figure out another way to market it. I just don’t see the logic in the naming in any way shape or form.

Spartan-S63 4y ago
Their price point was too high to be considered a 4070. If they launched it as a 4070, it would be naked price gouging.
- imiric 4y ago
  > it would be naked price gouging As opposed to the rest of the 40 series cards?
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    If you divide the cost of the card by the pixel fill rate, the 4090 is a bargain.
    - onli 4y ago
      It is a new series. It is supposed to be cheaper relative to the performance than the ancestor series, not priced as a higher tier.
    - plasticchris 4y ago
      This is a fundamental shift from years past where perf per dollar scaled up every generation. Now they are trying to scale performance while also scaling up price. Only time will tell if the demand is inelastic or not.
      - neogodless 4y ago
        The RTX 3090 had an MSRP of $1499, so this is only a 6.7% increase. If there was a fundamental shift, it was when that card launched.
    - filmgirlcw 4y ago
      Meh, only if you accept that the 4090 is really a Titan or a Quadro under another name. And to be fair, I think that it probably is. But that doesn’t match with the consumer designation that we see in these things and so bargain or not, this is a professional card being marketed to consumers. If you’re looking for a pro card and have the cooling and power to support it (not to mention, the workflow needs that could benefit), that’s great. If you’re a gamer or enthusiast, the price is still high enough (not to mention the other changes you might need to make to your rig to support the card) that the actual delta between the potential and what you’ll actually do with the card means you should probably just stick with either a 3090 that is now half the price, or hold out for the other 4000 series cards if you must get a next-gen card.
      - Godel_unicode 4y ago
        This is incorrect. If you want to play e.g. Cyberpunk at 4k maxed out with decent framerates the 4090 is the only card that gets you there. Especially once you start looking at meaningful numbers like 1% lows, even the 3090 is struggling to break the low 30s. It doesn’t apply to every game or every resolution, but there are actual game scenarios where a 4090 makes sense. Price and heat and power and space not withstanding, it’s a meaningful upgrade.
        flerchin 4y ago
        Dangit, I do want to play Cyberpunk maxed in 4k. Sorry kids, I guess you'll have to take a gap year before you can go to college, daddy's gonna upgrade.
        Wowfunhappy 4y ago
        I will add that, IMO, if it's possible for any gpu to play a just-released game at maximum settings at a high resolution at 60+ fps, the developers haven't set the maximum quality settings high enough. Leave some headroom for future GPUs, or allow players who e.g. prefer a ludicrously high draw distance at any cost to make that choice and dial down the resolution to compensate. Most games don't meet this bar, and I think gamers who expect to be able to set every slider to the max and go to town—yes, even on a $2K GPU—are mostly responsible.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      3070 had .29 GP/s/$ at base clock. 4090 has .28 GP/s/$ at base clock. Considering this is coming out two years later, I'm not so inclined to call it a bargain.
      - elabajaba 4y ago
        Especially considering the whole 30 series had inflated MSRPs due the ridiculous demand gpu mining created which lead to GPU shortages for regular consumers.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- izacus 4y ago
  I think you're setting yourself for another massive disappointment if you think nVidia will sell those at any kind of lower price in the future. Because that's the issue isn't it? Everyone wanting for nVidia to just sell those chips for less? They'll slap 4070Ti or something on it and sell it to you for the same price.
  - Macha 4y ago
    You might have missed it with how long the inflated market lasted, but in the last few months with the ethereum PoS transition and the threat of recession keeping gamers at bay they literally haven't been able to sell the 30-series cards for quite a bit under MSRP in what was a very sudden reversal from being above MSRP. Maybe a new series stole the demand but part of the reason they're holding out on lower tier SKUs is the 30-series is not going away fast enough, so there's a good chance that we're back in the 10-series vs 20-series day where there's so much used stock of the old series and a perception that nvidia is gouging to the extent that it hamepers sales of the new ones. 30 series launch MSRPs looked very good until it became clear you couldn't get them for that price, partly because they were having to partially roll back the 20 series price increases, so it wouldn't be impossible to see a repeat.
    - radicalbyte 4y ago
      For the 30 series it was the 3080 in particular which looked fantastic - it had 95% the performance of the 3090 for half the price ($750 vs $1500) and it was a large improvement on the previous generation. This time around the 4090 is an excellent card, the 4080 16GB is a lot slower and the 4080 12GB a lot slower than the 16GB. They've also jacked the prices: the 4080 should be $750 and the 4090 should be $1500. Arguably lower again given the coming recession and the market being flooded with the previous generation. It will be interesting to see what AMD do as they could make life very difficult for nVidia.
      - izacus 4y ago
        > This time around the 4090 is an excellent card, the 4080 16GB is a lot slower and the 4080 12GB a lot slower than the 16GB. And "by a lot slower" you mean "they're all faster than previous generation flagship 3090".
- 7speter 4y ago
  But now they have this bin of chips designated as the low tier 4080 that they previously said was worth, what 1000 dollars? Do they call it a 4070 and just instantly sell it for 600 dollars? Really showsbus that the value behind their cards are whatever Jensen and friends want it to be, actual costs be damned.
  - mst 4y ago
    That's true of pretty much everything though. The monetary value of a thing is definitionally how much money you can sell it for.
    - 7speter 4y ago
      But i thought it was inflation that drove the price of everything up the last two years?
      - puffoflogic 4y ago
        Yes, good, you're getting there. Now... put them together... Inflation is driven by consumers having more money. This means that more can be charged for the same products and the consumers will begrudgingly pay. This means more will be charged. This is why giving ~50% of US net-taxpayers free cash caused inflation to spike.
        7speter 4y ago
        Right, that's all the cause of 60% "inflation," I suppose.
LegitShady 4y ago
they got greedy and every reviewer in existence called them out on it. The price is too high for a 4070 so they called it another 4080 no matter how different it was from the other 4080.
- chippiewill 4y ago
  They should have just called it a 4075
  - Macha 4y ago
    It probably will be. A 4075, 4080-lite, 4070 super or similar. I don't think their pride and target retail price could stomach calling it the 4070 it clearly is.
- samstave 4y ago
  What the heck was the price? I paid $1,600 for an evans and Sutherland card with 32 MEGABYTES to run Softimage on NT 4 because I couldn’t afford an SGI in 1997
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    $900. But there was a time when the best GeForce you could get was less than that by a pretty wide margin.
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    in 2018 the 2080 launched at $800 and was seen as extremely overpriced, such that the entire generation of cards sold poorly. There's no reason to cherry pick data points unrelated to current date because you can remember chiselling out your circuits out of stone tablets in 1997. it just isn't relevant.
    - samstave 4y ago
      >>because you can remember chiselling out your circuits out of stone tablets in 1997. I just want you to know I love this comment
0x457 4y ago
I think what they saw is: we're going to release 4080 and not 4080 under 4080 name, that would allow us to claim that 4080 stayed the same MSRP. Except anyone with a brain saw through it and enough content generated, that trick simply wouldn't work anymore.
filmgirlcw 4y ago
They thought they could fool people and that the graphics card demand of the last two years would let them coast on this. They were wrong.
mooman219 4y ago
Some reddit post looked at the % differences in core count and clock speed relative to each generation. It most closely fit in the spot a 4060Ti would fit in based its specs relative to the actual 4080.
elabajaba 4y ago
The 4080 12GB's performance is about the same as where a new 60 series card sits compared to the previous gen 80 series card (60 series tend to be within +-10% of the previous gen 80 series, 4080 12GB is at most a 60ti based on this) The 4080 16GB is around where a 70 series card tends to sit. [0] https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/nvidia_releases_new_benchmarks_for_its_rtx_4080_graphics_cards/1 https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/nvidia_release... Ignore the dlss2 vs dlss3 numbers, just look at the base numbers since dlss3 numbers are interpolated framerates
- 7speter 4y ago
  Yes, a youtuber who goes by ‘I’m a mac’ made a great (at least I thought) series of videos breaking down how this generations of die sizes compare to previous generations: (The first where he starts comparing generations with graphs) https://youtu.be/9_bqwEy5AQ4 https://youtu.be/9_bqwEy5AQ4 Though I have to wonder, do we want bigger 40 gen dies? The 4090 already guzzles at 400w at full tilt, and gets ar least 200+ fps at pretty much all games except maybe cyberpunk, and can complete video editing workloads at twice the speed of the 3090. Do we need an even bigger lovelace chip?
  - elabajaba 4y ago
    Considering the 4090 gets 95% of the performance in games if you set a 60% powertarget [0](~90% in synthetics), I feel like they just juiced the power draw like crazy to be able to say they had the fastest gpu this generation (same with AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs, where you can drop from ~240w to 140w for 95% of the multicore/100% of the single core performance). Also I was playing the Darktide beta, and at 4k I want about double the framerate I currently get on a 6800xt (FSR 1.0 and DLSS (according to friends and comments on reddit+discord) both look bad in it). We're moving past crossgen games at this point too (and UE5 seems very heavy), so for eg. 100+ fps or 4k something in range of ~50% faster than a 3090 would be nice. [0] https://youtu.be/60yFji_GKak?t=876 https://youtu.be/60yFji_GKak?t=876
    - philliphaydon 4y ago

Spartan-S63 4y ago

Their price point was too high to be considered a 4070. If they launched it as a 4070, it would be naked price gouging.

imiric 4y ago
> it would be naked price gouging As opposed to the rest of the 40 series cards?
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  If you divide the cost of the card by the pixel fill rate, the 4090 is a bargain.
  - onli 4y ago
    It is a new series. It is supposed to be cheaper relative to the performance than the ancestor series, not priced as a higher tier.
  - plasticchris 4y ago
    This is a fundamental shift from years past where perf per dollar scaled up every generation. Now they are trying to scale performance while also scaling up price. Only time will tell if the demand is inelastic or not.
    - neogodless 4y ago
      The RTX 3090 had an MSRP of $1499, so this is only a 6.7% increase. If there was a fundamental shift, it was when that card launched.
  - filmgirlcw 4y ago
    Meh, only if you accept that the 4090 is really a Titan or a Quadro under another name. And to be fair, I think that it probably is. But that doesn’t match with the consumer designation that we see in these things and so bargain or not, this is a professional card being marketed to consumers. If you’re looking for a pro card and have the cooling and power to support it (not to mention, the workflow needs that could benefit), that’s great. If you’re a gamer or enthusiast, the price is still high enough (not to mention the other changes you might need to make to your rig to support the card) that the actual delta between the potential and what you’ll actually do with the card means you should probably just stick with either a 3090 that is now half the price, or hold out for the other 4000 series cards if you must get a next-gen card.
    - Godel_unicode 4y ago
      This is incorrect. If you want to play e.g. Cyberpunk at 4k maxed out with decent framerates the 4090 is the only card that gets you there. Especially once you start looking at meaningful numbers like 1% lows, even the 3090 is struggling to break the low 30s. It doesn’t apply to every game or every resolution, but there are actual game scenarios where a 4090 makes sense. Price and heat and power and space not withstanding, it’s a meaningful upgrade.
      - flerchin 4y ago
        Dangit, I do want to play Cyberpunk maxed in 4k. Sorry kids, I guess you'll have to take a gap year before you can go to college, daddy's gonna upgrade.
        Wowfunhappy 4y ago
        I will add that, IMO, if it's possible for any gpu to play a just-released game at maximum settings at a high resolution at 60+ fps, the developers haven't set the maximum quality settings high enough. Leave some headroom for future GPUs, or allow players who e.g. prefer a ludicrously high draw distance at any cost to make that choice and dial down the resolution to compensate. Most games don't meet this bar, and I think gamers who expect to be able to set every slider to the max and go to town—yes, even on a $2K GPU—are mostly responsible.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    3070 had .29 GP/s/$ at base clock. 4090 has .28 GP/s/$ at base clock. Considering this is coming out two years later, I'm not so inclined to call it a bargain.
    - elabajaba 4y ago
      Especially considering the whole 30 series had inflated MSRPs due the ridiculous demand gpu mining created which lead to GPU shortages for regular consumers.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
izacus 4y ago
I think you're setting yourself for another massive disappointment if you think nVidia will sell those at any kind of lower price in the future. Because that's the issue isn't it? Everyone wanting for nVidia to just sell those chips for less? They'll slap 4070Ti or something on it and sell it to you for the same price.
- Macha 4y ago
  You might have missed it with how long the inflated market lasted, but in the last few months with the ethereum PoS transition and the threat of recession keeping gamers at bay they literally haven't been able to sell the 30-series cards for quite a bit under MSRP in what was a very sudden reversal from being above MSRP. Maybe a new series stole the demand but part of the reason they're holding out on lower tier SKUs is the 30-series is not going away fast enough, so there's a good chance that we're back in the 10-series vs 20-series day where there's so much used stock of the old series and a perception that nvidia is gouging to the extent that it hamepers sales of the new ones. 30 series launch MSRPs looked very good until it became clear you couldn't get them for that price, partly because they were having to partially roll back the 20 series price increases, so it wouldn't be impossible to see a repeat.
  - radicalbyte 4y ago
    For the 30 series it was the 3080 in particular which looked fantastic - it had 95% the performance of the 3090 for half the price ($750 vs $1500) and it was a large improvement on the previous generation. This time around the 4090 is an excellent card, the 4080 16GB is a lot slower and the 4080 12GB a lot slower than the 16GB. They've also jacked the prices: the 4080 should be $750 and the 4090 should be $1500. Arguably lower again given the coming recession and the market being flooded with the previous generation. It will be interesting to see what AMD do as they could make life very difficult for nVidia.
    - izacus 4y ago
      > This time around the 4090 is an excellent card, the 4080 16GB is a lot slower and the 4080 12GB a lot slower than the 16GB. And "by a lot slower" you mean "they're all faster than previous generation flagship 3090".
7speter 4y ago
But now they have this bin of chips designated as the low tier 4080 that they previously said was worth, what 1000 dollars? Do they call it a 4070 and just instantly sell it for 600 dollars? Really showsbus that the value behind their cards are whatever Jensen and friends want it to be, actual costs be damned.
- mst 4y ago
  That's true of pretty much everything though. The monetary value of a thing is definitionally how much money you can sell it for.
  - 7speter 4y ago
    But i thought it was inflation that drove the price of everything up the last two years?
    - puffoflogic 4y ago
      Yes, good, you're getting there. Now... put them together... Inflation is driven by consumers having more money. This means that more can be charged for the same products and the consumers will begrudgingly pay. This means more will be charged. This is why giving ~50% of US net-taxpayers free cash caused inflation to spike.
      - 7speter 4y ago
        Right, that's all the cause of 60% "inflation," I suppose.

LegitShady 4y ago

they got greedy and every reviewer in existence called them out on it. The price is too high for a 4070 so they called it another 4080 no matter how different it was from the other 4080.

chippiewill 4y ago
They should have just called it a 4075
- Macha 4y ago
  It probably will be. A 4075, 4080-lite, 4070 super or similar. I don't think their pride and target retail price could stomach calling it the 4070 it clearly is.
samstave 4y ago
What the heck was the price? I paid $1,600 for an evans and Sutherland card with 32 MEGABYTES to run Softimage on NT 4 because I couldn’t afford an SGI in 1997
- goosedragons 4y ago
  $900. But there was a time when the best GeForce you could get was less than that by a pretty wide margin.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  in 2018 the 2080 launched at $800 and was seen as extremely overpriced, such that the entire generation of cards sold poorly. There's no reason to cherry pick data points unrelated to current date because you can remember chiselling out your circuits out of stone tablets in 1997. it just isn't relevant.
  - samstave 4y ago
    >>because you can remember chiselling out your circuits out of stone tablets in 1997. I just want you to know I love this comment

0x457 4y ago

I think what they saw is: we're going to release 4080 and not 4080 under 4080 name, that would allow us to claim that 4080 stayed the same MSRP. Except anyone with a brain saw through it and enough content generated, that trick simply wouldn't work anymore.

filmgirlcw 4y ago

They thought they could fool people and that the graphics card demand of the last two years would let them coast on this. They were wrong.

mooman219 4y ago

Some reddit post looked at the % differences in core count and clock speed relative to each generation. It most closely fit in the spot a 4060Ti would fit in based its specs relative to the actual 4080.

elabajaba 4y ago

The 4080 12GB's performance is about the same as where a new 60 series card sits compared to the previous gen 80 series card (60 series tend to be within +-10% of the previous gen 80 series, 4080 12GB is at most a 60ti based on this) The 4080 16GB is around where a 70 series card tends to sit. [0] https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/nvidia_releases_new_benchmarks_for_its_rtx_4080_graphics_cards/1 https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/nvidia_release... Ignore the dlss2 vs dlss3 numbers, just look at the base numbers since dlss3 numbers are interpolated framerates

7speter 4y ago
Yes, a youtuber who goes by ‘I’m a mac’ made a great (at least I thought) series of videos breaking down how this generations of die sizes compare to previous generations: (The first where he starts comparing generations with graphs) https://youtu.be/9_bqwEy5AQ4 https://youtu.be/9_bqwEy5AQ4 Though I have to wonder, do we want bigger 40 gen dies? The 4090 already guzzles at 400w at full tilt, and gets ar least 200+ fps at pretty much all games except maybe cyberpunk, and can complete video editing workloads at twice the speed of the 3090. Do we need an even bigger lovelace chip?
- elabajaba 4y ago
  Considering the 4090 gets 95% of the performance in games if you set a 60% powertarget [0](~90% in synthetics), I feel like they just juiced the power draw like crazy to be able to say they had the fastest gpu this generation (same with AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs, where you can drop from ~240w to 140w for 95% of the multicore/100% of the single core performance). Also I was playing the Darktide beta, and at 4k I want about double the framerate I currently get on a 6800xt (FSR 1.0 and DLSS (according to friends and comments on reddit+discord) both look bad in it). We're moving past crossgen games at this point too (and UE5 seems very heavy), so for eg. 100+ fps or 4k something in range of ~50% faster than a 3090 would be nice. [0] https://youtu.be/60yFji_GKak?t=876 https://youtu.be/60yFji_GKak?t=876
  - philliphaydon 4y ago