>The technology future I was sold was one where technology becomes cheaper over time, not more expensive. Contrary to popular belief, high-end cards actually a

>The technology future I was sold was one where technology becomes cheaper over time, not more expensive. Contrary to popular belief, high-end cards actually are priced appropriately. It's the low to midrange cards that are ludicrously overpriced; their price-performance ratios make them terrible investments. The RTX3050 (250) is 2 times more expensive than the 1070 (125) and is 10% faster than that card. The RTX3060 (400) is 3 times more expensive than the 1070 (125) and is 40% faster than that card. The RTX3080 (750) is 3 times more expensive than the 3050 (250) and is 300% faster than that card. The RTX4090 (1600) is 2 times more expensive than the 3080 (750) and is 200% faster than that card. The high-end GPUs are currently vastly cheaper per unit of performance than the midrange cards and have been for the last 2 years (the 3080 was twice the price of the 3070, but had twice the performance). And that completely destroys the value proposition (and PCMR cache) of PC gaming over just buying a console (IIRC both the newest ones have the functional equivalent of an RTX2060). And so it shouldn't be a surprise that people continue to bitch about "yet another overpriced card". What the builder market needs is a 3080 competitor at the 500-dollar price point to forcibly correct the pricing of the cheaper cards down to the 200 dollars the secondary market reveals they're actually worth; once that happens, the pricing structure will likely begin to return to normal. (It's also weird that nobody talks about this.) Of course, there's always the possibility that the RTX 5000 series doubles in speed (and price) again; after all, not only have gamers proven they'll pay for 3080s at massive markups, but companies training ML models will pay top dollar to cut the time that takes in half. Intel seems to have bet on it; taking advantage of in-house fabrication + that market gap is what Arc was made to do, but it only survives provided current price/performance ratios stay the way they are for a little while longer.