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Unfortunately the gaming hardware prices are also shooting for the top https://www.pcgamer.com/ultra-enthusiast-hardware-is-strangling-pc-gaming/ https://www.

Unfortunately the gaming hardware prices are also shooting for the top https://www.pcgamer.com/ultra-enthusiast-hardware-is-strangling-pc-gaming/ https://www.pcgamer.com/ultra-enthusiast-hardware-is-strangl...

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
"ultra-enthusiast" gaming hardware prices.
- avtolik 4y ago
  Actually the thesis of the article is that the focus on the "ultra-enthusiast" is killing the mainstream and budget end of the market.
PaulHoule 4y ago
Unlike the 4090 you can get a 4080 at something close to the MSRP. (When I was building a machine last month it seemed I could have gotten a 4090 for $2500 or so) For gaming the 4080 is not cost-effective compared to the old generation but NVIDIA may have priced it about right for tensor-heavy ML workloads. And that's what it comes down to. NVIDIA is obsessed with cloud gaming and other things that don't make sense to ordinary people (like kids cloud gaming in the back seat of a minivan instead of just playing a switch.) Maybe a gamer keeps a GPU busy for a few hours a day, but a cloud GPU could be shared between multiple gamers and train neural networks when gamers are asleep. From a "value-based pricing" perspective a GPU that sells for $1600 and is utilized 10% of the time could be sold for $16,000 to someone who could keep it busy 100% of the time. By that perspective NVIDIA can't really afford to sell cards to individual gamers.
- leereeves 4y ago
  > From a "value-based pricing" perspective a GPU that sells for $1600 and is utilized 10% of the time could be sold for $16,000 to someone who could keep it busy 100% of the time. Only if you (among other things) ignore the other costs and profit of the cloud gaming service. How much does continuously streaming 4k bandwidth alone cost over the life of a GPU?
  - Idiot_in_Vain 4y ago
    >> How much does continuously streaming 4k bandwidth alone cost over the life of a GPU? Doesn't matter - the bandwidth used by an average user costs a small portion of a montly subscription fee. High prices for GPUs may be a good way to get more subsribers, who will pay a lot more money over the years.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      > Doesn't matter - the bandwidth used by an average user costs a small portion of a montly subscription fee. Citation needed. > High prices for GPUs may be a good way to get more subsribers, who will pay a lot more money over the years. And they set price of both markets. Sounds like market manipulation to me.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        You can go into tons of datacenters and pay 10-20 cents per mbps in bulk. If we're using almost 40Mbps for each GPU then we're looking at $4-$8 of bandwidth. And this simplified scenario has 10 users per GPU on the 4k tier, I guess? That's $200 in subscription fees. And that's significantly understating the number of subscribers per GPU, if we're trying to pay off $16000.
        leereeves 4y ago
        Ten subscribers per GPU means an average player can play at most 17 hours per week, even if the service can somehow load balance across time zones without unacceptable lag. Having significantly more subscribers wouldn't give each player much time to play.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        Yeah that was the scenario laid out, that an average player with a $1600 GPU would use it 10% of the time. Whatever you think the real numbers are, you probably need about half a subscription to pay the bandwidth. I'd be more concerned about the electricity bill, since you'd be in the ballpark of 200kWh a month.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > By that perspective NVIDIA can't really afford to sell cards to individual gamers They can't afford to continue profitable line of business that took them from nothing to multi-billion dollar corporation? This is not a new problem - why does Intel sell CPUs to gamers for $100 when theu can sell same CPU for servers for $1000? Narket segmentation, and you try to make sure these markets buy diffetent products that are priced differently. You artifically create differences in priducts. For example Intel withholds ECC memory from consumer products. Whether its rihht or wrong is debatable. But please let's not use language like 'we can't afford', It implies they are losing money and subsidising gamers. Whereas in reality they are very profitable and you are saying they could nickel and dime their customers even harder.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    The majority of gamers might not need or desire better hardware, particularly if they have to pay for it. For that matter, game developers have very little reason to invest in games that require more capable hardware. There's the silly pretense now that people will use more capable hardware to play the same game in 4K, 8K, 16K, but the awful truth is that a lot of people would rather pay $45/month for 1 Mbps DSL than pay $50/month for 1 Gbps fiber, or would rather watch a terrible camera capture of a movie from the theater than wait for the Bluray to come out. Consider the success of the Nintendo switch. The dock for the switch was a bit of a Jedi mind trick, just like the Wiimote was for the Wii. In particular, it changed the competitive psychology of game producers to think that any "big game" that came out for the Playstation or Xbox would also be released for the Switch. Selling the switch as a hybrid device stops gamers and games company from realizing it is what is... the beginning of the end of the TV-attached console. The Steam Deck is a much more powerful machine for about the same price and it also has a very strong catalog. The Steam Deck can play Control natively and the Switch can't. Yet for the most part the industry is going to keep remaking the same old games and releasing them for the Switch, even most the innovative parts are going to be making games like Genshin Impact for midrange phones. Sales of the 4090 are driven by prestige, the pleasure you can get out of saying that you own the very best. They are not driven at all by the reality that you can have anywhere near 10x the pleasure from a $4000 gaming PC than from a $400 portable. However a business that revolves around neural networks very well might be able to generate 10x the revenue from a 10x faster graphics card. It's not a question of what "we" can afford but it is a function of what "they" can justify to their shareholders. I mean, the people in my town could afford 100% fiber optic internet, but the phone company can't afford to stop using the copper network when it can still charge people premium prices for subprime service. If we decided that $100 a month was a fair price for gigabit fiber and that price caps should be scaled accordingly, my telecom would quickly decide that it "can't afford" to offer DSL at $0.10 a month and would start tearing up that copper network pretty quickly.
amelius 4y ago
Class-divide in gaming.
neogodless 4y ago
There's always going to be an imbalance between GPU companies and gamers. The ideal for a gamer is that every year the GPU maker pulls another rabbit out of their hat, and doubles the performance from the previous year, with the same manufacturing and 50% less power consumption. Anyone who can remotely afford it and prioritizes gaming could upgrade. The ideal for the GPU maker is that every year, gamers double in number, and double in hunger for higher performance, and any incremental gain in performance can be sold for double the price of the previous year, all while R&D and manufacturing costs are dwarfed by sales volume. There were years where it felt like the gamers were winning. You could buy a mid-range card for a couple hundred US dollars that outperformed the previous flagship. Amazing! The past couple of years shifted the other way. Between cryptocurrency mining and machine learning, the appetite for GPU hardware created a seemingly insatiable seller's market. Fortunately, the mining craze has all but vanished, and GPU hardware is much more powerful than it was a year earlier. However, the GPU makers are still on a high from the wave they were riding. If you're a gamer (and not a machine learning hardware consumer), you're not in a terrible place right now. There's lots of hardware that can run modern games in 1440p and 4K resolutions with lots of eye candy and plenty of performance for $500 available to buy right now. If you can't afford $500, you can buy a $200 card and easily get excellent 1080p performance. But things aren't advancing as fast as they had at some point in the past, and there is no new midrange ($250-300) card yet available from the current generation that can embarrass old flagships (that used to cost $500-600). So we can be a bit unhappy about that, but I don't think things are terrible. And I think with a little patience, we'll still see performance increase, and affordable options continue to improve.
- moonchrome 4y ago
  >There's lots of hardware that can run modern games in 1440p and 4K resolutions with lots of eye candy and plenty of performance for $500 available to buy right now. Except that's the price of a full gaming console that can also get me 1440p/4k. It's ridiculous that I have to pay the same ammount of money for a GPU to get similar experience to my PS5. Consoles were always cheaper than PC gaming, but midrange GPUs costing more than a console is a new phenomena and I doubt it's sustainable for gaming industry.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

"ultra-enthusiast" gaming hardware prices.

avtolik 4y ago
Actually the thesis of the article is that the focus on the "ultra-enthusiast" is killing the mainstream and budget end of the market.

PaulHoule 4y ago

Unlike the 4090 you can get a 4080 at something close to the MSRP. (When I was building a machine last month it seemed I could have gotten a 4090 for $2500 or so) For gaming the 4080 is not cost-effective compared to the old generation but NVIDIA may have priced it about right for tensor-heavy ML workloads. And that's what it comes down to. NVIDIA is obsessed with cloud gaming and other things that don't make sense to ordinary people (like kids cloud gaming in the back seat of a minivan instead of just playing a switch.) Maybe a gamer keeps a GPU busy for a few hours a day, but a cloud GPU could be shared between multiple gamers and train neural networks when gamers are asleep. From a "value-based pricing" perspective a GPU that sells for $1600 and is utilized 10% of the time could be sold for $16,000 to someone who could keep it busy 100% of the time. By that perspective NVIDIA can't really afford to sell cards to individual gamers.

leereeves 4y ago
> From a "value-based pricing" perspective a GPU that sells for $1600 and is utilized 10% of the time could be sold for $16,000 to someone who could keep it busy 100% of the time. Only if you (among other things) ignore the other costs and profit of the cloud gaming service. How much does continuously streaming 4k bandwidth alone cost over the life of a GPU?
- Idiot_in_Vain 4y ago
  >> How much does continuously streaming 4k bandwidth alone cost over the life of a GPU? Doesn't matter - the bandwidth used by an average user costs a small portion of a montly subscription fee. High prices for GPUs may be a good way to get more subsribers, who will pay a lot more money over the years.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > Doesn't matter - the bandwidth used by an average user costs a small portion of a montly subscription fee. Citation needed. > High prices for GPUs may be a good way to get more subsribers, who will pay a lot more money over the years. And they set price of both markets. Sounds like market manipulation to me.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      You can go into tons of datacenters and pay 10-20 cents per mbps in bulk. If we're using almost 40Mbps for each GPU then we're looking at $4-$8 of bandwidth. And this simplified scenario has 10 users per GPU on the 4k tier, I guess? That's $200 in subscription fees. And that's significantly understating the number of subscribers per GPU, if we're trying to pay off $16000.
      - leereeves 4y ago
        Ten subscribers per GPU means an average player can play at most 17 hours per week, even if the service can somehow load balance across time zones without unacceptable lag. Having significantly more subscribers wouldn't give each player much time to play.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        Yeah that was the scenario laid out, that an average player with a $1600 GPU would use it 10% of the time. Whatever you think the real numbers are, you probably need about half a subscription to pay the bandwidth. I'd be more concerned about the electricity bill, since you'd be in the ballpark of 200kWh a month.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> By that perspective NVIDIA can't really afford to sell cards to individual gamers They can't afford to continue profitable line of business that took them from nothing to multi-billion dollar corporation? This is not a new problem - why does Intel sell CPUs to gamers for $100 when theu can sell same CPU for servers for $1000? Narket segmentation, and you try to make sure these markets buy diffetent products that are priced differently. You artifically create differences in priducts. For example Intel withholds ECC memory from consumer products. Whether its rihht or wrong is debatable. But please let's not use language like 'we can't afford', It implies they are losing money and subsidising gamers. Whereas in reality they are very profitable and you are saying they could nickel and dime their customers even harder.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  The majority of gamers might not need or desire better hardware, particularly if they have to pay for it. For that matter, game developers have very little reason to invest in games that require more capable hardware. There's the silly pretense now that people will use more capable hardware to play the same game in 4K, 8K, 16K, but the awful truth is that a lot of people would rather pay $45/month for 1 Mbps DSL than pay $50/month for 1 Gbps fiber, or would rather watch a terrible camera capture of a movie from the theater than wait for the Bluray to come out. Consider the success of the Nintendo switch. The dock for the switch was a bit of a Jedi mind trick, just like the Wiimote was for the Wii. In particular, it changed the competitive psychology of game producers to think that any "big game" that came out for the Playstation or Xbox would also be released for the Switch. Selling the switch as a hybrid device stops gamers and games company from realizing it is what is... the beginning of the end of the TV-attached console. The Steam Deck is a much more powerful machine for about the same price and it also has a very strong catalog. The Steam Deck can play Control natively and the Switch can't. Yet for the most part the industry is going to keep remaking the same old games and releasing them for the Switch, even most the innovative parts are going to be making games like Genshin Impact for midrange phones. Sales of the 4090 are driven by prestige, the pleasure you can get out of saying that you own the very best. They are not driven at all by the reality that you can have anywhere near 10x the pleasure from a $4000 gaming PC than from a $400 portable. However a business that revolves around neural networks very well might be able to generate 10x the revenue from a 10x faster graphics card. It's not a question of what "we" can afford but it is a function of what "they" can justify to their shareholders. I mean, the people in my town could afford 100% fiber optic internet, but the phone company can't afford to stop using the copper network when it can still charge people premium prices for subprime service. If we decided that $100 a month was a fair price for gigabit fiber and that price caps should be scaled accordingly, my telecom would quickly decide that it "can't afford" to offer DSL at $0.10 a month and would start tearing up that copper network pretty quickly.

amelius 4y ago

Class-divide in gaming.

neogodless 4y ago

There's always going to be an imbalance between GPU companies and gamers. The ideal for a gamer is that every year the GPU maker pulls another rabbit out of their hat, and doubles the performance from the previous year, with the same manufacturing and 50% less power consumption. Anyone who can remotely afford it and prioritizes gaming could upgrade. The ideal for the GPU maker is that every year, gamers double in number, and double in hunger for higher performance, and any incremental gain in performance can be sold for double the price of the previous year, all while R&D and manufacturing costs are dwarfed by sales volume. There were years where it felt like the gamers were winning. You could buy a mid-range card for a couple hundred US dollars that outperformed the previous flagship. Amazing! The past couple of years shifted the other way. Between cryptocurrency mining and machine learning, the appetite for GPU hardware created a seemingly insatiable seller's market. Fortunately, the mining craze has all but vanished, and GPU hardware is much more powerful than it was a year earlier. However, the GPU makers are still on a high from the wave they were riding. If you're a gamer (and not a machine learning hardware consumer), you're not in a terrible place right now. There's lots of hardware that can run modern games in 1440p and 4K resolutions with lots of eye candy and plenty of performance for $500 available to buy right now. If you can't afford $500, you can buy a $200 card and easily get excellent 1080p performance. But things aren't advancing as fast as they had at some point in the past, and there is no new midrange ($250-300) card yet available from the current generation that can embarrass old flagships (that used to cost $500-600). So we can be a bit unhappy about that, but I don't think things are terrible. And I think with a little patience, we'll still see performance increase, and affordable options continue to improve.

moonchrome 4y ago
>There's lots of hardware that can run modern games in 1440p and 4K resolutions with lots of eye candy and plenty of performance for $500 available to buy right now. Except that's the price of a full gaming console that can also get me 1440p/4k. It's ridiculous that I have to pay the same ammount of money for a GPU to get similar experience to my PS5. Consoles were always cheaper than PC gaming, but midrange GPUs costing more than a console is a new phenomena and I doubt it's sustainable for gaming industry.