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For the young whipper snappers here, these were the days when there was fierce competition with about 5 GPU manufacturers competing for your dime and prices for

For the young whipper snappers here, these were the days when there was fierce competition with about 5 GPU manufacturers competing for your dime and prices for everyone. That was the time when $300 for the top of the line flagship GeForce 256 was considered an absurd sum of money for a GPU, or $544 today adjusted for inflation. In 2002 the ATI(now AMD) Radeon 9700 Pro flagship would blow everyone away playing Unreal Tournament 2003 at 1600x1200 at about 100 FPS, all for $400 or $670 in today's money. Boy, how times of changed. Imagine picking up an RTX 4090 for $670 today off the shelf. Wild. This kids, is why competition is good, and entrenched monopolies are bad.

actionfromafar 3y ago
This is true, but I feel it's also reflecting of how new GPUs were back then. That they could do anything fast than the CPU gave the largest impact. Back then the GPU basically swept textures and rotated 3D vectors, very fast. Todays GPUs can do so much more. Even further back, a Z80 CPU in a microcomputer wasn't very costly at all compared to all of the rest of the components. A Commodore 64 had a MOS6502 CPU, and the diskette drive for the Commodore 64 also had a MOS6502 CPU. Imagine your SSD come with a Core i7 embedded in it. But also, competition is good and I miss it. Looking back, it seems to me so much computer development happened on a compressed time scale from the 1970s up through the 90s. Nowadays, it feels like not much happened 2013-2023. Machine learning of GPUs is about it, I think. What changes now is "just" the sheer numbers of things and infrastructure. More smartphones, more bandwidth etc. It's also impressive in its own right of course, but not as exciting.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  >Back then the GPU basically swept textures and rotated 3D vectors, very fast. Not really. That's what the original 3df Voodoo did, but tech moved fast. By 1999 we had multi texturing, vertex blending, cube mapping, hardware transforming and lighting on the GeForce 256 and Direct3D 7[1], and by 2001 we already had the GeForce 3 and DirectX 8 [2], featuring programable vertex and pixel shaders, fog, bump mapping and texture mapping, and the next year in 2002 DirectX 9.0b[3] dropped which move the goalpost even more giving us the realism of Doom 3 and Half Life 2 [4]. It was a great time to be alive and whitness these tech marvels unfold before your very eyes year on year. [1] https://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/~semancik/research/resources/papers/nvidia/Microsoft_DirectX_7.pdf https://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/~semancik/research/resources/papers/... [2] https://www.evga.com/articles/images/11directx8.pdf https://www.evga.com/articles/images/11directx8.pdf [3] https://www.pny.com/file%20library/company/support/product%20brochures/geforce%20graphics/user%20guides%20and%20tutorials/microsoftdirectx_v1.pdf https://www.pny.com/file%20library/company/support/product%2... [4] https://www.ign.com/articles/2004/11/18/half-life-2-directx-comparison https://www.ign.com/articles/2004/11/18/half-life-2-directx-...
bloqs 3y ago
While yes, prices today are absurd, prices a year or two ago were not. It's a very recent change. I got a 3080 OC (since they fiddled the numbers, 4090 equivalent) for £750 and I missed the release batch. Demand outstripping supply is the main issue since the PC boom of covid 2020. The market is now approaching saturation, and given costs, the demand at those prices will simply not sustain long term.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  Well yes, I was talking about the present today we live in, since I don't have a time machine to go back to pre-pandemic 2020 and buy a new 30 series GPU for cheap MSRP, I only speak of what the market looks like today if I want to buy something now. Otherwise I would also like to go back and buy a house when real estate was still affordable. The current price hikes are due to greed-flation complacency from AMD and Nvidia, not due to unsatiable market demand like during Covid, as they both report poor sales of 40 series and 7000 series GPUs and yet they refuse to lower prices even though judging by die sizes, they have enough room to do so without loosing money. They're not lowering the prices and taking a sales hit on this generation to make the new higher prices "sticky" and the new norm in the industry, betting that consumers will ultimately have to accept this new pricing going forward as they can't use their aging GPUs for much longer into the future and will eventually need to upgrade at some point.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

actionfromafar 3y ago

This is true, but I feel it's also reflecting of how new GPUs were back then. That they could do anything fast than the CPU gave the largest impact. Back then the GPU basically swept textures and rotated 3D vectors, very fast. Todays GPUs can do so much more. Even further back, a Z80 CPU in a microcomputer wasn't very costly at all compared to all of the rest of the components. A Commodore 64 had a MOS6502 CPU, and the diskette drive for the Commodore 64 also had a MOS6502 CPU. Imagine your SSD come with a Core i7 embedded in it. But also, competition is good and I miss it. Looking back, it seems to me so much computer development happened on a compressed time scale from the 1970s up through the 90s. Nowadays, it feels like not much happened 2013-2023. Machine learning of GPUs is about it, I think. What changes now is "just" the sheer numbers of things and infrastructure. More smartphones, more bandwidth etc. It's also impressive in its own right of course, but not as exciting.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>Back then the GPU basically swept textures and rotated 3D vectors, very fast. Not really. That's what the original 3df Voodoo did, but tech moved fast. By 1999 we had multi texturing, vertex blending, cube mapping, hardware transforming and lighting on the GeForce 256 and Direct3D 7[1], and by 2001 we already had the GeForce 3 and DirectX 8 [2], featuring programable vertex and pixel shaders, fog, bump mapping and texture mapping, and the next year in 2002 DirectX 9.0b[3] dropped which move the goalpost even more giving us the realism of Doom 3 and Half Life 2 [4]. It was a great time to be alive and whitness these tech marvels unfold before your very eyes year on year. [1] https://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/~semancik/research/resources/papers/nvidia/Microsoft_DirectX_7.pdf https://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/~semancik/research/resources/papers/... [2] https://www.evga.com/articles/images/11directx8.pdf https://www.evga.com/articles/images/11directx8.pdf [3] https://www.pny.com/file%20library/company/support/product%20brochures/geforce%20graphics/user%20guides%20and%20tutorials/microsoftdirectx_v1.pdf https://www.pny.com/file%20library/company/support/product%2... [4] https://www.ign.com/articles/2004/11/18/half-life-2-directx-comparison https://www.ign.com/articles/2004/11/18/half-life-2-directx-...

bloqs 3y ago

While yes, prices today are absurd, prices a year or two ago were not. It's a very recent change. I got a 3080 OC (since they fiddled the numbers, 4090 equivalent) for £750 and I missed the release batch. Demand outstripping supply is the main issue since the PC boom of covid 2020. The market is now approaching saturation, and given costs, the demand at those prices will simply not sustain long term.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
Well yes, I was talking about the present today we live in, since I don't have a time machine to go back to pre-pandemic 2020 and buy a new 30 series GPU for cheap MSRP, I only speak of what the market looks like today if I want to buy something now. Otherwise I would also like to go back and buy a house when real estate was still affordable. The current price hikes are due to greed-flation complacency from AMD and Nvidia, not due to unsatiable market demand like during Covid, as they both report poor sales of 40 series and 7000 series GPUs and yet they refuse to lower prices even though judging by die sizes, they have enough room to do so without loosing money. They're not lowering the prices and taking a sales hit on this generation to make the new higher prices "sticky" and the new norm in the industry, betting that consumers will ultimately have to accept this new pricing going forward as they can't use their aging GPUs for much longer into the future and will eventually need to upgrade at some point.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]