Operating margins are actually down compared to previous gens, roughly similar to 2012 levels, until AI comes into the picture. And gaming cards haven’t increas

Operating margins are actually down compared to previous gens, roughly similar to 2012 levels, until AI comes into the picture. And gaming cards haven’t increased their margins equivalently. Nvidia isn’t going to sell gaming cards at an operating loss out of AI money. If the consumer market is soft then it’s soft, and with the general slowdown in Moores law cost progression it doesn’t make sense to have “firesale gens” that set an impossible standard for future gens to beat. ~20% perf/$ progression per generation is going to be about what’s sustainable, because that’s about what tsmc is giving the chip companies. You can “cheat” by using older worse nodes like ampere and turing did, and like AMD did with the RX 7600, to keep costs down, but that’s a one-time boost and consumers grow to expect that pricing going forward. It’s been a market-strategy mistake and has resulted in mis-calibrated consumer expectations around how much costs are actually increasing. Just make the products you can make and sell them at the same margins you’ve always operated at. Super refresh should recalibrate a couple of the worst misses, 4080 MSRP is indefensible and 4070 ti is just way too expensive for a 12gb card, but, 4060 and 4070 and 4090 are all pretty on-target and are not particularly high-margin products especially compared to dirt cheap Turing and ampere chips.