4 ms·

I don't even know what people are really asking for anymore. 4070, 7800XT, 4060, and 7600 were all incredibly high-value launches, and in January we're incredi

by paulmd 3y ago

I don't even know what people are really asking for anymore. 4070, 7800XT, 4060, and 7600 were all incredibly high-value launches, and in January we're incredibly likely to get price drops on 12GB cards as well as 16GB cards at the old 4070 Ti price point. The value is there, just a fairly large faction of people have an emotional investment in pretending like it's perpetual doom-and-gloom. Consider the reaction when Microcenter started putting a $100 steam gift card on the already-attractive 4070 price. People still flipped a shit even though a de-facto $500 price was obviously about as good as any 4070-tier product would get for this gen (apart from the firesales at the end). https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/12v790e/100_steam_gift_card_with_4000_series_purchase_at/ https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/12v790e/100_s... https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/12ug1ql/it_appears_that_micro_center_is_trying_there_best/ https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/12ug1ql/it_ap... https://old.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/12ucq6b/gpu_100_steam_gift_card_included_with_any/ https://old.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/12ucq6b/gpu_... https://old.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/12ucljb/micro_center_is_now_offering_a_100_steam_gift/ https://old.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/12ucljb/micro_cente... This is pretty much what super refresh is going to accomplish next month (a year later!) - 4070 will probably move down to $499-549, 4070 Super will be 95% of a 4070 Ti for $599-629, and 4070 Ti Super will offer 16GB at the same $749 price point. But people want a return to 2000s-level pricing (despite soaring wafer costs etc) and nothing short of that is going to satisfy some people. (and a fair number of people (including reviewers!) actively propagandize about these cards, like complaining the 4060 or 4060 Ti is actually slower than its predecessor - they're absolutely not, even at 4K (tough for a 6600XT tier card!) the 4060 Ti is still faster on average. And as a general statement, AMD made the same switch to 128b memory bus last gen already without catastrophic issues, like the aforementioned 6600XT. A card can still be a mediocre step without making shit up about it, and the 3060 Ti was the absolute peak of the 30-series value so it's understandable the 40-series struggles to drastically outpace it. But it's not slower, either.) https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/14phuh8/geforce_rtx_4060_meta_review/ https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/14phuh8/geforce_r... https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/13vm5ti/geforce_rtx_4060_ti_radeon_rx_7600_meta_review/ https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/13vm5ti/geforce_r... Since the RTX launch there has been the rise of what I'd call the "socially gamer, fiscally conservative" faction, the group of people that likes to think they'd be gaming, or likes to think they would upgrade, but this spending is too gosh-darn wasteful! However good the deals get, it's much more fun to just post dismissively on the internet about it, and it costs nothing to do so, but you get all the social clout of aligning yourself with the thing your in-group is excited about and signaling your social virtue (thrift), etc. Others are elder gamers who have lives and families now and are just drifting away in general and can't justify the money on a hobby they really no longer do, but they can't just let go of that identity/touchstone from their youth. And they're subconsciously looking for a deal that's so out-of-band good that they won't feel bad about not using it. But again, like the 4060 and 4070, there are plenty of deals at all times and in all price brackets, including older cards if that's your jam. 3080 and 3090 are good, 6800XT/7800XT is good, 4060 and 4070 are good, 7900XT has fallen as low as $700, etc. If you need to upgrade, then upgrade, but the slowing of moore's law has hit GPUs hardest. They are asymptotic perf-per-area machines that thrive on scaling out on cheap transistors (jensen has explicitly talked about this more than a decade ago) and now that cost increases are eating up most of the density gains it's understandable that gpus are the first and most affected by slowing gains/rising costs. https://youtu.be/Xn1EsFe7snQ?t=1075 https://youtu.be/Xn1EsFe7snQ?t=1075 At some point if people don't want to bite on deals like the microcenter thing, you will just see companies pivot to the products that are actually moving. 4090 did great, AI is doing great. Midrange and high-end will continue to sell and the "culturally gamer, fiscally conservative" folks will continue to seethe about the lack of a true Radeon 7850 successor or whatever. Everyone understands why the $150 price point is dead, but people don't want to accept that the cancer is going to continue to progress upwards, because fab tech isn't getting healthier either. And the perf/$ progress that AMD/NVIDIA can make is fundamentally determined by the transistors/$ that the fabs give them. Going above that rate of trx/$ gain is long-term unsustainable for them. If you can't be brought over by reasonable deals, like 4070 for $500 or Super Series refresh, are you really addressable market, from the perspective of NVIDIA and AMD? and in AMD's case, they benefit if you buy a PS5 anyway, that's still an AMD product, but doesn't carry the baggage of having to argue with the tech community (and big tech reviewers who increasingly view themselves as activists/participants rather than simply "calling balls and strikes") about the merits of cache vs bus width, or whether DLSS or RT or framegen is a good idea, or whatever. Sony will make a decision and you will take it or leave it, and seemingly that is more palatable than what AMD and NVIDIA are doing. Unified APUs are great, and have huge cost advantages, but it does involve many of the same compromises that gamers already hate. You're not going to be upgrading the memory of your Steam Console, and Series X/S both have GTX 970-style "3.5GB" slow-memory partitions, and there is a huge focus on upscaling (which will probably include AI upscaling in the PS5 Pro), etc. Those things are simply ground-truths in the console world. A huge part of the "console experience" is simply removing the option to even argue about these compromises, so that people don't feel bad about not being able to use ultra settings or having to turn on upscaling to do so, or for using a CPU with less cache/slightly lower IPC, etc. "Compromise pain" is quite similar to "choice paralysis" in practice, and by taking the choice away you relieve the pain.

ksec 3y ago
They want the latest and greatest, ( Leading Node, Latest Software Development and Driver Update improvement ) while not willing to pay much for it. At the same time refuse to learn and understand why something cost as much. And worst case of all? They are also the ones who traded cryptos. The major reason why Nvidia GPU prices had been above average.
- Zpalmtree 3y ago
  source that crypto miners are complaining about gpu prices? from my experience, it's nearly always the gamers complaining, usually blaming crypto for them not being able to afford a GPU
  - krunck 3y ago
    Do people still mine with GPUs? I thought ASICs blew that opportinity away a long time ago. Besides, we need to blame amateur AI enthusiasts for the high GPU prices now.
    - to11mtm 3y ago
      I believe ETH and it's offshoots (e.g. DOGE) didn't have major benefits for ASICs, or at the very least ASICs didn't 'blow away' GPUs the way they did for BTC.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    idk about miners being primarily the ones who complain about prices, but honestly they might be a large number of the people who complain about memory bus reductions. RDNA2 was a relatively poor miner (worse than RDNA1) precisely because RDNA2 already did the same thing as Ada, replaced real bandwidth with cache. And generally that's fine and it performs well, because games are a pretty normal workload. But mining is deliberately completely random and uncacheable (otherwise you could cache the parts of the DAG that you need) and benefits more from the raw bandwidth, because the cache does ~nothing. Miners have always been fucking great at astroturfing, like in 2021-2022 they had a ton of people convinced that it was just some giant production shortage and NVIDIA just wasn't making any cards etc. Or the arguments about how the mining LHR limiter was "bad for gamers" because you wouldn't be able to mine as profitably in your spare time (of course ignoring that paying double MSRP in the first place kinda offsets that and in fact necessitates mining to even make the purchase make sense). Miners are fundamentally just nerds who post on tech forums and gaming forums and know what arguments are convincing and catch traction etc. Can I see those guys making a particular stink about the last source of super-wide memory bus cards drying up? Yes. They already bought up all the 5700XTs etc, Ampere was the last hurrah of the Big Memory Bus, and actually it would make sense if a ton of the outright agitators had some history in mining subs/etc. It shouldn't really matter to gamers where the bandwidth comes from. Yes, cache hit rates decline at higher resolutions, but in reasonable configurations (eg not 4060 at 4K) the cache systems on RDNA2 and Ada are basically seamless/transparent to gamers. Games are cacheable workloads. It's fine. Things like the yuzu dev running 16K downscaled to 4K and complaining he had some performance loss on a 4060 is the extreme exception. They're not transparent to miners though. In accordance with hanlon's law, however, I will admit that gamers are some extremely dumb motherfuckers (ahem, "often lack understanding of relevant technical details and frequently tend to bandwagon even when it doesn't make sense" etc) and it could just be people getting riled up about stuff they don't fully understand from semi-trusted tech-media figures telling them to be upset. We went through this same "it shouldn't matter how the bandwidth gets there" thing with texture delta compression, there were people insisting for ages that it was bad and hurt image quality despite it being lossless, and that AMD's image quality was better despite them implementing the same lossless delta compression approaches in GCN3 (Tonga/Fiji). It's more bits delivered per bit, without even a real power usage hit (unlike GDDR6X which was an incredibly mixed bag). Or with Fiji's HBM and Vega's HBM2/HBCC supposedly being some magic thing that let you swap across a 16 GB/s pcie bus without any sort of framebuffer size limitation etc... the gaming community is real bad at critical understanding and thinking about some of this deeper tech stuff. https://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-r... https://www.anandtech.com/show/8460/amd-radeon-r9-285-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/8460/amd-radeon-r9-285-review... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ8YlXh-jbI&t=280s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ8YlXh-jbI&t=280s (Reviewers, on the other hand, there's really no excuse, and a lot of them are playing silly buggers largely at the expense of their viewers. People getting surprised by Alan Wake 2 that DX12U/DX12.2 is a thing that matters and is being adopted, people getting surprised that upscalers are a thing that matters and will matter more as UE5/6 and other intensive games come to rely on them, people getting surprised that mesh shaders reduce VRAM utilization, etc. They have basically done nothing to inform their viewers about any of the broader developments in the field other than whining about VRAM. It really does feel like a lot of the last 5 years has been a bunch of the reviewers being activists about the graphics field not going the way they want it to: they don't want upscaling, they want a return to moore's law and real raster gains etc, even though that's not possible and they understand perfectly well why. The trajectory of, eg, Steve Gamersnexus has really been something else, contrast his take on DX12 with his take on the RTX launch and DX12U/DX12.2. And pretty much everyone, too, continues to drag their feet on admitting DLSS is real framerate improvement etc that actually matters to card performance and efficiency etc. Reviewers discussed visual quality/pipeline quirks as part of GPU reviews for ages and it is increasingly going to be necessary again as more of this stuff is shunted into brand-specific platform libraries like DLSS, Metal, XeSS, and FSR. Doesn't matter if they don't wanna, it's necessary. It's very aggravating, for someone who wants to see the tech discussed and move forward.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qiQH29KAXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qiQH29KAXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=176s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=176s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=268 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=268 (just buy it!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu7pxJXBBn8&t=273s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu7pxJXBBn8&t=273s

by paulmd 3y ago

ksec 3y ago

They want the latest and greatest, ( Leading Node, Latest Software Development and Driver Update improvement ) while not willing to pay much for it. At the same time refuse to learn and understand why something cost as much. And worst case of all? They are also the ones who traded cryptos. The major reason why Nvidia GPU prices had been above average.

Zpalmtree 3y ago
source that crypto miners are complaining about gpu prices? from my experience, it's nearly always the gamers complaining, usually blaming crypto for them not being able to afford a GPU
- krunck 3y ago
  Do people still mine with GPUs? I thought ASICs blew that opportinity away a long time ago. Besides, we need to blame amateur AI enthusiasts for the high GPU prices now.
  - to11mtm 3y ago
    I believe ETH and it's offshoots (e.g. DOGE) didn't have major benefits for ASICs, or at the very least ASICs didn't 'blow away' GPUs the way they did for BTC.
- paulmd 3y ago
  idk about miners being primarily the ones who complain about prices, but honestly they might be a large number of the people who complain about memory bus reductions. RDNA2 was a relatively poor miner (worse than RDNA1) precisely because RDNA2 already did the same thing as Ada, replaced real bandwidth with cache. And generally that's fine and it performs well, because games are a pretty normal workload. But mining is deliberately completely random and uncacheable (otherwise you could cache the parts of the DAG that you need) and benefits more from the raw bandwidth, because the cache does ~nothing. Miners have always been fucking great at astroturfing, like in 2021-2022 they had a ton of people convinced that it was just some giant production shortage and NVIDIA just wasn't making any cards etc. Or the arguments about how the mining LHR limiter was "bad for gamers" because you wouldn't be able to mine as profitably in your spare time (of course ignoring that paying double MSRP in the first place kinda offsets that and in fact necessitates mining to even make the purchase make sense). Miners are fundamentally just nerds who post on tech forums and gaming forums and know what arguments are convincing and catch traction etc. Can I see those guys making a particular stink about the last source of super-wide memory bus cards drying up? Yes. They already bought up all the 5700XTs etc, Ampere was the last hurrah of the Big Memory Bus, and actually it would make sense if a ton of the outright agitators had some history in mining subs/etc. It shouldn't really matter to gamers where the bandwidth comes from. Yes, cache hit rates decline at higher resolutions, but in reasonable configurations (eg not 4060 at 4K) the cache systems on RDNA2 and Ada are basically seamless/transparent to gamers. Games are cacheable workloads. It's fine. Things like the yuzu dev running 16K downscaled to 4K and complaining he had some performance loss on a 4060 is the extreme exception. They're not transparent to miners though. In accordance with hanlon's law, however, I will admit that gamers are some extremely dumb motherfuckers (ahem, "often lack understanding of relevant technical details and frequently tend to bandwagon even when it doesn't make sense" etc) and it could just be people getting riled up about stuff they don't fully understand from semi-trusted tech-media figures telling them to be upset. We went through this same "it shouldn't matter how the bandwidth gets there" thing with texture delta compression, there were people insisting for ages that it was bad and hurt image quality despite it being lossless, and that AMD's image quality was better despite them implementing the same lossless delta compression approaches in GCN3 (Tonga/Fiji). It's more bits delivered per bit, without even a real power usage hit (unlike GDDR6X which was an incredibly mixed bag). Or with Fiji's HBM and Vega's HBM2/HBCC supposedly being some magic thing that let you swap across a 16 GB/s pcie bus without any sort of framebuffer size limitation etc... the gaming community is real bad at critical understanding and thinking about some of this deeper tech stuff. https://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-r... https://www.anandtech.com/show/8460/amd-radeon-r9-285-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/8460/amd-radeon-r9-285-review... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ8YlXh-jbI&t=280s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ8YlXh-jbI&t=280s (Reviewers, on the other hand, there's really no excuse, and a lot of them are playing silly buggers largely at the expense of their viewers. People getting surprised by Alan Wake 2 that DX12U/DX12.2 is a thing that matters and is being adopted, people getting surprised that upscalers are a thing that matters and will matter more as UE5/6 and other intensive games come to rely on them, people getting surprised that mesh shaders reduce VRAM utilization, etc. They have basically done nothing to inform their viewers about any of the broader developments in the field other than whining about VRAM. It really does feel like a lot of the last 5 years has been a bunch of the reviewers being activists about the graphics field not going the way they want it to: they don't want upscaling, they want a return to moore's law and real raster gains etc, even though that's not possible and they understand perfectly well why. The trajectory of, eg, Steve Gamersnexus has really been something else, contrast his take on DX12 with his take on the RTX launch and DX12U/DX12.2. And pretty much everyone, too, continues to drag their feet on admitting DLSS is real framerate improvement etc that actually matters to card performance and efficiency etc. Reviewers discussed visual quality/pipeline quirks as part of GPU reviews for ages and it is increasingly going to be necessary again as more of this stuff is shunted into brand-specific platform libraries like DLSS, Metal, XeSS, and FSR. Doesn't matter if they don't wanna, it's necessary. It's very aggravating, for someone who wants to see the tech discussed and move forward.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qiQH29KAXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qiQH29KAXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=176s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=176s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=268 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=268 (just buy it!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu7pxJXBBn8&t=273s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu7pxJXBBn8&t=273s