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> either pass on that savings or make more profit. Has Nvidia ever passed on savings? It seems to be the opposite to how they operate.

rvba 3y ago
During the time cryptocurrency miners were buying out all the cards, nvidia could sell cards at auctions to skim the profit.
- to11mtm 3y ago
  That would not sit well with all sorts of regulators, may not be the best counter-argument?
paulmd 3y ago
3080, 3060 ti, maxwell...
- justinclift 3y ago
  Not sure what you're meaning there?
  - paulmd 3y ago
    those are high-value products/gens where nvidia did indeed “pass along the savings”. Turing and ampere as a whole were already below the price increase curve due to the trailing node. Ampere certainly was a massive attempt at passing the savings through - 3060 ti and 3080 were both really aggressively priced and were great overall products. Notoriously, 3060 ti was so aggressively priced that partners didn’t even want to make it at msrp… And Turing is another example of the “AMD is subject to the same overall industry price trends/not able to drastically beat nvidia pricing either” too - sure, AMD leapt ahead to 7nm early with 5700xt… and this was more expensive than Nvidia’s solution with Turing, such that AMD was not able to undercut Nvidia’s pricing. Those cost increases have been eating up the density gains for a long time now. Nvidia is really actually doing the things that keep the costs down, and ampere and Turing indeed bent the cost curve below where it would otherwise have been. It’s obviously not going to stay fixed, the era of $100 and $150 gaming gpus being serious contenders has obviously long since come to a close, and now it’s happening for $200-300 gpus too, $500-600 is where a $300 gpu was 10 years ago. People just don’t have any way to objectively determine what “true” prices should be, and refuse to believe the true price is rising because it offends their “gamer” worldview. It has to be gouging, otherwise I don’t get a new Sony GameStation X every 2 years at the exact same price, and that can’t be possible. https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-moores-law-aint-dead-its-just-a-whole-lot-more-expensive/ https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-moores-law-aint-dead-its-just-a-...
    - justinclift 3y ago
      > those are high-value products/gens where nvidia did indeed “pass along the savings”. You've got to be joking. The 3000 series cards weren't any kind of "pass along savings", and this generation after it have pricing best called "taking the piss". Widely regarded as "price gouging". You're probably the very first person on earth to try telling people those cards are cheap (with a straight face). I don't think you're going to be able to convince anyone that you're right.
      - paulmd 3y ago
        if you don't think 3060 ti and 3080 and 970/980 ti were cheap products in the overall sense of the cost-trend of the market... you might be a fanboy. I've said it before and it's true today: a lot of people don't think of themselves as fanboys, they just constantly say all the same things fanboys say and think all the things fanboys think. The ayymd discourse permeates the online discussions of all these things such that people can no longer determine what's biased and what's not. Moreover, as I've said before, a lot of people's sense on pricing today is just miscalibrated and often they're outright hallucinating on past prices. GTX 970 was the cheaper x70 ever released - the segment has bounced between $350 and $400 since it was introduced, and $349 in 2010 was a lot more money than it is now. And people don't have a good sense of just how much costs have grown and are growing - most people don't even bother accounting for CPI in these discussions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces... GTX 670: $533 in 2023 dollars (cutdown of 294mm2 die)
        justinclift 3y ago
        No worries. You certainly have a unique perspective. ;)
solardev 3y ago
GeForce Now is an incredible value for gamers. For $20/mo you get a 4080 streamed from the cloud, 6 hours at a time (and you can just relaunch after that). It has a smallish library, but the games it supports run very well. This first party service is miles ahead of their competitors, many of who also use their cards. Shadow, for example, costs 3x as much for a worse experience. I don't really understand how they can make the economics of it work. which worries me, especially as their AI work is just printing money. I wonder if it's just a matter of time before they abandon the gaming market.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Hmmm, at $20/mo (for 6 hours at a time) then each of those 4080's is able to bring in $80/mo of revenue. That's about $1k per year. Seems potentially reasonable if that's amortised over a few years.
  - solardev 3y ago
    You're not limited to 6 hours per day (though that's a lot of gaming anyway). But I doubt people are playing in optimally spread out times, i.e. it's usually a lot busier in the evenings, and on weekends and holidays. So they have to plan for bursty peaks and a lot of bandwidth that can't be cached or CDNed (it's all generated in real-time), heat management (bunch of GPUs running at full blast), virtualizing and isolating every user's Steam instance, etc. And of course all the staff it takes to manage the whole thing, test games, fix issues, etc. The other cloud gaming providers need to do the same thing, and they either cost more and/or have worse hardware and/or have publisher relationships. Xbox and PS streaming use actual consoles and are much less powerful, for example, Shadow costs a lot more for worse hardware, Luna works with publishers, Stadia just gave up before ever really trying (lol), etc. Maybe in Nvidia's case, at least they can get the GPUs at cost, and maybe use them for non gaming async workloads during off peak times? I dunno. I just hope they keep GFN going; it's completely replaced my desktop PC.

rvba 3y ago

During the time cryptocurrency miners were buying out all the cards, nvidia could sell cards at auctions to skim the profit.

to11mtm 3y ago
That would not sit well with all sorts of regulators, may not be the best counter-argument?

paulmd 3y ago

3080, 3060 ti, maxwell...

justinclift 3y ago
Not sure what you're meaning there?
- paulmd 3y ago
  those are high-value products/gens where nvidia did indeed “pass along the savings”. Turing and ampere as a whole were already below the price increase curve due to the trailing node. Ampere certainly was a massive attempt at passing the savings through - 3060 ti and 3080 were both really aggressively priced and were great overall products. Notoriously, 3060 ti was so aggressively priced that partners didn’t even want to make it at msrp… And Turing is another example of the “AMD is subject to the same overall industry price trends/not able to drastically beat nvidia pricing either” too - sure, AMD leapt ahead to 7nm early with 5700xt… and this was more expensive than Nvidia’s solution with Turing, such that AMD was not able to undercut Nvidia’s pricing. Those cost increases have been eating up the density gains for a long time now. Nvidia is really actually doing the things that keep the costs down, and ampere and Turing indeed bent the cost curve below where it would otherwise have been. It’s obviously not going to stay fixed, the era of $100 and $150 gaming gpus being serious contenders has obviously long since come to a close, and now it’s happening for $200-300 gpus too, $500-600 is where a $300 gpu was 10 years ago. People just don’t have any way to objectively determine what “true” prices should be, and refuse to believe the true price is rising because it offends their “gamer” worldview. It has to be gouging, otherwise I don’t get a new Sony GameStation X every 2 years at the exact same price, and that can’t be possible. https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-moores-law-aint-dead-its-just-a-whole-lot-more-expensive/ https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-moores-law-aint-dead-its-just-a-...
  - justinclift 3y ago
    > those are high-value products/gens where nvidia did indeed “pass along the savings”. You've got to be joking. The 3000 series cards weren't any kind of "pass along savings", and this generation after it have pricing best called "taking the piss". Widely regarded as "price gouging". You're probably the very first person on earth to try telling people those cards are cheap (with a straight face). I don't think you're going to be able to convince anyone that you're right.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      if you don't think 3060 ti and 3080 and 970/980 ti were cheap products in the overall sense of the cost-trend of the market... you might be a fanboy. I've said it before and it's true today: a lot of people don't think of themselves as fanboys, they just constantly say all the same things fanboys say and think all the things fanboys think. The ayymd discourse permeates the online discussions of all these things such that people can no longer determine what's biased and what's not. Moreover, as I've said before, a lot of people's sense on pricing today is just miscalibrated and often they're outright hallucinating on past prices. GTX 970 was the cheaper x70 ever released - the segment has bounced between $350 and $400 since it was introduced, and $349 in 2010 was a lot more money than it is now. And people don't have a good sense of just how much costs have grown and are growing - most people don't even bother accounting for CPI in these discussions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces... GTX 670: $533 in 2023 dollars (cutdown of 294mm2 die)
      - justinclift 3y ago
        No worries. You certainly have a unique perspective. ;)

solardev 3y ago

GeForce Now is an incredible value for gamers. For $20/mo you get a 4080 streamed from the cloud, 6 hours at a time (and you can just relaunch after that). It has a smallish library, but the games it supports run very well. This first party service is miles ahead of their competitors, many of who also use their cards. Shadow, for example, costs 3x as much for a worse experience. I don't really understand how they can make the economics of it work. which worries me, especially as their AI work is just printing money. I wonder if it's just a matter of time before they abandon the gaming market.

justinclift 3y ago
Hmmm, at $20/mo (for 6 hours at a time) then each of those 4080's is able to bring in $80/mo of revenue. That's about $1k per year. Seems potentially reasonable if that's amortised over a few years.
- solardev 3y ago
  You're not limited to 6 hours per day (though that's a lot of gaming anyway). But I doubt people are playing in optimally spread out times, i.e. it's usually a lot busier in the evenings, and on weekends and holidays. So they have to plan for bursty peaks and a lot of bandwidth that can't be cached or CDNed (it's all generated in real-time), heat management (bunch of GPUs running at full blast), virtualizing and isolating every user's Steam instance, etc. And of course all the staff it takes to manage the whole thing, test games, fix issues, etc. The other cloud gaming providers need to do the same thing, and they either cost more and/or have worse hardware and/or have publisher relationships. Xbox and PS streaming use actual consoles and are much less powerful, for example, Shadow costs a lot more for worse hardware, Luna works with publishers, Stadia just gave up before ever really trying (lol), etc. Maybe in Nvidia's case, at least they can get the GPUs at cost, and maybe use them for non gaming async workloads during off peak times? I dunno. I just hope they keep GFN going; it's completely replaced my desktop PC.