Gone in 60.121 seconds: Your guide to the pricey new gear Nvidia teased at its annual GPU fest Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang flaunted a bunch of stuff, from bigger boxes of graphics chips to robot simulators, at its 2018 GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in Silicon Valley on Tuesday. Here's a quick summary of what went down, minus the fluff. Huang acknowledged in a Q&A session that there is indeed a shortage right now of top- …
But it would not surprise me if Nvidia/AMD are taking advantage and limiting availability - after all, who would not want there product to increase in value? Saying that RRP it self does not seem to have increased, so perhaps better to assume its the resellers taking advantage..
Either way, it is frustrating, I'm not a massive gamer.. but do keep a box for when the urge hits (usually when a new Fallout/Mass effect type game is coming). I recently decided its time to upgrade my 4 year old box.. I discovered the GFX card alone, cost more than everything else combined (mid-range Ryzen, 16GB RAM, large SSD etc).
I'd also love to build a new game-capable PC but it's not feasible right now due to crazy prices and expectation of new GPUs from Nvidia.
The blame for high GPU prices is on cryptocurrency miners (thanks, twats) and to a lesser extent price of DRAM, which is high due to demand for memory in phones and other devices. That's the common story. Any alternative explanations would be fun to read.
I think they see this glut coming, so they release a new Titan for £3000. Then it will be a mid range x70 equivalent Volta for £700 and the x80 at £1000 ( then bring out the Ti for £1200) and you've re-based what people think they need to pay for a graphics card. Produce them in fairly limited numbers so you aren't adding to that slump in demand when the crypto crowd move on. The bonus is that everyone will have forgotten that £350 for a graphics card used to be considered quite a lot of money.
I'm still with my GTX970 and I can't see me getting anything to replace it any time soon.
And this lets AMD compete on price. And eventually, squeeze Nvidia out of the volume midrange market (and scratching on the bottom end of the enthusiast market) by releasing APUs similar to Intel's Kaby Lake-G. Could come in a year or so (when they move to 7 nm).
I guess Nvidia would actually be willing to sacrifice mainstream to keep margins up. I'm well aware that AMD was unable to overtake Nvidia in market share even when they had superior products at much better prices (Evergreen vs. Fermi), but I wonder if gamers would be similarly willing to pay $800 for GeForce that has similar performance to $500 Radeon?
Ramping up price? Have you priced Nvidia cards lately? Until my 2016 build, I've never spent more than $350 on a video card. I wanted the 1080 for my new oculus rig in the summer of 2016 and it set me back a whopping $700 (that was after watching prices for a month and waiting for a sale, it was normally 799-850$). The same card is still hovering over 550$ right now with no sign of dropping.
I can understand RAM prices (especially GDDR5) raising costs 100-150$ but 300-400$??
On a side note, I bought 32GB of DDR4 2400 in July 2016 for 116$ on N.E., that same ram is 369$ right now. These component manufacturers need to realize that gouging builders at this level is only going to hurt them in the long run. I've got 4 other computers in my house and none of them are getting any upgrades until prices return to normal... that's 4 sets of everything that manufacturers will not be selling to me (and I'm a single IT pro with LOTS of disposable money). If I won't fork it out, I can imagine the budget computer enthusiasts are shaking their heads even harder.
Someone needs to take down these RAM manufacturer CEOs again for price fixing, just like we had to do back in 2003.... oh and I think in 2008... seems to be a pattern here (and it bleeds to all component vendors across the board).
The trouble is that there's only so many factories capable of producing a modern chip, and they're all being used already.
It takes years and millions of dollars/pounds/yen/etc. to start up a new chip fab, so there's no quick opportunity for nVidia (or AMD or Intel etc.) to increase production.
If cryptomining on GPUs is still a profitable business in four-five years I expect the chip makers to be producing 'mining cards' specifically geared towards that, as well as their gaming and workstation GPUs, but that's a pretty big 'if' for a GPU manufacturer to invest millions right now...
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