I don't nessesarily disagree with any of that, but tell me, do you think prices should remain the same forever or do you think its reasonable for Nvidia / AMD to price up with inflation?
The inflation meme for dGPUs is more fake news spread on social media by their PR to jack up prices. Why not use Zimbabwe and Turkey inflation rates? Then a £2000 RTX4070 would look great value.
There was fake news spread just before Kepler was released of how "expensive" 28NM was,etc and people kept repeating it when they priced the Titan at £1000. It did cost more but not to the level they were spinning.
Plenty of small and medium businesses in the UK are cutting margins,despite rising energy costs and interest rates in Europe so they have no entitlement to expect us to increase their margins. So why do these tech companies get a freebie? They don't especially as they get lots of tax breaks and money thrown at them by the US taxpayer like the CHIPs act. In 2018 Nvidia paid no Federal taxes. Let the US taxpayer prop them up - if Nvidia and AMD want us to prop them up build your stuff in Europe then and give us tax revenue. There is more chance of Intel doing than either Nvidia or AMD.
Plus the RTX3000 and RX6000 series were introduced 9~18 months into a Global Pandemic. China/Taiwan were locked down,global shipping costs were high,GDDR6 prices were high,labour disruptions. The RRPs reflected that as was the streetprice.
Remember this pricing was from last year,long before the recent AI hype.
If there was no Pandemic the RX6700XT would be priced at under £400. Why did you think Nvidia introduced the RTX3060
12GB,RTX3070TI and RTX3080TI? They realised they missed out on a payday so wanted to reset pricing. AMD launched later so the RX6600XT/RX6700XT had this baked in.
Plus lets look at the other factors:
1.)They are made in China and Taiwan.Chinese inflation is under 1% and Taiwanese inflation is under 2% so is not important.
2.)Chinese and Taiwanese energy costs are not affected by the problems in Europe.
3.)No more lockdowns,so free movement of labour.
4.)Global shipping companies are charging much less. Their profits have collapsed.
5.)GDDR6 pricing has collapsed.
6.)Components are much easier to get now.
So any increases in TSMC costs are more then compensated for by all the other costs dropping.
What these companies have done is overproduce dGPUs for miners and gamers willing to pay above RRP. This happened in 2017/2018 and why Turing was a ripoff.
They overproduced billions of USD of dGPUs,and greedily expected mining prices for the next few years. Now that mining has collapsed they need to spin to investors that this wasn't due to mining and it was "gaming demand". So they are desperately trying to normalise mining pricing.
No amount of inflation jusifies going from normal 30% to 40% improvements under £400,to suddenly this costing £600.
Its nothing but an unofficial gentlemans agreement.
Plus with the PS5 Pro rumoured to be a 60CU part released next year - you now need to spend £600 to keep up with a console?
Are these greedy companies trying to end mainstream PC gaming? It seems they want to.
