While they can price things as they see fit. However if they want people to actually buy...
... They have to offer something worth buying.
After pumping money out like no tomorrow since at least 911 (so close to 22 year), inflation has finally gone crazy now
Now they may say that is precisely why they want to increase prices, however a things to consider:
- GPUs are discretionary items. When the cost of living goes up, less people are going to be prepared to spend big on GPUs.
- Cheap credit is gone
- GPU inflation since 2001 has often been way above general inflation.
- While this started with halo "I am worth it" Titan cards, this is especially the case now at the lower and middle of the market.
- The total addressable market was or could be quite large nowadays as many more people worldwide have income where they could afford tech (although most of that is laptops, consoles and phones).
- The GPU manufacturer's costs truly have gone up, but not as much as they make out.
- A lot of the increased costs is fixed, so going for low volume, high margins makes even less sense.
Reasonable?
Maybe but short-termism is going to kill the gaming golden goose.
Neither Nvidia or AMD may care, but there are things to consider:
- While I expect Nvidia's AI hype to continue for some years still as few other companies can stand them and as GPUs aren't really the best for AI work and barriers to entry (aka the patent wall) isn't that large for both AI uses.
- so most big players will make their own. Google Tensor, Tesla Dojo were simply the first, but almost everyone else doing their own. Partially because working with Nvidia is no fun, and costly, but also because custom chips are going to be much cheaper.
- AMD only really have the console market and of course dGPUs compete with CPU and especially server GPUs.
I really think one of the two will come back crawling for gamer sales but if in the meantime they have killed the market?