People need to stop using Stockholm Syndrome for our hobby,and justifying price increases?? Gamers are just acting like Whales now. The GDDR6 "price" being one of them. None of you have any clue what the actual price AMD/Nvidia/Intel/Sony/MS are paying for any of this which is far less than you think. Remember that report about TSMC jacking up prices?? Apparently its only 5% for AMD being a large customer.
Samsung are also cheaper than TSMC - Nvidia must be paying even less than we think for their chips.
Don't some of you understand these companies might be just putting out fake news about the real prices,to make it easier to price stuff higher?? Do any of you think the large semiconductor companies will tell you the ACTUAL LARGE SCALE and LONGTERM volume pricing?? They won't.
Just like MS charges people £100 for an OEM Windows license but for decades just charged OEMs far less.
Sony can sell the disk version of the PS5,with 16GB of GDDR6,a 300MM2~400MM2 SOC,PCI-E 4.0 SSD - all custom designed,and also no doubt helped contribute towards RDNA2 R and D costs too. AMD is selling a motherboard with a failed PS5 SOC with no GPU and 16GB GDDR6,and I doubt it can be sold for more than a Ryzen 7 3700X and 16GB of DDR4,because it is probably slower(the PS5 CPU has reduced AVX capability compared to desktop Zen2 CPUs).
But,if you look at the net margins of Nvidia/AMD they are all up,and in the case of AMD their console business is lower margin,so they are probably making massive margins on the current GPUs. OFC,they will spin to everyone else they are making a pittance.
Nvidia is even making more per GPU than AMD - people have forgotten that the 2020 Ampere/RDNA2 releases were priced during a pandemic too.All the AIB partners are having record years. Even the arguments about shipping costs seem to forget just before the pandemic costs were at an all time low - the current costs are closer to that 5~10 years ago.
Hardware enthusiasts on tech forums need to stop justifying all these price increases - these companies are laughing in your faces and running away to the bank,and their CEOs getting nice big bonus,on your backs.
Lots of other parts like phones,etc are not seeing similar price increases. Even CPUs seem to have settled down in price. SSDs,PSUs,motherboards,etc all seem to be OK price. Only GPUs seem to be going up by such massive amounts - because the markets is being controlled by mining and gaming whales,who will pay beyond the odds for them. Then use mental gymnastics to pay through the nose for GPUs.
Its like drug addicts justifying whatever price their drug dealer quotes to them.
As Steve from Gamersnexus said - its not really our problem to care about their "cost increases".
Some of you have learnt nothing from your repeated excuse making for the last decade. So many "experts" here justified £1000 Nvidia Titan GPUs back in 2012 because "TSMC 28NM" and "GDDR5" cost a lot more and "R and D" cost a lot.
Yet,the moment they could get away with jacking up the price,their gross/net margins went up massively over the next 9 years.
Companies like Nvidia in 2018,despite record profits and margins paid no Federal taxes - these companies are getting tons of taxpayer support already.