I didn't know that..they're going to be a tier higher in cost, they're already expensive.
If we look back then the 980ti and 1080 were both around £400 on launch. The 1080ti was a step up at £600+, great card but this was the first real price increase for a top tier gpu for a long time. This was then followed by the stupidely overpriced 2080/2080ti and these did not sell well for a variety of reasons , good cards but not enough of a boost over a 1080ti to be worthwhile and they were just overpriced so they sold relatively poorly. I had never paid over £200 for a gpu until I bought a 1080 for £400, real kick in the teeth but I glad I did because the first mining wave came right after and nothing was available for a year.
The 3080 release was a return to the £650 price point and if you could actually get your hands on a card for this price they were incredible value for money. The poor sales for the 2080ti is the most likely reason for this price drop or maybe they knew AMDs RDNA2 was going to be competitive but it doesnt really matter why.
Now onto the 4000 series cards coming soon. Built on TSMC 5nm process, great but expensive and TSMC pushed the price up for these wafers. Monolithic die so you lose more chips per die than smaller gpus die. Assume a large framebuffer of expensive GDDR. I assume Nvidia knew they underpriced the 3000 series card. Not going to be cheap is my thoughts for these upcoming cards.
AMD RDNA3. Multi-chip gpus for the first time, lot of silicon in these chips and every single transistor has a cost. Also on TSMC 5nm so expensive , huge framebuffer expected and thats is costly as well. May be awesome , may be terrible , may be somewhere in between or a mix of all 3 depending on the game. I really hope NV and AMD are neck and neck performance wise because that helps keep prices down. If one team has a large advantage they take the opportunity to make more profits and that not good for us the consumers.
Will we see a situation similar to the 3070 matching the 2080ti in performance for half the price? I just do not know but I doubt it because I am expecting the 4070 to not be £450 like the 3070 was and I am thinking it will be closer to £600 with the 4080 being £800+ on launch. Last I heard the 4090 was going to come first so we can more accureatly predict the rest of the cards once we have a price for that one.
One last thing. Pricing is starting to be leaked for AMD 7000 series cpus and they are approx 10-15% higher than the 5000 chips. Is also on the TSMC 5nm node iirc so its not a cheap process to use.
