Blackwell gpus

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

We need to realise we are on a tech forum,which is an echo chamber. Just like an audiophile forum,or a performance car forum,etc. I know very few gamers with dGPUs over £500 and those who spend more than that keep their cards for a very long time. I know zero people with a card over £1000. Even Steam has cards such as the RTX4060 and RTX3060 at the top - most PC gamers buy prebuilt desktops and laptops to game on. Around half of dGPU sales are in laptops AFAIK!

 

[Ayahuasca]

We need to realise we are on a tech forum,which is an echo chamber. Just like an audiophile forum,or a performance car forum,etc. I know very few gamers with dGPUs over £500 and those who spend more than that keep their cards for a very long time. I know zero people with a card over £1000. Even Steam has cards such as the RTX4060 and RTX3060 at the top - most PC gamers buy prebuilt desktops and laptops to game on. Around half of dGPU sales are in laptops AFAIK!

I think everyone understands that, but those people aren't the ones driving nVidia's price increases.

Anecdotally, I also know people who own high-end graphics cards, who don't make a lot of money and they don't post on here or Reddit or whatever. The dynamics of consumer spending have also changed, with more people willing and able to take on debt for luxury items.

 

[brostradamus]

someone scraping the bottom of the barrel is perhaps not a target market for nvidia, ofcourse there are outliers but the pricing has to aim for a sweet spot at which people become indifferent between what they currently own and the incoming replacement - its a rational business decision not based purely on outliers (on either side)

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I think everyone understands that, but those people aren't the ones driving nVidia's price increases.

Apple and Samsung started all this with modern electronics. They pushed the top end up and shrinkflated their whole range. Don't believe me? Look at the S20FE and now compare all the replacements,or how the A series has now been pushed up in price. It's those two companies which set the modern precedence for this - everyone is trying to copy it because it sadly seems to work well.

Once the high end pushes the max ceiling up,the rest of the range is rejigged to fill that gap. This is why people like me were worried about what the original Titan did,when it essentially doubled the price of the GTX580 in one generation and sold very well. It's why AMD is now copying the same tactic - just look at Zen3,Zen4 and Zen5 launch pricing?

On a related note, I know people who own high-end graphics cards, who don't make a lot of money and they don't post on here or Reddit or whatever. The dynamics of consumer spending have also changed, with more people willing and able to take on debt for luxury items.

I know lots of gamers and I have not known anyone with a £1000+ card. But most of these people have families,etc and have other spending considerations too and other hobbies. So probably casual gamers for want of a better description.They don't care if they have to turn a few settings down or can't get 600FPS in Fornite or COD. But at the same time,most will only ever buy Nvidia,because frankly that is mostly what is available in laptops or desktops. AMD absolutely failed in leveraging the Zen platform to sell its own cards - Nvidia seems to simply understand the market better.

The people I know who will even spend anywhere close to that,tend to be tech heads for want of a better description. So obsess about FPS,or whether they have to turn a setting down,etc. I knew one guy who was always like that and it became a bit compulsive. But it's no different than people who are too much into Hi-Fi or other hobbies. Even if such people don't post on forums/social media they to also lurk a lot.

Nothing wrong with it either,but companies whether its dGPU makers,makers of Hi-Fi,etc seem to be increasingly pushing the boat to ridiculous levels.

I used to be a bit like that a long time ago,until I realised I just wasted too much money. So decided to stick to my budget. If I can't get something which fulfills my expectation I will wait. If I need to reduce settings,or ignore playing some games for now,then be it. I have enough games to tide me over.

 

[TNA]

Apple and Samsung started all this with modern electronics. They pushed the top end up and shrinkflated their whole range. Don't believe me? Look at the S20FE and now compare all the replacements,or how the A series has now been pushed up in price. It's those two companies which set the modern precedence for this - everyone is trying to copy it because it sadly seems to work well.

Once the high end pushes the max ceiling up,the rest of the range is rejigged to fill that gap. This is why people like me were worried about what the original Titan did,when it essentially doubled the price of the GTX580 in one generation and sold very well. It's why AMD is now copying the same tactic - just look at Zen3,Zen4 and Zen5 launch pricing?


I know lots of gamers and I have not known anyone with a £1000+ card. But most of these people have families,etc and have other spending considerations too and other hobbies. So probably casual gamers for want of a better description.They don't care if they have to turn a few settings down or can't get 600FPS in Fornite or COD. But at the same time,most will only ever buy Nvidia,because frankly that is mostly what is available in laptops or desktops. AMD absolutely failed in leveraging the Zen platform to sell its own cards - Nvidia seems to simply understand the market better.

The people I know who will even spend anywhere close to that,tend to be tech heads for want of a better description. So obsess about FPS,or whether they have to turn a setting down,etc. I knew one guy who was always like that and it became a bit compulsive. But it's no different than people who are too much into Hi-Fi or other hobbies. Even if such people don't post on forums/social media they to also lurk a lot.

Nothing wrong with it either,but companies whether its dGPU makers,makers of Hi-Fi,etc seem to be increasingly pushing the boat to ridiculous levels.

I used to be a bit like that a long time ago,until I realised I just wasted too much money. So decided to stick to my budget. If I can't get something which fulfills my expectation I will wait. If I need to reduce settings,or ignore playing some games for now,then be it. I have enough games to tide me over.

You probably have sensible friends and he has yolo one's

I could easily got a 5090. Will I? Nope. Will just wait for something I consider a decent deal and sell what I have and get that.

I got a S24 Ultra at few months ago as you know. Brand new directly from Samsung. Ended up costing £355 after Quidco paid me

Only way I would get a 5090 is if I was retired and had loads of gaming time. Then I could justify it. Right now I barely get time to game. Not relative to how much I used to anyway.

Will still keep an eye out for a 5070/80 though. If the price sucks will just wait for a good deal or price error or something

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You probably have sensible friends and he has yolo one's

I could easily got a 5090. Will I? Nope. Will just wait for something I consider a decent deal and sell what I have and get that.

I got a S24 Ultra at few months ago as you know. Brand new directly from Samsung. Ended up costing £355 after Quidco paid me

Only way I would get a 5090 is if I was retired and had loads of gaming time. Then I could justify it. Right now I barely get time to game. Not relative to how much I used to anyway.

Will still keep an eye out for a 5070/80 though. If the price sucks will just wait for a good deal or price error or something

Unfortunately it seems waiting for a pricing error or cashback deal is the only way forward nowadays if you want a decent deal. Still annoyed I missed that S24 Ultra deal,but have to console myself with getting my camera on the cheap.

 

[Nitefly]

2k is abt lets say you are finishing 80-100 games through the lifetime of the card, works out to approx. 20-25 per finished game.. thats about 50% of a newly released title, so objectively speaking it doesnt look reasonable (but this is a GPU thread)
but dont you worry new games will soon be releasing at 100 price point, so the math will work out favorably

This is an insanely good argument for me to not upgrade.

I suppose you take into account all the busywork and fun of designing, planning and building a new machine but if you don’t game much… yeah it is kind of insane to spend that much haha.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

This is an insanely good argument for me to not upgrade.

I suppose you take into account all the busywork and fun of designing, planning and building a new machine but if you don’t game much… yeah it is kind of insane to spend that much haha.

But then you need a sufficiently good rig to avoid bottlenecking the graphics card!

 

[thefreeman0001]

wonder what special software that will only run on the 5000 series has yet to be revealed.

 

[BigBANGtheory]

wonder what special software that will only run on the 5000 series has yet to be revealed.

well pretty anything you want to run on the Pimax Crystal Super tbh

 

[gpuerrilla]

But then you need a sufficiently good rig to avoid bottlenecking the graphics card!

Agree. If you add in ray tracing, rtx hdr for example, some features you also tax the cpu. Dropping in a powerful GPU may not yield stunning results if your choking elsewhere.

 

[Nitefly]

But then you need a sufficiently good rig to avoid bottlenecking the graphics card!

Maybe - depends on display / target fps.

My current way of thinking is dropping a 5090 into my 5950x rig - try to hit 100 FPS at 4K. Will I spend about £700 upgrading to AM5 for a few % points? Hmm, doubt it tbh.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Maybe - depends on display / target fps.

My current way of thinking is dropping a 5090 into my 5950x rig - try to hit FPS. Will I spend about £700 upgrading to AM5? Hmm, doubt it tbh.

Increasingly you are starting to see CPU bottlenecks coming into play. Part of the RT calculations,ie,the BVH Calculations are done on the CPU. Just an example of two games tested:

CPU limitations with RT

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So for some games with RT,you will actually get a big boost by upgrading the CPU first.

 

[humbug]

@CAT-THE-FIFTH in 2005 the 7800 GTX was $600, adjusted for inflation that's $970.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

@CAT-THE-FIFTH in 2005 the 7800 GTX was $600, adjusted for inflation that's $970.

Which was the top end product of the era and still considered overpriced for the time! The X1900XTX was $400.

Then you had the 7900GS,X1900GT and X1950 PRO within one year of the launch of the 7800GTX too. They were around the $250 mark IIRC.

 

[humbug]

Which was the top end product of the era and still considered overpriced for the time! The X1900XTX was $400.

Which is $650 today, 67% the price, i don't think much has changed, other than the ##90 class cards now.

 

[Nitefly]

Increasingly you are starting to see CPU bottlenecks coming into play. Part of the RT calculations,ie,the BVH Calculations are done on the CPU. Just an example of two games tested:

CPU limitations with RT

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So for some games with RT,you will actually get a big boost by upgrading the CPU first.

Yup maybe. Currently have a 3090 so pretty sure the 5090 will be best ‘single thing’ to upgrade, if I were to compromise.

And tbh compromise is sensible considering how little I game.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Which is $650 today, 67% the price, i don't think much has changed, other than the ##90 class cards now.

$400 is $624 in 2024,or £476(under £600 with VAT). Even the Nvidia card would be £700 now(under £900 with VAT).Within a year,cards costing 40% of the price matched it or slightly beat it.The 7900GS would be under £400 with VAT in the UK. The prices also dropped rapidly too for all these cards. I know as I had a 7900GS and X1900GT.

The same goes with the 8800GTX - very expensive at launch and the 8800GT/8800GTS came within a year and matched it at a fraction of the cost.Even a GTX580 would be under £700 in today's money. That was the best consumer chip.

Also there was no 90 class card. The 90 class card/Titan class was pretty much the the 80 series card jacked up in price.

The 70 series card used to be the large die 80 series chip,slightly disabled. So the 70 series morphed into the 80/80ti series after Fermi.

The 60 series became the equivalent 70 series in terms of chip size,specifications,etc.

The GTX560TI was 75% of the shaders of the GTX580!

This was the same point at which mainstream 60 series cards start to stop being "mid-range" anymore.

The reason why Ampere was considered good is because for once the large dies were used in the 60,70 and 80 series products.

Yup maybe. Currently have a 3090 so pretty sure the 5090 will be best ‘single thing’ to upgrade, if I were to compromise.

And tbh compromise is sensible considering how little I game.

TechPowerUp had CPU limitations on their Zen3 based test rig when they reviewed the RTX4090,so had to redo all their tests with a faster CPU!

 

[Tinek]

nvidia uses hardware schedulers, its just that its limited in functionality because of nvidia's simple architecture which does not require complex pipeline mgmt, often in most scenarios all functional units can run independent of each other

Ok, to clarify what I meant, on the very low level both Nvidia and AMD use now simple hardware schedulers. However, the whole prep of workload is done on the CPU and it's part of the scheduling as well - scheduling pipeline includes both. Now, if the scheduler in hardware is good enough you can offload some CPU tasks to it (that's what the scheduling hardware acceleration for GPU does in Windows). In case of most games and programs, it does very little, that Windows setting, for Nvidia GPUs around 5% on average. No experience with current AMD generation but it seems to be the same situation - hence we can see cpu overhead and bottleneck in older games especially and that is why Nvidia was able to redesign and in a way cheat DX11 games to turn single threaded CPU scheduling into multi threaded, winning against AMD who was stuck with their fancy hardware schedulers they couldn't easily update in drivers. Dx12 reverted the situation though, with AMDs solution being faster. Vulkan seems to be good for both these days. Anyway, in the end, Nvidia can still improve their bits in drivers most likely. Big hardware changes are unlikely as both brands seem to be relying on compilers doing a good job instead of making hardware schedulers do it.

 

[Tinek]

The vast majority of games I play I buy for a fraction of the new price using steam key sites. The PC has such an extensive back catalogue of games, many of which look amazing and eat up more GPU power, that I don't see reason to pay top dollar for newly released games unless it's really something special.

Steam key sites? If I understand you correctly, might as well just download pirate version, as at least you don't feed scammers monies. Which is what a lot of Devs (indie especially) say openly - they rather you pirate it than give money to people who steal keys, credit cards etc.