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GPU price inflation over the last decade

arknor said:
It''s insane that gaming was cheaper when it was niche..
anything to do with gaming has a big idiot tax on it now, yet were told capitalism should mean things get cheaper as demand increases...... when in reality they see they can just milk more profit margins out of people

30jun 2015
MSI GeForce GTX 980Ti £599.99 (thats release month)
look how NVDA profit margin changed as prices went insane, 2015/2016 is the last time GPUs were anywhere near reasonable
Tvp8Ipx.jpg

Thats Net profit btw.......

yea all their revenue isn't from GPU's but still it's clear that they decided to up the profit margin the company makes.

seems to be a trend with most companies
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I can see the profit margin skyrocketing obviously but I am actually surprised the profit margin is so "low". I presumed it would be closer to 50% with Ampere.
 
Price has inflated along with performance. Cheaper overall today since something like a 1050ti is faster than a gtx480 and considerably cheaper too... Assuming you dont get scalped.
 
arknor said:
It''s insane that gaming was cheaper when it was niche..
anything to do with gaming has a big idiot tax on it now, yet were told capitalism should mean things get cheaper as demand increases...... when in reality they see they can just milk more profit margins out of people
Click to expand...
Surely capitalism states: make as much money as possible.

The apologists for a totally unregulated market say that the 'invisible' hand of the market will force competition.

In theory, maybe.

But the thing is both Nvidia and AMD have so many GPU patents that new entrants will find it very problematic to not step on one of those.

And even if they did, where would they get them made? TSMC/Samsung/Intel have 1000s of manufacturing patents

If ensuring competition was on governments agenda, patent holders would be forced to licence with royalties decided independently.

As with anything, the incumbent players will lobby (i.e. bribe) their way to ensure things don't change.

About the only thing capitalist here is the crazy amounts of capital it takes to construct a leading edge silicon manufacturing foundry.

Which is another huge barrier to entry and hence competition.

Even having state sponsorship (which most 'free market' players have had in huge amounts at various points) is no guarantee, witness SMIC being targeted by the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Manufacturing_International_Corporation#U.S._sanctions

EDIT:
The most telling thing about patent law never changing is that in the midst of a global pandemic, there was barely any talk of changing pharmaceutical patents. If not now, then never?
 
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Quartz said:
A key factor is that there's no competition on price. Demand exceeds supply so suppliers can charge what they think the market will bear. I have high hopes of the next few years: with Intel entering the fray the supply problems should vanish and we should see prices trending downwards.
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I'll take the other side of that bet. Intel entering the GPU market even with decent hardware=NOT much difference in GPU prices.
We'll still be in the commodity shortage inflation spike even 5 years from now!
Competition won't make that much difference to prices this time.
I am a market expert remember!
 
A perfect storm created this situation (covid, mining, supply and demand) and another perfect storm can completely reverse it. Intel entering the market, lots of second hand gpus on sale after mining becomes non-profitable and supply exceeding demand significantly.
 
Bill Turnip said:
I'm not sure top GPU prices are coming down for a while, if ever either. I am not a market expert though. One of us must be wrong!
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I think I should clarify this - I mean the msrp prices. The current inflated prices will correct to a degree I believe, but GPUs won't be cheap.

One other thing people state is that another competitor entering the market will result in lowering prices. If it was a no-name brand starting from scratch? Possibly, it makes logical sense. But Intel are well established in the computer world, if not for discrete GPUs. They may be able to claim an "Intel Tax" resulting in them entering at a higher price than another brand necessarily would.

It will give more options, but if they are all at the same price? I don't see any improvement for the consumer. If the producer is able to sell all they can make (regardless of who to), why would they lower their price? Its not currently the number of competitors, but the cost and availability of the raw materials. There's no difference between 2, 3 or 8 brands if they are all out of stock.

Pretty sure if Nvidia or AMD could make more to sell, they would - there's no real benefit to holding onto stock which will be obsolete in a relatively short amount of time. Who they sell them to and how many is a different matter and, unfortunately, up to them.

All the above are just opinions, could very well be wrong!
 
DarkBahamut said:
The problem with inflation for computer components
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The real problem with 'inflation' for computer components is it is rarely measuring inflation in the sense of measuring the change in cost of either the same product, or one giving comparable performance. People typically scale it with hardware progress so they expect to pay the same money for something much more powerful. So it's kind of normalised relative to the rate of progress in tech.

6950 is a naff card in 2021, I wouldn't pay £160 for a new card with the same performance today.
 
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