Inflation adjusted price history of nVidia GPUs

Freddie1980 · 14 Mar 2017 at 11:43

They have ignored the Titan completely which is Nvidia's true high end card (excluding dual chip cards) which is skewing the numbers as they practically invented a brand new price point that previously never existed. I know some will argue their geared more towards more then just gaming but that was only the originally Titan and every Titan on release has been marketed toward gamer's.

TheRealDeal · 14 Mar 2017 at 11:47

Titan should be in there as well. Let's not forget that most of the older parts before gtx680 were the biggest and baddest chip Nvidia could give you and we're the Titans of the day.

Curlyriff · 14 Mar 2017 at 11:52

I was just using what we had but I can certainly add them in later this afternoon for you all to see. What I think is interesting is that it appears you should not go fro the non-ti and would be better with the model below and wait for the ti to arrive if you want best bang for buck as they come out.

Curlyriff · 14 Mar 2017 at 12:26

So the titans are added in accordingly.

With that the last % shown is the total average that we have seen as the "UK Tax" on electronics without of course any local tax so we are assuming worst case for the UK and best case for US buyers who are in a state that can purchase from Amazon with no sales tax.

Further to that of course different places had different prices. I have always tried to select reference design as a base or the cheapest model that can be found at the time of release. It of course isn't 100% but I think still gives a good overview.

The Titans in the UK relative to the US have been pretty good value apart from the Titan Black by all accounts. Saying that if you was in Tennessee buying it then we as UK customers are only paying 2% more. We have of course also not then added any shipping fees that re-sellers this end would have to swallow to get stock from US. Again this will be a few % but really I feel the "UK Tax" is a little bit of a myth for the most part based on this.

spot35 · 14 Mar 2017 at 13:50

This is great. Seeing it in raw numbers you realise that whilst more expensive, it's not quite the price gouging people think it is.

Gibbo · 14 Mar 2017 at 13:58

Hi there

Just to note, if you buy from USA you pay "NO" USA sales tax, it ships tax free or the tax/shipping is done at checkout for shipping destination. Depends on the website, for examples for sites will charge you 20% VAT/Shipping up front, so when goods arrive you pay nothing. Other sites will just be the card plus shipping and then the delivery man will want money for tax/duties or you will get an invoice 30 days later (fedex) or even better sometimes you avoid Mr. Tax Man.

Gibbo · 14 Mar 2017 at 14:00

Also the USD/GBP rate has being 1.21 most of this week!
Also when you buy on your cc/dd/paypal from USA the bank will give you around 1.17-1.19 rate, not actual rate, something else to remember, you never get the spot rate.

I buy using AMEX and only got 1.19 rate last week for some USA purchases I made.

IT Troll · 14 Mar 2017 at 14:09

Mastercard are currently offering 1.22 and there are no conversion fees with a Halifax Clarity card.

Curlyriff · 14 Mar 2017 at 14:10

Gibbo said:
Hi there

Just to note, if you buy from USA you pay "NO" USA sales tax, it ships tax free or the tax/shipping is done at checkout for shipping destination. Depends on the website, for examples for sites will charge you 20% VAT/Shipping up front, so when goods arrive you pay nothing. Other sites will just be the card plus shipping and then the delivery man will want money for tax/duties or you will get an invoice 30 days later (fedex) or even better sometimes you avoid Mr. Tax Man.

Sorry I should have been clear but the sales tax I was discussing was comparing what a person America actually pays to what we pay to buy here. In the USA they get charged sales tax on online sales depending on state and their local laws. So the different figures show what someone in different parts of the USA can pay and thus even they get a "UK tax" as we like to call it just by living in the wrong state.

Edit: And in regards to store brought they always pay sales tax when in a brick and mortar store so actually works out better (depending on shipping costs) to buy from a different state online to avoid sales tax for themselves.

But yes you are correct in that, but that isn't what anything here is showing. It is just what you as a retailer sell to what a person in the USA buys it for. There would need to be a whole other set of columns to show import duties for us etc which I don't want to go down as it gets messy then. Although if enough people want to see I might produce a secondary table to show such a thing.

To your second point, the exchange rate is shown on release date. Tbh I hadn't checked the figure for the ones that someone else had done previous and just added to the table but actually makes the gouge slightly better for us as such and was indeed at 1.211 on March 10th (release day). With that said the reason it showed the figure it did is that is what it was on March 1st. The original person I believe took the 1st of each month rather than exact day.

I have therefore followed accordingly, it will make a difference of 1-2% each way depending as the fluctuation over any given month has not been greater in itself. I hope that clarifies what is shown and why it wont be 100% accurate but paints a reasonable picture.

Gibbo · 14 Mar 2017 at 14:11

IT Troll said:
Mastercard are currently offering 1.22 and there are no conversion fees with a Halifax Clarity card.

Well I am not changing cards now, but experience with paypal and AMEX is they sit a few points under spot rate.

IT Troll · 14 Mar 2017 at 14:23

Curlyriff said:
We have of course also not then added any shipping fees that re-sellers this end would have to swallow to get stock from US. Again this will be a few % but really I feel the "UK Tax" is a little bit of a myth for the most part based on this.

I would have though stock would ship direct from manufacturer (China?). The take away message for me is on the whole we don't do too bad in the UK, with perhaps the exception of the x80 cards. So people should look at Volta x80 pricing closely on release. Of course, we do often see some rather inventive and fluid pricing during the initial few weeks of a new card release with some retailers, due to supply constraints.

Curlyriff · 14 Mar 2017 at 14:35

eleased.

IT Troll said:
I would have though stock would ship direct from manufacturer (China?). The take away message for me is on the whole we don't do too bad in the UK, with perhaps the exception of the x80 cards. So people should look at Volta x80 pricing closely on release. Of course, we do often see some rather inventive and fluid pricing during the initial few weeks of a new card release with some retailers, due to supply constraints.

True in regards to the price of new cards, I have taken review prices or prices from OcUK where possible on release day or if not prices within one week of release as some the older info harder to source (hence the blank row as I couldn't firm down a price in UK).

In regards to shipping, not always and shipping costs also are greater to the UK than to America generally for electronic goods as a rule. I don't know too many details on that off hand, just from what my father does with import to what his counterpart does in America. It is a bit difficult to extrapolate that data without being in the industry and we could always see if Gibbo can give advice/information on that front for this in terms of shipping. They certainly purchase their own stock in US$ though so that again is something else that is not completely visible from this view. I would say overall though what we as consumers see are the end figures and so the US$ sale price with & without tax and our sale prices are what are important to compare.

IT Troll · 14 Mar 2017 at 14:54

The real eye opener is the GeForce 2 Ultra. Ignoring performance for a second, imagine if a modern card looked like that with that price tag! You certainly get a lot more tin for money nowadays.

Curlyriff · 14 Mar 2017 at 15:04

IT Troll said:
The real eye opener is the GeForce 2 Ultra. Ignoring performance for a second, imagine if a modern card looked like that with that price tag! You certainly get a lot more tin for money nowadays.

The part that costs and always has as AMD has recently stated is the memory on the GPU. It appears that is almost 50% the cost of cards and more with higher end GPU's thus why even back then it cost a lot because at the time the 64MB SDRAM was very expensive. The 4ns SDRAM they actually used was so cutting edge it had no head room to overclock and so they released it with the memory under-clocked to allow enough yields to make it viable at all.

But you can see how prices fell once that memory became cheaper as in principle it used the same memory. That is also why the Titan series has predominantly been expensive because of the amount of memory compared to other ranges (relative to type used of course).

stooeh · 14 Mar 2017 at 15:11

My Geforce 2 Ultra came with some nice Revelator 3D shutter glasses

Pants · 14 Mar 2017 at 15:13

Curlyriff said:
The part that costs and always has as AMD has recently stated is the memory on the GPU. It appears that is almost 50% the cost of cards and more with higher end GPU's thus why even back then it cost a lot because at the time the 64MB SDRAM was very expensive. The 4ns SDRAM they actually used was so cutting edge it had no head room to overclock and so they released it with the memory under-clocked to allow enough yields to make it viable at all.

But you can see how prices fell once that memory became cheaper as in principle it used the same memory. That is also why the Titan series has predominantly been expensive because of the amount of memory compared to other ranges (relative to type used of course).

But the difference in, for example, the 4GB and 8GB AMD 480's has been as low as £30 recently.

Curlyriff · 14 Mar 2017 at 15:19

Pants said:
But the difference in, for example, the 4GB and 8GB AMD 480's has been as low as £30 recently.

Yep that is very true. It isn't a solid reason across the board but a broad statement. You can select similar instances with the 4GB & 6GB 780 however the price difference of £30 on a card that is only £175 to start with 20% of the total card cost. Other memory solutions can be more expensive and it I believe was also including the cost of the memory controller as a reason for increased costs because going from say 4GB to 8GB is one thing but going from say 12GB to 24GB is another. if we know that 4GB increases costs but say £30 then going up by 12GB is still £90 increase in costs in basic form.

Of course that is really simplified in layman terms but the principle stands. It doesn't of course explain the cost of the Titan Z increasing by 30% over two Titan Blacks.

Edit: Also in relativity and what I probably explained really badly or glossed over is that memory back then was more expensive to produce with general higher costs if you worked out the relative calculations to extrapolate how much the 64 SDRAM memory back then it was a lot.

To the point that the RAM on the GeForce Ultra 2 would be in the region of $225 back then and thus 50% of the card cost ish.

Curlyriff · 14 Mar 2017 at 15:24

Following that 6 months later the same SDRAM was only $55 but that is why I believe we see such a drop in price from the Ultra 2 at $500 to the 3 Ti 500 at $350 almost falls in line exactly with those price differences.

Pants · 14 Mar 2017 at 15:27

Curlyriff said:
Yep that is very true. It isn't a solid reason across the board but a broad statement. You can select similar instances with the 4GB & 6GB 780 however the price difference of £30 on a card that is only £175 to start with 20% of the total card cost. Other memory solutions can be more expensive and it I believe was also including the cost of the memory controller as a reason for increased costs because going from say 4GB to 8GB is one thing but going from say 12GB to 24GB is another. if we know that 4GB increases costs but say £30 then going up by 12GB is still £90 increase in costs in basic form.

Of course that is really simplified in layman terms but the principle stands. It doesn't of course explain the cost of the Titan Z increasing by 30% over two Titan Blacks.

Edit: Also in relativity and what I probably explained really badly or glossed over is that memory back then was more expensive to produce with general higher costs if you worked out the relative calculations to extrapolate how much the 64 SDRAM memory back then it was a lot.

To the point that the RAM on the GeForce Ultra 2 would be in the region of $225 back then and thus 50% of the card cost ish.

I guess the point stands up more for bleeding edge ram, so perhaps doubling HBM ram for example will have a big impact on price. I'm not sure if there are example of that yet though? I'm not really clued up on the HBM cards.

Curlyriff · 14 Mar 2017 at 15:45

Pants said:
I guess the point stands up more for bleeding edge ram, so perhaps doubling HBM ram for example will have a big impact on price. I'm not sure if there are example of that yet though? I'm not really clued up on the HBM cards.

Yes exactly, new tech that costs, you double it and that cost is even greater. It was the reason HBM memory was limited to a point in the first place. Anyways kinda off topic.

What I am seeing is that I was in the highest bracket of relative prince gouging with going from 780's to 980's although I paid no extra or less as at the time the 780's and 980's were the same price upon the 980's release and thus the step up was free.