It looks like the 'real' /affordable RDNA3 + next gen NV desktop launch won't launch until September. Thoughts?

[Grim5]

Price of 7900xtx and xt cut by 19% in china

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX & 7900 XT GPUs See Up To 19% Price Cuts In China, Now Below MSRP

Graphics card prices continue to drop in China with AMD's latest Radeon RX 7900 XTX & 7900 XT seeing up to 19% price cuts.

wccftech.com

 

[Darujhistan]

IDC what anyone says, Nvidia is cheaping out on Vram and has for a while.

I've been saying this for years.

 

[g67575]

I think it's to do with the memory bus specs.

Looking at these 8 and 12gb models:

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB Specs

NVIDIA GA106, 1777 MHz, 3584 Cores, 112 TMUs, 48 ROPs, 12288 MB GDDR6, 1875 MHz, 192 bit

www.techpowerup.com

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 8 GB Specs

NVIDIA GA106, 1777 MHz, 3584 Cores, 112 TMUs, 48 ROPs, 8192 MB GDDR6, 1875 MHz, 128 bit

www.techpowerup.com

they basically have to use a higher bandwidth bus for the card with higher amounts of VRAM. They'd rather not as these were considered mid range GPU dies (same core config for both), these days well suited to gaming at 1080p, but struggling a bit at 1440p.

The bit that is most worthy of criticism, is the 128 bit bus on the RTX 3060 with 8GB VRAM. Combined with 15gbps GDDR6, it's likely limiting the card's performance at 1440p.

A 128 bit bus design was quite common for older cards, and would use fewer components. There was a shortage in DRAM and semiconductor components in 2021 and 2022, I guess they thought it would be better to produce a higher number of graphics cards with 8GB VRAM + 128 bit bus designs, than 192 bit.

This year, there is an oversupply of DRAM components, according to this:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/04/semiconductor_market_bubble/

So I don't expect we will see the same kind of economising measures that we saw in 2022, for DRAM. For one thing, Nvidia knows quite a lot of PC gamers will only buy graphics cards with high VRAM amounts, it has become part of the marketing for graphics cards.

In January, TSMC reported an 'imbalance' of chips, stating that 'it will take until the first half of 2023 to rebalance inventories to 'healthier levels''.
https://kr-asia.com/chip-glut-to-last-most-of-2023-while-automotive-crunch-persists

 

[Darujhistan]

Are they really going to go with 8GB for the 4060 (cough 4050)?

Surely even NV couldn't sink this low, could they?

 

[Marine-RX179]

Are they really going to go with 8GB for the 4060 (cough 4050)?

Surely even NV couldn't sink this low, could they?

Whaddaya mean? It's precisely something in-character for them to do

They would go for 6GB even, if they could get away with it

 

[Tetras]

Are they really going to go with 8GB for the 4060 (cough 4050)?

Surely even NV couldn't sink this low, could they?

Doesn't 12GB for the 4070 Ti already answer that question?

 

[G J]

Do not worry our saviours AMD will give us the VRAM by giving the 7500XT more than 4GB but on a more serious note it seems so far the 7600 and 7600XT will have 8GB.

 

[g67575]

What's wrong with 8GB for the RTX 4060, if the card is priced well?

Hardly going to be a 4K card is it?

Not really a stretch that two versions coming out, one with 12gb later on.

 

[g67575]

With AMD's 7900 XT price drop, I wonder if the RTX 4070 TI price could be reduced to £700-£750 also?

 

[g67575]

I wonder what went wrong with Navi31 production, as there still aren't that many 7900 XTXs available for sale... Just 12 on the website I'm looking at.

There's more 7900 XTs available, but not a lot more.

 

[g67575]

It looks like there might be some Navi31 chips with integrated vcache coming at some point.

I guess maybe I'm a bit out of date on this rumour, but it seems like a smart move if it's true.

It does make me wonder if that extra cache might be of use for ray tracing.

I think it would be a good idea to keep the 'X3D' branding for these GPUs...

 

[g67575]

There's one website I'm looking at (not a well known website) that is expecting RTX 4070 TIs for ~£780 in about a week. So the prices are slowly coming down.

The good news is that they seem to be out of stock for most of the last gen cards, like the RTX 3050, RX 6600, RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, RX 6900 XT, RTX 3080s and RTX 3090s.

There's still some stock for RTX 3060s, RTX 3060 TIs, RTX 3070s, RTX 3070 TIs and RX 6700 XTs though, and some RX 6500 XTs.

 

[Freddie1980]

What's wrong with 8GB for the RTX 4060, if the card is priced well?

Well lets be honest it won't be priced well and consumers have been able to get 8Gb enthusiast entry level cards since the days of the RX480/GTX1060 (GTX1060 topped out at 6Gb so a 8 Gb card is s whopping 1/3 increase in 8 years). The point is the market is stagnating rather then evolving like has had done previously and the VRAM situation is just an obvious symptom of it, this has dire consequences as stagnation in hardware will likely lead to stagnation in software/games.

 

[Zarax]

Well lets be honest it won't be priced well and consumers have been able to get 8Gb enthusiast entry level cards since the days of the RX480/GTX1060 (GTX1060 topped out at 6Gb so a 8 Gb card is s whopping 1/3 increase in 8 years). The point is the market is stagnating rather then evolving like has had done previously and the VRAM situation is just an obvious symptom of it, this has dire consequences as stagnation in hardware will likely lead to stagnation in software/games.

On the other side, quite a few recent titles seems so poorly optimized that they struggle even with high end hardware. I wonder what the refund numbers are on those... There is a storm brewing, in a couple years we might see a PC gaming market collapse.

 

[g67575]

I think most people will just play at 1080p (as this is still a very common monitor resolution). As such, I don't think that will hold back game development.

An exception might be if people want to enable ray tracing at 1080p.

 

[g67575]

Do you think we will get Navi33 graphics cards in April?

No sign of Navi32 yet, not sure these are production ready.

But Navi33 is definitely shipping out in mobile devices. Can't say that's exciting for PC gaming, but it might be all we get.

 

[Mean Mr Mustard]

I wonder what went wrong with Navi31 production, as there still aren't that many 7900 XTXs available for sale... Just 12 on the website I'm looking at.

There's more 7900 XTs available, but not a lot more.

AMD are intentionally limiting the supply of GPUs and CPUs to keep costs under control (and create an impression of scarcity so they can keep prices high).

 

[Hotwired]

AMD are intentionally limiting the supply of GPUs and CPUs to keep costs under control (and create an impression of scarcity so they can keep prices high).

Is this the disgraced "undershipping" story that proved that many tech sites don't know what they are talking about.

 

[g67575]

I think there must be a production issue with mid/high end RDNA3 GPUs.

AMD wouldn't want to miss out on that sweet mobile GPU profit.

 

[g67575]

Laptops with RDNA3 GPUs included are pretty hard to find at the moment, despite that these mobile GPUs officially launched in January.

I found one Asus laptop:

https://uk.store.asus.com/asus-tuf-gaming-a16-advantage-edition-2023-90nr0ep2-m000x01340-90nr0ep2-m000x0.html?srsltid=Ad5pg_EoX__2gpGnUgznuA1cv8zHrzqyHEPeOD7O8Yu0AU9BMzO_7PLIE4s

With a RX 7600S GPU.

The mobile chips announced so far are all 6nm (TSMC N6), so I'd guess this will be the next thing to be released on desktop.