With Turing, they "charged over" what I was willing to pay for what little they offered. This is subjective, of course, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Intel did the same thing for a long time, so I sat on my 3770k until AMD caught up.
People talk about "mindshare" but Intel built up a "negative mindshare" with me. It got to the point where I was willing to wait for their competition to catch up...and then upgrade.
If Nvidia pulls another Turing, they will be going down that same path with me. I'm willing to consider that maybe Nvidia just couldn't find a cost-effective way to improve performance with Turing, but if they do it twice in a row, they will not get the benefit of the doubt with me. Nvidia will fall into the same category with me as Intel did at that point.
Don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate that they are free to charge as much as they want while offering as little as they care to. It is literally "their business". But they will give AMD a bigger opening to get "my money".
I can tell you a little bit about Intel's practices. Mostly because I witnessed it first hand.
When AMD launched the slot A? Athlon (the slotted chip, first one) and it was really quick all of a sudden our Intel rep was at our shop daily. We were an official Intel reseller, so we got perks. You know? engineering samples, little dolls, window stickers and all that crap. Our rep basically told us that if we stocked Athlons and put signs up in our windows that we would lose our position as a authorised reseller. They also threatened us with the same if we told any of our customers how to overclock their processors.
And they did stuff like that for years. Obviously AMD sued them for all of this, but the gains in their sales and dominance made it so that the lawsuits and fines were very affordable, if it meant treading their rival into the ground.
Obviously as the years have progressed they have dialled this back, but even so recent as about 5 years ago they were trying the same thing. When Linus opened his forum Intel were basically bribing users to be a part of the "Intel Response Squad". Whenever someone posted asking about an AMD CPU these "members" (who were nothing but shills, and I bet Linus was receiving money for it too or something or he would never have let it happen on his forum nor grant people those titles) would basically come along and rubbish AMD and tell the person that they should buy Intel.
It only existed for about six weeks, then every single last trace of it vanished. If you search engine it now? the only thing you will find is an ex user of the forum who has "Ex Intel Response Squad member" in his sig. Every other trace of it was removed, including all of the posts.
Most probably because AMD saw it and set their lawyers on Linus.
But those are the bent and dirty tricks that they used to pull. And believe it or not? it worked. It totally worked. AMD were always quite a passive company and Intel were always very aggressive. It kinda reminds me of Edison VS Tesla.
Once that was all stopped and we now have Youtube and stuff? yeah, the tables have turned.
Like I said though, I can not see that happening to Nvidia. They are not a machine like Intel, who basically has thousands of reps doing their dirty work, they are far more intelligent as a company. Could one see the example of them selling expensive GPUs to their customers and it not hurting them? I suppose. But, for that ever to change AMD would need to do what they have done to Intel and not only give Nvidia a bloody nose but also make their GPUs look crap in comparison. And that is the part of the equation that will never change. Complain about Nvidia all you like, that is up to you. I've done plenty of it myself. However, they do always deliver the goods. So yeah, Turing was disappointing right? well it wasn't bad for what it was. A shrunken Pascal with tensor cores on the die. And it wasn't even what we were supposed to get, Ampere just wasn't ready due to the Samsung issues.
If you are into buying cards every gen? then yeah I can see why you would be a bit disappointed. However, you also need to realise that the landscape has changed. For many years a generation would last you about a year at the top end, maybe two, and then the games would improve and you would need a new GPU. The very fact I had my Titan XP for over three and a half years and it was still smashing out over 100 FPS at 1440p ultra says a lot to me. Even in the newest titles like COD MW and so on. It never seemed aged, and it never ran out of VRAM and so on.
Nvidia know all of this. Every single last bit of it. So what you are paying £1400 for a GPU now? well guess what, it lasts twice as long as the £700 one. And that lasts twice as long as the £350 one, and so on. In fact, the most disappointing part of the GPU race is how badly the entry level and mid range has sat totally stagnant. The RX 480 launched bloody ages ago, yet the 580 is still the budget choice all these years later. And it is only 10% faster than the 480 was.
That, IMO, is why the 3080 will "only" ship with 10gb VRAM. Because Nvidia know that when that runs out you will be back. I have seen games we have already hitting 9.5gb VRAM in games at 4k. So it came as no surprise that this 2080Ti equivalent for £600 less is going to come with a caveat or two. You want safety? you are being led back to the £1400 card. However, like I also said, if you are not chasing RT and you are being sensible that card will last you for years. Just like my Titan XP did. In fact, I should still have that now. And I could have held onto it for another two years at least. I just got really, really bored with it.
