Why are GPUs so expensive?

[Guest2]

Not that long ago I remember a midrange GPU costing ~£200, low end £100 and top of the range £500.

Now we are looking at top of the range costing £1500/£2000, midrange £500-£1k and low end £300.

I know there’s inflation over the past 10-15 years to take into account but RAM, CPUs, motherboards etc. have not jumped this much. Is it the lack of certain GPU components, R&D or simply greed of companies and people willing to pay the extortionate prices? (me being one of these people)

 

[Guest2]

The dymanic has changed though. About 20+ years ago, games had a good range of graphical settings to future-proof them. Settings nobody could use when the game is released. Then years later, people could go back to old games and play them again on newer hardware with the settings turned up. This was especially good when games were rereleased as a budget title.

Times have changed now though and people want to play games at maximum settings on release. That's not what people were able to do in the old days. Yet now people moan when they cant.

Good point, i remember playing Unreal on a 4mb onboard graphics chip. It ran the game at something like 8fps Dark match was playable, just. But only when no-one turned a torch on
Fast forward to SLI Voodoo 2 and the glorious 1024 x 768 was available and high details!

I think in-between I had a Matrox Mystique 220. What a big pile of poo that was for £150

3dfx / Voodoo cards were definitely the high point of GPU history. Watching the intro on Unreal and first seeing the water effects were mind blowing when ''3d acceleration'' was utilised

 

[Guest2]

Looking back, I bought an ''EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC Black Edition GAMING'' for £710 second hand almost 2 years ago.
Id have never have dreamed of paying that much for a GPU, but 2 years of use, 500 days still left on the warranty and it looks like they still sell for around £600 second hand. Suppose if you are careful they are sort of worth it

 

[Guest2]

Pretty sure gpu mining is all but dead and gone. Its all asics now.

Did prices ever go down again after the mining boom? I cant remember they did, not that i expected them too