GPU prices — is the worst behind us ?

2 years after peak of mining craze, the best (affordable) GPU you can buy right now is:

— your current GPU. whatever GPU you have right now in your system. Use FSR

In 2 more years (2025 or after) Nvidia & AMD likely to have performance of 4070 / 4070 ti at price point of $300 / $400
Wait till then before committing to a new GPU !!!

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/two-year-old-gpu-still-one-to-buy/
 
This generation has been the worst price/performance gpus in a long time. While some cards improve the performance a good amount, the price premium of that improvement is costly.
 
Marees said:

Most PC hardware pricing is back to normal so why not GPUs?​


https://www.pcgamer.com/most-pc-hardware-pricing-is-back-to-normal-so-why-not-gpus/
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5nm/4n process is more expensive, and the price just keeps going up. It's the cost of the technology.

https://www.pcgamer.com/tsmcs-higher-prices-could-make-for-even-more-expensive-gpus/

PcGamer said:
TSMC is reported to be upping its chip production prices yet further for its upcoming 2nm node. New estimates for wafer prices claim TSMC will be charging $25,000 per wafer for 2nm chips.

TSMC's current 5nm wafers, as used by both AMD and Nvidia to produce graphics chips (Nvidia's "4nm" GPUs are built on 5nm class wafers), are said to cost around $13,000.
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Jerry Coffin said:
That depends on how big each chip is, of course. This varies over a wide range. High end GPUs have areas up to about 625 square mm. At the bottom end, something like an ATMega is somewhere around the 9 square mm range.

So, a 300 mm wafer fully of high-end GPUs would hold around 89 chips. With a defect density of 0.1 defect per square cm, you’d expect a yield of about 55%, or around 49 or 50 usable dice per wafer.
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If these are accurate for the 4xxx chips, that puts the cost at $260 per chip. Which is simply manufacturing cost. There's also R&D costs, marketing. You would want to sell that for about $500 to make it profitable. No idea what they actually sell for to the board partners, I know the vRam is included.

It's historically high prices. And until there is a real competitor to TSMC, don't expect any big price drops.
 
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Marees said:
In 2 more years (2025 or after) Nvidia & AMD likely to have performance of 4070 / 4070 ti at price point of $300 / $400
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I highly doubt that with the way NVIDIA is pricing their products over the last two years.
Try $1000+ USD at least for that level of performance, maybe more, especially by 2025.

Maybe a GT 1030 equivalent will be around $400 USD by that point, but nothing above it.
 
Gaaaa!
I have a problem.
I need to order a GPU, it has some requirements that mean only the 7900xtx, 4080, or 4090 are viable for the job.
I do not want to "reward" this behavior and pricing from either AMD or Nvidia by purchasing one, but what are my options...
 
Lakados said:
Gaaaa!
I have a problem.
I need to order a GPU, it has some requirements that mean only the 7900xtx, 4080, or 4090 are viable for the job.
I do not want to "reward" this behavior and pricing from either AMD or Nvidia by purchasing one, but what are my options...
Click to expand...
Buy open box / used? Seen 7900 XT's for under $700 open box at MC ....granted that's not within your specs.
 
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Buying open Box is also rewarding (as it made possible the original buyer of that 7900xt to buy the xtx when it became available or an 4900 or what not) it is just less direct, same for used.

You cannot not reward this behavior and buy one.

Are you sure an used 24GB 3090Ti would not do ? (then again I would imagine the guy that sell is 3090TI bought a 4090 and you would have made that possible, there is just no way)
 
Lakados said:
Maybe .... bah! I don't like this.
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Buying used would be the least rewarding way to go... it's not a DIRECT sale, but like LukeTbk said, you might be enabling someone else's purchase...

It's a rough spot to be in :confused: I'm kind of feeling the itch to upgrade but am trying not to scratch it... praying I don't have to be put in your exact situation of HAVING to buy something from either.

I assume HW failure of sorts occurred?
 
AlphaQup said:
Buying used would be the least rewarding way to go... it's not a DIRECT sale, but like LukeTbk said, you might be enabling someone else's purchase...

It's a rough spot to be in :confused: I'm kind of feeling the itch to upgrade but am trying not to scratch it... praying I don't have to be put in your exact situation of HAVING to buy something from either.

I assume HW failure of sorts occurred?
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Yeah we have new software going on some existing machines and they didn't budget for new machines or upgrades just the software but the hardware just falls short of the minimums, so I am trying to find a way to bring them up to spec to a degree where they won't suffer a decrease in productivity as a result and BAH!
The proper answer is to throw this back at accounting and tell them to increase the budget because really I might have to do away with all the options there and go with the RTX 2000 ADA instead, as it looks like those machines only have 550w PSUs. So the whole thing is a prime example of why department heads should have somebody from IT present in the meetings they have with software sales to ask the questions they don't think about.
 
Lakados said:
So the whole thing is a prime example of why department heads should have somebody from IT present in the meetings they have with software sales to ask the questions they don't think about.
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Shit, so it is MUCH worse then HW failure! Been there before myself.... and I do no envy you right now man.

No one ever thinks of the prerequisites or getting us involved until the shit is ordered already :( Luckily though, the HW cost is often a fraction of the software cost, so it lessens the blow a bit.
 
Lakados said:
Yeah we have new software going on some existing machines and they didn't budget for new machines or upgrades just the software but the hardware just falls short of the minimums, so I am trying to find a way to bring them up to spec to a degree where they won't suffer a decrease in productivity as a result and BAH!
The proper answer is to throw this back at accounting and tell them to increase the budget because really I might have to do away with all the options there and go with the RTX 2000 ADA instead, as it looks like those machines only have 550w PSUs. So the whole thing is a prime example of why department heads should have somebody from IT present in the meetings they have with software sales to ask the questions they don't think about.
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If there's ever a time to break their wills about buying a "gaming" card for a non-gaming purpose, this is it.
 
1_rick said:
If there's ever a time to break their wills about buying a "gaming" card for a non-gaming purpose, this is it.
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Well it’s not a problem on my level, but we submit everything to government auditors at year end that’s when the real pain comes in.
 
Lakados said:
The proper answer is to throw this back at accounting and tell them to increase the budget because really I might have to do away with all the options there
Click to expand...

The bean counters. Count them when they come and and count them when they go out. Worst is the corporate purchasing agent. His/her only job in life is to beat up vendors. So smart vendors respond with a "better" price, but for lower specced hardware/software. Been there, watched the clusterf---, got chastised by the purchasing guy,
Lakados said:
So the whole thing is a prime example of why department heads should have somebody from IT present in the meetings they have with software sales to ask the questions they don't think about.
Click to expand...
Yeah. Finance guys are good at what they do, but hardware and software, not so much.
 
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Lakados said:
Gaaaa!
I have a problem.
I need to order a GPU, it has some requirements that mean only the 7900xtx, 4080, or 4090 are viable for the job.
I do not want to "reward" this behavior and pricing from either AMD or Nvidia by purchasing one, but what are my options...
Click to expand...
 
ZeroBarrier said:
AMD couldn't exploit itself out of a paper bag, let's be honest here.
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Well, I would hope AMD would choose to not be exploitive in the sense of being underhanded, maybe taking advantage of an opportunity. On the other hand, your statement is patently false as they have greatly taken advantage of Intel becoming quite lax with Core architecture; they developed Ryzen, and ever since then they have been eating away Intel market share in every sector from desktop, to enterprise. GPUs sold to gamers is not AMD's bread and butter and it won't pay the bills or fund R&D for long, they are going after the companies with deep pockets that are throwing money at them for high margin products.

Let's be honest, your business acumen is still in the paper bag...
 
Agent_N said:
Well, I would hope AMD would choose to not be exploitive in the sense of being underhanded, maybe taking advantage of an opportunity. On the other hand, your statement is patently false as they have greatly taken advantage of Intel becoming quite lax with Core architecture; they developed Ryzen, and ever since then they have been eating away Intel market share in every sector from desktop, to enterprise. GPUs sold to gamers is not AMD's bread and butter and it won't pay the bills or fund R&D for long, they are going after the companies with deep pockets that are throwing money at them for high margin products.

Let's be honest, your business acumen is still in the paper bag...
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AMD getting lucky again is not the same thing as AMD exploting Intels misfortunes.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
 
ZeroBarrier said:
AMD getting lucky again is not the same thing as AMD exploting Intels misfortunes.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
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It isn't about them getting lucky again, they have a solid roadmap, superior products, especially in the enterprise sector, and they can chase AI money that Intel is not able to chase as easily. AMD is doing well and will continue to do well for the foreseeable future. They are not the same scrappy company they used to be. Dr. Lisa Su is leading them into a solid future. I would only start to worry if Dr. Su stepped down and somebody else was made the CEO.

A broken clock being right twice a day does not help advance your case.
 
As I posted in the other thread where this video was posted, AMD and Nvidia have traditionally finished producing their consumer parts around now, as Enterprise Q1 comes up (which is basically now) that is when the biggest of their orders will be coming in So Nvidia and AMD must have production for them already slotted to meet that demand. OEMs will also want to have already received their shipments to deal with the back-to-school and Christmas rush. Then consumer spending drops off a cliff from Jan through to April, picking up right around easter which usually comes with some sort of refresh.
With the notable exception of 2020 through 2022 AMD and Nvidia have always front-loaded the market so consumer supply can naturally dwindle in time for the new product launches or announcements.
AMD and Nvidia's production schedules with TSMC are hammered out a full year in advance, so this should not come as a surprise or anything nefarious it is how the supply chain works when things are healthy.

When people were wondering why Nvidia was producing so many 4060s and 4070s despite the fact they are wildly unpopular and why stores were stocking so many it was because that was it, that was the whole load and if the rumors around TSMC are accurate then the GPU refresh cycle is going to be slightly broken this year and we can expect announcements of new cards but no actual new cards when we would expect them because TSMC can't keep pace with the packaging technology they offer. The stacked cache is great, as are their new high-speed interposers but they don't have enough hardware to deal with those advanced packages and it causes a massive bottleneck.
 
Yeah it's just supply/demand/inventory management - every company does it (and got screwed by Covid with the just-in-time manufacturing>shipping>put-on the-shelf-model)

Wasn't this covered last time there was a thread about Nvidia 'throttling' the 3K series and then AMD followed suit soon after? Or are we just doing this every time for every Nvidia GPU series?
 
staknhalo said:
To be fair, how many times have we heard this before though?
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I dunno we ever heard AMD had superior products, even back in the Athlon days plenty argued Intel was still superior despite benchmarks. This is the first time AMD has done serious harm to Intel's bottom line and AMD is taking more and more of the server side of the business. Intel still does well in the laptop market. Only place I see AMD struggling is in the marketing department, they struggle to make themselves well known outside the enthusiast market.

But I would say for the foreseeable future it looks like AMD will continue to be a strong competitor and that I dont think really existed before.
 
Gideon said:
I dunno we ever heard AMD had superior products, even back in the Athlon days plenty argued Intel was still superior despite benchmarks. This is the first time AMD has done serious harm to Intel's bottom line and AMD is taking more and more of the server side of the business. Intel still does well in the laptop market. Only place I see AMD struggling is in the marketing department, they struggle to make themselves well known outside the enthusiast market.

But I would say for the foreseeable future it looks like AMD will continue to be a strong competitor and that I dont think really existed before.
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AMD struggles with production and Supply.
TSMC is huge but their 5N, and 4N production is incredibly constrained. And their entire production capacity there is something like 1/3’rd of Intels and AMD has to share that with Intel, Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Tesla, etc …
AMD also does a lot of everything more so now that they also own Xilinx.
So every server CPU they sell is 3 fewer consumer CPUs, every consumer CPU is 2 less laptop ones.
If Dell was to mainline an AMD chip in the Opteron and Latitude lineups they could claim damned near 100% of AMD’s annual capacity.
So they won’t because AMD is not capable of supplying that.

AMD is doing great things with the tools that TSMC is providing them, and that relationship is what has propelled AMD to where it is, but it’s also the noose around their neck because AMD and TSMC are so intertwined that AMD can not take much of what is giving them their edge anywhere else.
 
AMD also has those consoles everyone likes to talk about chipping away at what production capacity they have available/left for other things

And this is where AMD is caught in a perpetual corner - Nvidia can out spend them on production lines/quantities at any third party fab, and Intel has its own fabs to fall back on/alleviate things for themselves - while AMDs only option is essentially pay what they ask for anything you can get
 
staknhalo said:
AMD also has those consoles everyone likes to talk about chipping away at what production capacity they have available/left for other things

And this is where AMD is caught in a perpetual corner - Nvidia can out spend them on production lines/quantities at any third party fab, and Intel has its own fabs to fall back on/alleviate things for themselves - while AMDs only option is essentially pay what they ask for anything you can get
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AMD dedicates something like 120k wafers to consoles each quarter, and they get somewhere around 800k wafers at TSMC during that time.
So it makes up around 15% of their allotment but closer to 20% of their revenue so it is proportionately good.
 
Still chips away at production capacity left for all those other things, as well as money left to pay for production capacity of all those other things

Whether they can make it work or not, they're the most disadvantaged with the set up of the 3 companies (a result of them selling their fabs out of need all those ages ago)
 
staknhalo said:
AMD also has those consoles everyone likes to talk about chipping away at what production capacity they have available/left for other things

And this is where AMD is caught in a perpetual corner - Nvidia can out spend them on production lines/quantities at any third party fab, and Intel has its own fabs to fall back on/alleviate things for themselves - while AMDs only option is essentially pay what they ask for anything you can get
Click to expand...
Now that console are on 7nm versus 5-6 for new GPU-CPU does it change things ? I would have thought it is more Epyc server stuff eating up capacity for new GPU than consoles.

staknhalo said:
as well as money left to pay for production capacity of all those other things
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If console is an profitable endeavour, do they not have more money left than less ?
 
Pro console(s) coming up that need to be produced/are or will be in production taking up an amount of capacity something else can't

LukeTbk said:
If console is an profitable endeavour, do they not have more money left than less ?
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But they don't actually have enough money to actually create enough product to actually remove serious marketshare from Nvidia is the point - no matter how profitable or whatever a small sliver of a slice of a pie something is - especially if Nvidia then decides to counter by lowering prices and margins and compete in a price war (an option they leave themselves in the future, by 'price gouging') - that means that small slice of the pie would then bring in even less money for AMD if this were to occur (edit: because AMD would have to respond to Nvidia's price cuts we assume), thus lowering again what they can afford to pay for what little capacity they can pay for

Intel it's the same thing towards AMD, but replace Nvidia's piggy bank with Intel's own fabs as its ace up the sleeve if/when things really get rough, that if worst ever came to worst Intel isn't going to tell Intel to 'fuck off pay more or we can't help you go somewhere else' and leave Intel out to dry Edit: AMD can't force a fab to be a charity towards them if things get really rough is the point here - they're gonna have to pay to still allow the fab to be profitable on the production run of however much they can afford to contract

AMD is the more disadvantaged one here of the three
 
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staknhalo said:
To be fair, how many times have we heard this before though?
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Bulldozer's architecture was hardly a solid product, that and AMD struggled with Opteron to be competitive with Intel. The trajectory with Ryzen is different, they are solid products. Intel is hemorrhaging in the Enterprise space and they practically gave up on the HEDT market. Their CPUs are nowhere as efficient as Ryzen chips in laptops, especially when it comes to gaming. Ryzen as it stands is not empty promise, but solid products. Intel is finally getting it together, assuming their future chip releases have significantly better efficiency especially with gaming and general workloads. I've been around PCs long enough to hear the empty promises of companies, but with AMD, they are continuing to execute their roadmap. They have regularity and predictability. They haven't had a significant misstep (ala Intel 10nm).
 
Lakados said:
AMD struggles with production and Supply.
TSMC is huge but their 5N, and 4N production is incredibly constrained. And their entire production capacity there is something like 1/3’rd of Intels and AMD has to share that with Intel, Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Tesla, etc …
AMD also does a lot of everything more so now that they also own Xilinx.
So every server CPU they sell is 3 fewer consumer CPUs, every consumer CPU is 2 less laptop ones.
If Dell was to mainline an AMD chip in the Opteron and Latitude lineups they could claim damned near 100% of AMD’s annual capacity.
So they won’t because AMD is not capable of supplying that.

AMD is doing great things with the tools that TSMC is providing them, and that relationship is what has propelled AMD to where it is, but it’s also the noose around their neck because AMD and TSMC are so intertwined that AMD can not take much of what is giving them their edge anywhere else.
Click to expand...
That is assuming AMD remains only with TSMC, rumors are pointing to them using Samsung and I think it makes sense, especially for consumer products and save the TSMC production for high margin product. AMD used to have more flexibility with their own fabs, but they spun them off to survive. But your right AMD's main limitation is how much they can produce and honestly as a company it's a good problem to have.

Also I think your giving too much credit to TSMC to why AMD chips are working so well, a good chunk of that comes down to design over the tools. You need both to make a really good product though.
 
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