What exactly is the deal with GPUs

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magoo

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So here we are.......6 months in and you can't find a new GPU anywhere for even a modest jack over MSRP (Im talking etail, not eBay)

What the hell happened?

poor production?
poor planning?
sudden demand?
lack of parts?
"the COVID"
greed?

what is the truth Mulder?
 
So here we are.......6 months in and you can't find a new GPU anywhere for even a modest jack over MSRP (Im talking etail, not eBay)

What the hell happened?

poor production?
poor planning?
sudden demand?
lack of parts?
"the COVID"
greed?

what is the truth Mulder?

A little mix of everything,.

Your video card requires parts from all over the world, but Covid has made those shipments less predictable than before. Unfortunately. EVERY FINISHED CHIP your video card requires also has spotty availability of their raw materials (thinks various chemicals, people,etc) due to COVID.

Everyone has adopted this to reduce costs and delivery times:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_manufacturing

Normally, all this system works fine , but if you interrupt a single unreplaceable ingredient, it gets fouled-up; the cut in international shipping volume has both affected delivery time to other factories AND end-user retail cards

https://unctad.org/news/covid-19-cuts-global-maritime-trade-transforms-industry

RMT-2020-Figure-1-web.png

When 1/3 of your worldwide cargo ship volume is to support the hospitality industry, you can't recover from losing those quick-ship options (the hotel's food deliveries always happen, so they just parked your video cards in the spare hull space WHEN NEEDED); even a growth in the tech industry isn't enough to undo that.

Even with second-sources, the Auto industry is also being affected; the only-real fix is for us to get the same all-in-one variant vaccine like we hae had fr decades with Flu, but it's going to be another year:

https://arstechnica.com/science/202...ht-variants-wont-require-big-trials-fda-says/

The only thing that can undo Scalping (the human greed part of your list) is a massive increase in manufacturing (cards sold at MSRP means no more sucker worth exploiting),it won't happen until we give the entire world the vaccine(plus time to rebuild)
 
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To the OP: another post explaining how scalping is ruining already dicey availability.

https://www.techspot.com/news/88603-scalpers-press-treats-them-unfairly-because-they-valuable.html

The part that is most revealing:

1613071071944.png


And that's why I try to add a FE 3060 Ti to my cart on BestBuy, and right after clicking it's somehow "gone" already. Some good progress seems to be in the pipeline, at least in the UK:

https://www.techspot.com/news/87992-uk-politicians-want-ban-ps5-xbox-series-x.html

Although, frankly, you don't really need this kind of paternalistic economy control to fix the situation. It'd be as simple as having Nvidia, AMD, Sony or Microsoft sell directly to consumers at MSRP. Why I can't get an RTX card directly from Geforce.com, I will never understand. It's not like it'd be very hard for Nvidia to have their own store - they already hold their own inventory, and if it's partner relations they fear, no problem - partners can also sell directly to consumers! Even include partner cards in their website, so Nvidia fulfills the order but it's sent directly to the AIB in question.
 
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There has never been an "All in one" vaccine for the flu. The vaccine changes every year depending on the dominant strain.


The fact that it changes yearly does not discount the fact that we have an effective multi-variant Flu Vaccine for each yea, does it not?

What I meant specifically was, you only get one flu shot each year that covers all the variants for tat year (much easier than taking multiple COVID vaccines)

To those whose instant response to that is "Flu Vaccines don't work", I respond when was the last time we had a major flu pandemic? Probably the 1960s here in the USA Keep in mind that we keep on working indoors during the worst season for Flu (gotta build and ship shit for Christmas, don't ya know and attend massive events without masks), and it would be nice to have that same level of Flu safety in COVID times.

The people who claim Flu vaccinates don't work just because they still got sick have no clue how disruptive an untamed disease like this can be, and we need to do the same with COVID that we already did with Flu- we need seamless seasonal vaccines (that both reduce the likelihood of infection, AND reduce the intensity, even if you still get sick), plus a replacement for Tamiflu, and it will be back to business-as-usual.
 
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Although, frankly, you don't really need this kind of paternalistic economy control to fix the situation. It'd be as simple as having Nvidia, AMD, Sony or Microsoft sell directly to consumers at MSRP. Why I can't get an RTX card directly from Geforce.com, I will never understand. It's not like it'd be very hard for Nvidia to have their own store - they already hold their own inventory, and if it's partner relations they fear, no problem - partners can also sell directly to consumers! Even include partner cards in their website, so Nvidia fulfills the order but it's sent directly to the AIB in question.
I suspect a big part of the reason they don't do this is they don't want to build up and maintain all the infrastructure needed to do retail deliveries. They do a lot of selling after a launch and during the holidays, but it would end up half idle much of the time. It's much more efficient to have other companies that do retail sales as their business handle distribution.

Retailers could do more to combat scalpers though. A couple ideas that don't take any central planning...
* Randomized page generator. The order page and checkout process looks different every time and the underlying HTML and Javascript is obfuscated differently. The format for data sent back to the server would also be rescrambled on every page load. Basically this would make writing a working bot much, much harder. It could still be done, but would be more difficult... especially if they suddenly changed the scrambling right before a launch.
* Use firm, non-cancelable, pre-paid pre-orders that can only be returned for replacement. That would make scalping more risky.

AMD & NV could do a bit more, like set up a central order database to limit how many cards go to one person or household. It ought to be one card per gamer until the cards are in stock at retail, but that gets messy with roomates, families with kids, gifts, etc. so I'm not sure what the best way to handle it is.
 
AMD & NV could do a bit more, like set up a central order database to limit how many cards go to one person or household. It ought to be one card per gamer until the cards are in stock at retail, but that gets messy with roomates, families with kids, gifts, etc. so I'm not sure what the best way to handle it is.
Valid points, but I may have not made myself clear: I don't mean Nvidia or AMD should act as an etailer, have their stock, sell it, process the purchase, and ship it to the customer. Imagine a system where instead of using Amazon or Newegg, you just go to Geforce.com. There you can see many of the card models that EVGA, MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, Zotac and other AIBs sell. Nvidia doesn't care about a product being sold over MSRP because they make the same amount of money whether a store or scalper gets extra money on the sale or not. So:

1. Order the FE or AIB card through Geforce.com; sign up for a queue if/while product is out of stock.
2. Nvidia sends the order, perhaps even payment info, to the AIB of your chosen model.
3. AIB charges the amount, ships the card to you.

This way, Nvidia would have the easier job of acting as a middle man to route gamers' orders, letting the AIB finish processing the payment and dealing with inventory, shipping, etc. Nvidia would just be making sure that a) 1 household gets 1 GPU until stratospheric demand is satisfied, b) product is sold at MSRP (because keeping your central customers happy is simply smart business, and mining will disappear from GPU-world in a few years), and c) at least some of their actual gaming clients are buying their gaming products, however smaller the quantity and slower the process might be VS other stores selling to miners and scalpers. In this scenario, Nvidia stills sells all their GPUs pretty much instantly, but spreads the product around better and gives gamers a guarantee that they'll get a card after signing up to a legitimate queue.

Logistically, this doesn't seem to be too complicated. Nvidia already has a tight relationship with all their AIBs, so it's not like this processing and sending this information would be any more difficult than what they already share. Even better, Nvidia would gain something in the process by getting some knowledge of their clients' spending habits, which I'm sure they can capitalize on in further GPU generations.
 
To those whose instant response to that is "Flu Vaccines don't work", I respond when was the last time we had a major flu pandemic? Probably the 1960s here in the USA
2009 Swine Flu pandemic (H1N1) around 13K people died from it in the US, close to 600K worldwide. I agree. We'll have to have a year round vaccine for Covid. I fear Covid will become endemic. like the common cold, that used to not be so common.
 
You know what I find fuckin hilarious?

Nvidia has all this money, enough to gobble up whole companies and they can't figure out how to run a online store. That is funny. So they relegate the task to Best Buy, a store notorious for screwing up online orders or lackluster customer service in general. Its mind numbing.
 
You know what I find fuckin hilarious?

Nvidia has all this money, enough to gobble up whole companies and they can't figure out how to run a online store. That is funny. So they relegate the task to Best Buy, a store notorious for screwing up online orders or lackluster customer service in general. Its mind numbing.
not only that but when the 3070 first came out they were selling them on the nvidia website. then at some point they were like, hey, instead of us making all the money, lets let best buy take a piece of the pie.

with supply as low as it is, why would any manufactorer let retailers sell them? thats just lost money.
 
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You know what I find fuckin hilarious?

Nvidia has all this money, enough to gobble up whole companies and they can't figure out how to run a online store. That is funny. So they relegate the task to Best Buy, a store notorious for screwing up online orders or lackluster customer service in general. Its mind numbing.
Bless your heart.
 
not only that but when the 3070 first came out they were selling them on the nvidia website. then at some point they were like, hey, instead of us making all the money, lets let best buy take a piece of the pie.

with supply as low as it is, why would any manufactorer let retailers sell them? thats just lost money.
More like lets use Best Buy to sell our cards because we don't know what we're doing or how to fix it. And if customers get angry, they can get angry with Best Buy instead of Nvidia. Typical big corporate passing of the buck.
 
with supply as low as it is, why would any manufactorer let retailers sell them? thats just lost money.
Outside the avoiding all the complication and the ability to do much more with money (with some of the highest ROI that exist in other field) then being in the very low margin retailing business, keeping good relationship with them ? Many store were selling apple stuff at a small lost at a time (with the expectation someone would buy an headphone, charging cable or something else at the same time)

It is almost no money lost, best buy margin on hardware like that is quasi nill, they make 90% margin on overpriced cable and stuff like (warranty, service, phone data plan) that but on video cards and hardware that people shop the price around it must be in general really thin.

I would not assume that people with more information for the situation in particular and information about how things work in general are in the wrong, that seem an incredible lack of humility.
 
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Outside the avoiding all the complication and the ability to do much more with money (with some of the highest ROI that exist in other field) then being in the very low margin retailing business, keeping good relationship with them ? Many store were selling apple stuff at a small lost at a time (with the expectation someone would buy an headphone, charging cable or something else at the same time)

It is almost no money lost, best buy margin on hardware like that is quasi nill, they make 90% margin on overpriced cable and stuff like (warranty, service, phone data plan) that but on video cards and hardware that people shop the price around it must be in general really thin.

I would not assume that people with more information for the situation in particular and information about how things work in general are in the wrong, that seem an incredible lack of humility.
these cards aren't sold in stores though. people needs video cards, and they are going to buy them where ever they can. retailers need the products, not the other way around.
 
these cards aren't sold in stores though. people needs video cards, and they are going to buy them where ever they can. retailers need the products, not the other way around.
And bestbuy online store margin are particularly low I think, if it is possible for Nvidia to use energy, focus orr money to make more card in any way, it is hard for me to argue they should put any of those things into the very low margin retailing business, specially that like you are saying they will be sold anyway, focusing everything into making more cards (and reopening older different supply chain a la 1050Ti type of thinking) seem more profitable than doing anything else for them and by a giant amount something hard to argue against.

We do not even know the kind of long term deal they can have with giant like bestbuy to start with or the complication to burn bridge with them (and for what ?), today any card you make you can sell, but one day in the future people will enter or go to the best buy website to buy a card and if only Amd card are available they will go for those.

Best buy that a 3-4% margin a year grocery store type of business (when you include the high margin item like cable, warranty, service, the hardware business is probably at a loss), Nvidia is a 25-40% margin type of business, that it would be a necessary good idea to try to focus on the low margin side of things in a moment like right now and that they would be stupid now too because they are living those small crump to other is not necessary false, and my brain lack the capacity to wrap the calculation of it, but I feel it is lacking humility to think someone without all the information would know that and be sure of it.
 
2009 Swine Flu pandemic (H1N1) around 13K people died from it in the US, close to 600K worldwide. I agree. We'll have to have a year round vaccine for Covid. I fear Covid will become endemic. like the common cold, that used to not be so common.


I was thinking Hong Kong Flu , the first appearance of H3N2. China was still A a lot bigger shithole back then, and made it easy to kill between 1 and 4 million.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.html

The case mortality rate was low, but t it was incredibly infectious! in undeveloped countries, you could ed -up a severe case with no hospital beds, but it did finally kick our ass into gear producing seasonal Flu vaccine
 
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Well Nvidia would be stuck at MSRP pricing while BestBuy, Microcenter . . . can charge whatever they can get - > Nvidia can make more by having others sell their products at ridiculous pricing. I just get the drift Nvidia would sell them if they could make more money from doing it.
 
I was thinking Hong Kong Flu , the first appearance of H3N2. China was still A a lot bigger shithole back then, and made it easy to kill between 1 and 4 million.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.html

The case mortality rate was low, but t it was incredibly infectious! in undeveloped countries, you could ed -up a severe case with no hospital beds, but it did finally kick our ass into gear producing seasonal Flu vaccine
Yikes. I pray that we don't get another flu pandemic like we had in 1917-19. All a matter a time though Im afraid.
 
Well Nvidia would be stuck at MSRP pricing while BestBuy, Microcenter . . . can charge whatever they can get - > Nvidia can make more by having others sell their products at ridiculous pricing. I just get the drift Nvidia would sell them if they could make more money from doing it.
Thats one good thing I've noticed, the FE models are MSRP. If only there was stock. I'm ready to buy today.
 
Thats one good thing I've noticed, the FE models are MSRP. If only there was stock. I'm ready to buy today.

Yeah, well, you and everyone else...which is why it's a complete unicorn for most people.
 
You know what I find fuckin hilarious?

Nvidia has all this money, enough to gobble up whole companies and they can't figure out how to run a online store. That is funny. So they relegate the task to Best Buy, a store notorious for screwing up online orders or lackluster customer service in general. Its mind numbing.
They choose not to, because best Buy will be more efficient. You don't throw money away like that.
 
Well Nvidia would be stuck at MSRP pricing while BestBuy, Microcenter . . . can charge whatever they can get - > Nvidia can make more by having others sell their products at ridiculous pricing. I just get the drift Nvidia would sell them if they could make more money from doing it.
Nvidia does not make a single extra cent whether a 3rd party store sells a card at MSRP or above.
 
Nvidia does not make a single extra cent whether a 3rd party store sells a card at MSRP or above.
I would not be so sure about that since Nvidia would not incur the cost of managing, dealing with the public, per card basis, handling issues more per customer at a much finer detail.

Reading through the typical dry government documents which usually end up begging for more answers to the obvious questions and would be argue endlessly in courts by lawyers both thinking their right:
My guesswork, no more, no less:

  • Anyways Nvidia can put a ceiling on the max price on their brand of cards, Ampere 3090 let say. Totally legal for a number of reasons. Nvidia so far is allowing Ampere cards to be made and sold way beyond their MSRP value, over $2000.
  • Nvidia has and probably still bin chips, even if mostly so minute in differences that it does not make much difference. In other words one 3090 chips can be binned and sold at different cost to the AIBs, nothing fixed as in all 3090 GPUs have to be sold at this one price by Nvidia.
  • Then there is price differences in how many one can buy, lots.
  • Anyways Nvidia can sell so called low binned chips for Manufacturers to make MSRP like cards and sell the so called high end (even if not that much) at what ever price they can get. It probably doesn't matter if Nvidia has over 50% high binned parts selling way above the low binned parts and much more available to purchase.
  • Are these AIBs actually making a killing on the way over MSRP cards or are forced to due to the higher cost of the chips available to them? When all of the AIBs have prices way above MSRP? If they worked together to make the higher prices that would be illegal (see above dry document), now if forced to do so, due to costs to them and no way to make a reasonable profit, most likely, then you see the current pricing of cards in general.
 
I would not be so sure about that since Nvidia would not incur the cost of managing, dealing with the public, per card basis, handling issues more per customer at a much finer detail.

Reading through the typical dry government documents which usually end up begging for more answers to the obvious questions and would be argue endlessly in courts by lawyers both thinking their right:
My guesswork, no more, no less:

  • Anyways Nvidia can put a ceiling on the max price on their brand of cards, Ampere 3090 let say. Totally legal for a number of reasons. Nvidia so far is allowing Ampere cards to be made and sold way beyond their MSRP value, over $2000.
  • Nvidia has and probably still bin chips, even if mostly so minute in differences that it does not make much difference. In other words one 3090 chips can be binned and sold at different cost to the AIBs, nothing fixed as in all 3090 GPUs have to be sold at this one price by Nvidia.
  • Then there is price differences in how many one can buy, lots.
  • Anyways Nvidia can sell so called low binned chips for Manufacturers to make MSRP like cards and sell the so called high end (even if not that much) at what ever price they can get. It probably doesn't matter if Nvidia has over 50% high binned parts selling way above the low binned parts and much more available to purchase.
  • Are these AIBs actually making a killing on the way over MSRP cards or are forced to due to the higher cost of the chips available to them? When all of the AIBs have prices way above MSRP? If they worked together to make the higher prices that would be illegal (see above dry document), now if forced to do so, due to costs to them and no way to make a reasonable profit, most likely, then you see the current pricing of cards in general.
Is this why some aftermarket cards come clocked higher than other, the better Bin allows the higher clock?
My only knowledge with binning relates to LEDs, but then the Binning is advertised because its for the end user to build around.
 
Is this why some aftermarket cards come clocked higher than other, the better Bin allows the higher clock?
My only knowledge with binning relates to LEDs, but then the Binning is advertised because its for the end user to build around.
They want you to believe that they are binned or "Better" but in reality, they're just factory overclocked. Which gives the impression the general consumer that its a "Better" card. There are a few exceptions though, like the Kingpin models, those are actually modified physically.
 
  • Anyways Nvidia can put a ceiling on the max price on their brand of cards, Ampere 3090 let say. Totally legal for a number of reasons. Nvidia so far is allowing Ampere cards to be made and sold way beyond their MSRP value, over $2000.

No they can’t. They’re not allowed to dictate distributor sell prices. BestBuy could sell them for $10,000 per card if they felt like it, and the only thing Nvidia can really do to respond is restrict MDF funds or try to keep them in check by selling Founders Edition cards at MSRP on their own website.
 
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