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$2500 5090 I’m out

spine said:
With that 4090 you're perfectly fine at 4K.
Click to expand...

Nope.

Sure, I guess if you play old titles or e-sports titles designed to run on a 2009 Dell Inspiron laptop with integrated intel graphics, then its fine but most newer titles I've tried at 4k, the 4090 can't handle. (at least not without enabling DLSS fake pixels and fake frames)

I can get barely acceptable framerates in Cyberpunk with RT High, if - and only if - I enable DLSS scaling at Quality, which is an unacceptable sacrifice.

I required similar settings with Starfield. And the same with my test of Stalker2.

My take is DLSS (both upscaling and framegen) are things that should only ever be used out of desperation. You know, it's late in the lifecycle of your GPU and you are not ready to upgrade yet, so you enable DLSS to make it last a little longer. DLSS (or FSR or AMD's Frame Gen) should only ever be used as a Plan B.

If you are buying a GPU and planning to use DLSS out of the box, that is a major fail. Buy a GPU that can handle what you plan on using it for natively.

And that's why the 4090 is insufficient for me.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Nope.

Sure, I guess if you play old titles or e-sports titles designed to run on a 2009 Dell Inspiron laptop with integrated intel graphics, then its fine but most newer titles I've tried at 4k, the 4090 can't handle. (at least not without enabling DLSS fake pixels and fake frames)

I can get barely acceptable framerates in Cyberpunk with RT High, if - and only if - I enable DLSS scaling at Quality, which is an unacceptable sacrifice.

I required similar settings with Starfield. And the same with my test of Stalker2.

My take is DLSS (both upscaling and framegen) are things that should only ever be used out of desperation. You know, it's late in the lifecycle of your GPU and you are not ready to upgrade yet, so you enable DLSS to make it last a little longer. DLSS (or FSR or AMD's Frame Gen) should only ever be used as a Plan B.

If you are buying a GPU and planning to use DLSS out of the box, that is a major fail. Buy a GPU that can handle what you plan on using it for natively.

And that's why the 4090 is insufficient for me.
Click to expand...
Good luck trying to hit even 120 fps native 4K on a 5090 in modern games then.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Nope.

Sure, I guess if you play old titles or e-sports titles designed to run on a 2009 Dell Inspiron laptop with integrated intel graphics, then its fine but most newer titles I've tried at 4k, the 4090 can't handle. (at least not without enabling DLSS fake pixels and fake frames)

I can get barely acceptable framerates in Cyberpunk with RT High, if - and only if - I enable DLSS scaling at Quality, which is an unacceptable sacrifice.

I required similar settings with Starfield. And the same with my test of Stalker2.

My take is DLSS (both upscaling and framegen) are things that should only ever be used out of desperation. You know, it's late in the lifecycle of your GPU and you are not ready to upgrade yet, so you enable DLSS to make it last a little longer. DLSS (or FSR or AMD's Frame Gen) should only ever be used as a Plan B.

If you are buying a GPU and planning to use DLSS out of the box, that is a major fail. Buy a GPU that can handle what you plan on using it for natively.

And that's why the 4090 is insufficient for me.
Click to expand...
The whole problem is ray tracing, any one of those games is more than playable without it. Take a look at Indiana Jones and the great circle and a 4090, at 4k Ultra settings RT on, the target for FPS is 60 and that's with DLSS performance. The 5090 will do better, but you still will have to probably use some form of DLSS, it's only a matter of time before it's blown out too. These days it seems to be all about making sacrifices somewhere to get these games to run.

Ray tracing was a awesome new feature to get gamers to constantly chase new cards in the quest for frame rates. With the Unreal Engine 5 ray tracing is baked into the game with no way to turn it off.
 
Last edited:
killroy67 said:
The whole problem is ray tracing, any one of those games is more than playable without it. Take a look at Indiana Jones and the great circle and a 4090, at 4k Ultra settings RT on, the target for FPS is 60 and that's with DLSS performance. The 5090 will do better, but you still will have to probably use some form of DLSS, it's only a matter of time before it's blown out too. These days it seems to be all about making sacrifices somewhere to get these games to run.

Ray tracing was a awesome new feature to get gamers to constantly chase new cards in the quest for frame rates. With the Unreal Engine 5 ray tracing is baked into the game with no way to turn it off.
Click to expand...

My take is that RT was all about locking out AMD from the market.

RT is MUCH easier to develop for than having to use shadow maps, manual reflections andother raster hacks, so devs jumped on it as soon as they saw it. It reduced their costs and made their lives easier. Since AMD didn't ahve a good RT product, this meant you pretty much had to buy Nvidia or have a subpar graphical experience.

You can make a raster title look almost as good as a good RT title, but no one does anymore. If you turn off RT it looks really shitty, as they don't put the work into making pure raster look good anymore.

And thus we have a 90% Nvidia market share. :/
 
Last edited:
pendragon1 said:
thats part of our point, they cant do it without the trickery.
Click to expand...
So this discussion is aiming to solve how new games will be developed? We are debating why sky is blue at this point or yellow or whatever color one is choosing. There is a reality of the gaming world and there is a card that is best positioned within that reality. All other discussion is just moot since it won’t solve anything.

I play sufficient games in the year and try everything even if it is not something I like or enjoy to see how far we have come and short answer is we have come very far. 4090 is a fantastic card and my hope is 5090 will be even better. DLSS is a great feature allowing for a flexibility to run 4K (with hacks) that looks wonderful. FG has its place - maybe not in competitive gaming or fps but very good for 3PS and with reflex even latency is solved somewhat.

All of this has allowed me to enjoy games at 4K with hacks for past 4 years (first with DLDSR and now true 4K) that still look leagues better than my 1440P experiences. So anything that furthers that agenda is welcome. All this nonsensical debate about not having true 4K is so out of context of current reality that I don’t know how to answer that since there is nothing out there that is better. So we are just talking about hypothetical performance requirements that can’t be fulfilled for another 2 years at least. It’s good mental masturbation I guess.
 
Last edited:
Zarathustra[H] said:
My take is that RT was all about locking out AMD from the market.

RT is MUCH easier to develop for that having to use shadow maps, manual reflections andother raster hacks, so devs jumped on it as soon as they saw it. It reduced their costs and made their lives easier. Since AMD didn't ahve a good RT product, this meant you pretty much had to buy Nvidia or have a subpar graphical experience.

You can make a raster title look almost as good as a good RT title, but no one does anymore. If you turn off RT it looks really shitty, as they don't put the work into making pure raster look good anymore.

And thus we have a 90% Nvidia market share. :/
Click to expand...
There is also a big reality of dev costs being very high even with RT etc or other cost of dev cutting measures and companies not recouping costs so what else is the suggestion to make games and engage the average gamer. Not everyone is attracted to pixelated indie games and there are far more losers in that category as well and only a few winners who recoup their costs.
 
KickAssCop said:
So this discussion is aiming to solve how new games will be developed? We are debating why sky is blue at this point or yellow or whatever color one is choosing. There is a reality of the gaming world and there is a card that is best positioned within that reality. All other discussion is just moot since it won’t solve anything.

I play sufficient games in the year and try everything even if it is not something I like or enjoy to see how far we have come and short answer is we have come very far. 4090 is a fantastic card and my hope is 5090 will be even better. DLSS is a great feature allowing for a flexibility to run 4K (with hacks) that looks wonderful. FG has its place - maybe not in competitive gaming or fps but very good for 3PS and with reflex even latency is solved somewhat.

All of this has allowed me to enjoy games at 4K with hacks for past 4 years (first with DLDSR and now true 4K) that still look leagues better than my 1440P experiences. So anything that furthers that agenda is welcome. All this nonsensical debate about not having true 4K is so out of context of current reality that I don’t know how to answer that since there is nothing out there that is better so we are just talking about hypothetical performance requirements that can’t be fulfilled for another 2 years at least. It’s good mental masturbation I guess.
Click to expand...

Not all of us play at 4K or care. People are pretending that DLSS and Frame generation somehow improve visual quality which is a impossibility as you are rendering from a lower resolution to a higher one and it introduces artifacts. If you play games at 4K then you are used to compromising visual fidelity to have playable frame rates. Rest of us play at lower resolutions with the fidelity as high as we can get it for the performance we have. Nvidia is not offering much in the 5000 series we care about as only the 5090 has any real performance increase over the the 4000 series. There is more to the graphic market then the Halo card, hell most still game at 1080p with card incapable of even doing ray tracing. At these current prices they won't be inspiring those with low end cards to upgrade and your experience will be reduced because of that. Developers are not going to lock out 95% of the market to make the 5% happy.
 
SO with the $2,000 price floor for the 5090, I wonder what the markup will be on the aftermarket boards. Considering we see some of the custom 4090 cards go for $2500 or more in some cases.
 
KickAssCop said:
So this discussion is aiming to solve how new games will be developed? We are debating why sky is blue at this point or yellow or whatever color one is choosing. There is a reality of the gaming world and there is a card that is best positioned within that reality. All other discussion is just moot since it won’t solve anything.

I play sufficient games in the year and try everything even if it is not something I like or enjoy to see how far we have come and short answer is we have come very far. 4090 is a fantastic card and my hope is 5090 will be even better. DLSS is a great feature allowing for a flexibility to run 4K (with hacks) that looks wonderful. FG has its place - maybe not in competitive gaming or fps but very good for 3PS and with reflex even latency is solved somewhat.

All of this has allowed me to enjoy games at 4K with hacks for past 4 years (first with DLDSR and now true 4K) that still look leagues better than my 1440P experiences. So anything that furthers that agenda is welcome. All this nonsensical debate about not having true 4K is so out of context of current reality that I don’t know how to answer that since there is nothing out there that is better. So we are just talking about hypothetical performance requirements that can’t be fulfilled for another 2 years at least. It’s good mental masturbation I guess.
Click to expand...
no thats what you want it to be.
ok.
and like some keep saying; we can see and feel all the bullshit software tricks and none of it is good enough, yet
 
TheHig said:
That’s the cost of living on the edge I suppose. Remember doing total rebuilds every 18mos in the 90s because things wouldn’t even run period?
Click to expand...
The difference back then was parts were a lot cheaper, gpu's didn't cost thousands of dollars. I remember playing Hellbender, Fury3, Doom, on my 486/66 and Win95, oh man don't get me started with all the great DOS games ! C:/Doom.exe

I miss those days.
 
killroy67 said:
The difference back then was parts were a lot cheaper, gpu's didn't cost thousands of dollars. I remember playing Hellbender, Fury3, Doom, on my 486/66 and Win95, oh man don't get me started with all the great DOS games ! C:/Doom.exe

I miss those days.
Click to expand...
I was living off my parents back then but I seem to remember RAM costing a whole lot more. I needed memory “with parity” for my Dell and a 2x2MB sticks was like $250. I remember upgrading from 4MB to 8MB when we went to CompUSA at midnight for Win95 release.
 
WilyKit said:
I was living off my parents back then but I seem to remember RAM costing a whole lot more. I needed memory “with parity” for my Dell and a 2x2MB sticks was like $250. I remember upgrading from 4MB to 8MB when we went to CompUSA at midnight for Win95 release.
Click to expand...
The days when windows upgrades took us forward, not backwards...
 
WilyKit said:
I was living off my parents back then but I seem to remember RAM costing a whole lot more. I needed memory “with parity” for my Dell and a 2x2MB sticks was like $250.
Click to expand...

Yeah. It used to be considered normal for a PC to be outdated every ~ 9 months as an effect of Moore's law.

The expectation was that as soon as you opened the box your PC part came in, it was worth like half of what you paid for it, and if you used it for a uyear, it was all but worthless. There wasn't much of a second hand market for PC parts.

...and with every generation the expectation was that everything got cheaper and cheaper.

Technology is supposed to advance, and things are supposed to get cheaper and cheaper and smaller and smaller with every generation. This was the rule and the expectation...

...until all of a sudden it wasn't, and we started getting first $500, then $750, then $1000 GPU's a little over a decade ago.

I remember when I bought my Sandy-E x79 motherboard and CPU upgrade in 2011. I was crushed after all of the hype surrounding the Bulldozer launch turned out to be utter bullshit, and it was a miserable failure of a product. I had bought a 990FX motherboard and dropped a Phenom II 1090T (black Edition) in it and overclocked the snot out of it with a rare huge 180mm AIO water cooler. I was so disappointed that Bulldozer was such a let down, that I just went out and spent $1000 on the upgrade. ($599 for for my Core i7-3930k, and $399 for my Asus P9 x79 WS motherboard.)

I had a lump in my stomach afterwards. Had I really just spend ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS on a computer? Not even on a computer, but just TWO parts? Am I an irresponsible shit person? I had the same remorse 2 years later when I dropped a grand on my 6GB Titan. Those were insanely expensive utterly ridiculous parts then. Most - even in the [H] community - couldn't imagine dropping that kind of cash on PC parts.

Now it's just normal. Well, a grand for a GPU is still slightly above normal, but still, not quite the outlier it once was.

I don't even know what to blame for this.

- Sure, there has been inflation, but not that much.
- And sure, crypto mining drove up demand. If by spending money on GPU's you can now make money, there is no limit to how many GPU's people will want to spend so they can make money, and use that money to buy more GPU's.
- And AI is now driving up demand.
- And there are fewer latest node chip fabs than ever, meaning there is a supply limitation that drives up costs.
- And sure, we are starting to reach the point where die shrinks are more and more difficult to achieve due to the limits of particle physics.
- And sure, a lot of bored people sequestered at home during the pandemic caused an explosion in the gaming market to where it is now bigger than the entirety of the film, TV and music industries combined, resulting in an even bigger mismatch in supply and demand.
- And sure, gaming used to be something just young people without professional jobs did, so everyone's budgets were more limited meaning prices didn't get bid up as much
- And sure, marketing assholes have tried to transform PC parts into some sort of liffestyle/designer products instead of just geeky components, further driving up margins
- And scalpers with nothing better to do with their time than stand in line during launch times or mash F5 in their browser windows all to make a quick buck at others expense, also don't help the situation...

Yeah, it's probably a little bit of everything...

But still, I can't help but ask myself why, and can't help but be wistful for ~25-35 years ago when we didnt realize how good we had it.

I remember - in 2001 - ordering the fastest GPU money could buy, the GeForce 3 Ti500, roughly 4 weeks after launch. I got it for $329 from Newegg I believe. That was notably $20 below MSRP of $349. Imagine getting the top end GPU for under MSRP within a month of launch today? Never going to happen.

And irt was $329! Sure, there has been inflation, but still, even accouinting for inflation, that's only ~$580 today.

Yeah, we definitely didn't realize how good we had it.

WilyKit said:
I remember upgrading from 4MB to 8MB when we went to CompUSA at midnight for Win95 release.
Click to expand...

Heh.

I was a DOS purist back in those days.

I had Windows 3.11, sure, but I almost never ran it unless I needed to get on the internet. ( I remember having fun coercing Winsock Trumpet to work in Windows 3.11 so I could get online, without the benefit of any instructions. That was fun.)

I often even didn't have Windows installed until like ~1994 when I upgraded my 286 to a 486sx25, and in the process got a new (huge) 100MB hard drive so I could fit both Windows 3.11 and my games at the same time!

Anyway... I digress.
 
Last edited:
KickAssCop said:
There is also a big reality of dev costs being very high even with RT etc or other cost of dev cutting measures and companies not recouping costs so what else is the suggestion to make games and engage the average gamer.
Click to expand...

Indeed. Dev costs are way higher than they used to be.

But at the same time, the market is enormous these days, unlike in the past.

The likes of Sid Meier at MicroProse put together games like Civilization by only a handful of developers in only a few months. It didn't cost much, but costs were covered by sales to even the small PC gaming market as it existed in 1990.

These days it is not uncommon for a AAA game to sell well in excess of 10 million copies. There are even a couple that have sold over 100 million copies, and even one up in the 300 million copies level.

If you charge each of them $60 for the game, that is a lot of revenue.

Yes, developing a modern AAA game is quite expensive, but the market is so enormous that sales revenues result in it making sense to spend that kind of money. (Though I wish they'd spend less money on celebrity cameo's and voice acting, and more on just making great games.)

KickAssCop said:
Not everyone is attracted to pixelated indie games and there are far more losers in that category as well and only a few winners who recoup their costs.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I have zero interest in indie games that look and play like Commander Keen from 1990.

1736370633178.png
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Yeah. It used to be considered normal for a PC to be outdated every ~ 9 months as an effect of Moore's law.

The expectation was that as soon as you opened the box your PC part came in, it was worth like half of what you paid for it, and if you used it for a uyear, it was all but worthless. There wasn't much of a second hand market for PC parts.

...and with every generation the expectation was that everything got cheaper and cheaper.

Technology is supposed to advance, and things are supposed to get cheaper and cheaper and smaller and smaller with every generation. This was the rule and the expectation...

...until all of a sudden it wasn't, and we started getting first $500, then $750, then $1000 GPU's a little over a decade ago.

I remember when I bought my Sandy-E x79 motherboard and CPU upgrade in 2011. I was crushed after all of the hype surrounding the Bulldozer launch turned out to be utter bullshit, and it was a miserable failure of a product. I had bought a 990FX motherboard and dropped a Phenom II 1090T (black Edition) in it and overclocked the snot out of it with a rare huge 180mm AIO water cooler. I was so disappointed that Bulldozer was such a let down, that I just went out and spent $1000 on the upgrade. ($599 for for my Core i7-3930k, and $399 for my Asus P9 x79 WS motherboard.)

I had a lump in my stomach afterwards. Had I really just spend ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS on a computer? Not even on a computer, but just TWO parts? Am I an irresponsible shit person? I had the same remorse 2 years later when I dropped a grand on my 6GB Titan. Those were insanely expensive utterly ridiculous parts then. Most - even in the [H] community - couldn't imagine dropping that kind of cash on PC parts.

Now it's just normal. Well, a grand for a GPU is still slightly above normal, but still, not quite the outlier it once was.

I don't even know what to blame for this.

- Sure, there has been inflation, but not that much.
- And sure, crypto mining drove up demand.
- And AI is now driving up demand.
- And there are fewer latest node chip fabs than ever, meaning there is a supply limitation that drives up costs.
- And sure, we are starting to reach the point where die shrtinks are more and more difficult to achieve due to the limits of particle physics.
- And sure, a lot of bored people sequestered at home during the pandemic caused an explosion in the gaming market to where it is now bigger than the entirety of the film, TV and music industries combined, resulting in an even bigger mismatch in supply and demand.
- And sure, gaming used to be something just young people without professional jobs did, so everyones budgets were more limited meaning prices didn't get bid up as much
- And sure, marketing assholes have tried to transform PC parts into some sort of liffestyle/designer products instead of just geeky components, further driving up margins
- And scalpers with nothing better to do with their time than stand in line during launch times or mash F5 in their browser windows all to make a quick bbuck at others expense, also don't help the situation...

Yeah, it's probably a little bit of everything...

But still, I can't help but ask myself why, and can't help but be wistful for ~25-35 years ago when we didnt realize how good we had it.

I remember - in 2001 - ordering the fastest GPU money could buy, the GeForce 3 Ti500, roughly 4 weeks after launch. I got it for $329 from Newegg I believe. That was notably $20 below MSRP of $349. Imagine getting the top end GPU for under MSRP within a month of launch today? Never going to happen.

And irt was $329! Sure, there has been inflation, but still, even accouinting for inflation, that's only ~$580 today.

Yeah, we definitely didn't realize how good we had it.



Heh.

I was a DOS purist back in those days.

I had Windows 3.11, sure, but I almost never ran it unless I needed to get on the internet. ( I remember having fun coercing Winsock Trumpet to work in Windows 3.11 so I could get online, without the benefit of any instructions. That was fun.)

I often even didn't have Windows installed until like ~1994 when I upgraded my 286 to a 486sx25, and in the process got a new (huge) 100MB hard drive so I could fit both Windows 3.11 and my games at the same time!

Anyway... I digress.
Click to expand...
Those were great days, games were plentiful, and fun, I played so many titles back then, DOS and Win95 games, so many first person shooters came out then. Now it's maybe one or two, and you're lucky if you don't have to wait for 4-5 huge patches to play it. So yeah I would be more than happy to give all this fancy hardware up and go back to my first real gaming rig, a AMD K62 500 on a super socket 7, with a 3DFX Voodoo 2.
 
Not to repeat myself, but I still don't understand how the highest end video cards have doubled or even tripled in price in a decade, when literally almost every other piece of tech has not gone up that much or even close. In 2015 a high-end nVidia card ( non titan ) was like $650 - $700 or so, now they are $1,600 to $2,000.

-High-end CPU processors from 2015 are not double or triple the price today. The 2015 Intel i7-5960X was $999, and a 2025 AMD 9950X3D is $800, so processors have actually come down in price or stayed the same the past ten years.

-The new iPhone 16 Pro is like $999, in 2015 the iPhone 6S was $700, so not double the price and not even close to triple.

-High-end OLED TV's have actually come down in price and gotten way better a decade later. 83 inch LG C1 OLED in 2021 was $6000 and today an 83 inch LG C4 in 2024 is $3999

-Top monitors have almost stayed the same price or gone up 25% in a decade, certainly not double. I recall the old Dell 30" LCD was like $1300 a decade ago, and today the high-end OLED monitors are around that same price or a little more.

-Cars, yes cars cost way more in the past 5+ years, and in ten years absolutely more, but again not double and not even close to triple the price today. A 2015 Corvette Z06 was $84k a 2025 Corvette Z06 is $112k, again not double not triple.


So again why is a high-end video card double or triple more today than 2015?
 
Last edited:
Zorachus said:
Not to repeat myself, but I still don't understand how the highest end video cards have doubled or even tripled in price in a decade, when literally almost every other piece of tech has not gone up that much or even close. In 2015 a high-end nVidia card ( non titan ) was like $650 - $700 or so, now they are $1,600 to $2,000.

-High-end CPU processors from 2015 are not double or triple the price today. The 2015 Intel i7-5960X was $999, and a 2025 AMD 9950X3D is $800.
-The iPhone 16 Pro Max is like $1200, in 2015 the iPhone 6S was $700, not double the price and not even close to triple.
-OLED TV's have actually come down in price and gotten way better a decade later
-Top monitors have almost stayed the price or gone up 50% in a decade, certainly not double.
-Cars, yes cars cost way more in the past 5+ years, and in ten years absolutely more, but again not double and not even close to triple the price today. A 2015 Corvette Z06 was $84k a 2025 Corvette Z06 is $112k, again not double not triple.

So again why is a high-end video card double or triple more today than 2015?
Click to expand...
You'd have to look at R&D and BOM cost to make comparisons. It seems to me the two things driving cost are the increased budgets required for performance improvements both at TSMC and Nvidia each generation is increasing massively. Smaller nodes are just getting more and more expensive. I'm sure Nvidia could still make a healthy profit a lower price but they're not going to do that either when there's no incentive. But even if AMD was like 30-40 percent of the market and they had to keep their prices lower to compete, I don't think it would be that much lower on the lower end and mid-range. Also, the iphone is 200 dollars away from being double in your example, so it's not like it's a small price increase. TVs are a whole different beast, things like the top end OLEDs are still hugely expensive.
 
Zorachus said:
-High-end CPU processors from 2015 are not double or triple the price today. The 2015 Intel i7-5960X was $999, and a 2025 AMD 9950X3D is $800.
Click to expand...
If we look at the transistor count and how much they charge for the motherboard (GPU board and ram cost a lot more now than back then, which could be a bit of the equivalent), cooler is way more expensive as well, lot of the added complexity of the mobo-ram-cooling-cpu combo does not come in the CPU box and do not get reflected in their price but the total package increase is maybe not that far, at least when DDR-5 release, if not higher.

A 980ti had 8 billions transistors, 6 GB of vram, a 5090 will have 92 billions and 32 GB of vram, 11.5 times.
A Intel Core i7-5960X had 2.6 billions transistor a 285k has about 17.8 billions transistor, 6.8x times


There is no competition at all for that $2000 product, which does not help.
 
Last edited:
Zorachus said:
Not to repeat myself, but I still don't understand how the highest end video cards have doubled or even tripled in price in a decade, when literally almost every other piece of tech has not gone up that much or even close. In 2015 a high-end nVidia card ( non titan ) was like $650 - $700 or so, now they are $1,600 to $2,000.

-High-end CPU processors from 2015 are not double or triple the price today. The 2015 Intel i7-5960X was $999, and a 2025 AMD 9950X3D is $800.
-The iPhone 16 Pro Max is like $1200, in 2015 the iPhone 6S was $700, not double the price and not even close to triple.
-OLED TV's have actually come down in price and gotten way better a decade later
-Top monitors have almost stayed the price or gone up 50% in a decade, certainly not double.
-Cars, yes cars cost way more in the past 5+ years, and in ten years absolutely more, but again not double and not even close to triple the price today. A 2015 Corvette Z06 was $84k a 2025 Corvette Z06 is $112k, again not double not triple.

So again why is a high-end video card double or triple more today than 2015?
Click to expand...
I think a lot had to do with Covid, the 3000 series came out and people were desperate to get one, at the time only the scalpers had them. Even places like Newegg were charging stupid prices, $800 and up, yet people paid for them, I even got caught up in the nonsense. I paid almost $900 for a 3080 12gb card. Nvidia, and many other corporations took advantage of the situation and started sticking it to the consumers. Some people even today have the mentality that they need a 4090 or 5090 to "future proof" just in case Covid comes back. The effects of the stupidity back then still has far reaching consequences today and for the foreseeable future.
 
killroy67 said:
I think a lot had to do with Covid, the 3000 series came out and people were desperate to get one, at the time only the scalpers had them. Even places like Newegg were charging stupid prices, $800 and up, yet people paid for them, I even got caught up in the nonsense. I paid almost $900 for a 3080 12gb card. Nvidia, and many other corporations took advantage of the situation and started sticking it to the consumers. Some people even today have the mentality that they need a 4090 or 5090 to "future proof" just in case Covid comes back. The effects of the stupidity back then still has far reaching consequences today and for the foreseeable future.
Click to expand...

I was able to walk into my local Microcenter in November 2020 and pick up a brand new RTX-3080 for $699 and walk out the door with one easily. At the time they were only on sale for like couple months. Same with my RTX-4080 two years later, walked into MC, saw a new 4080 on the shelf in December and bought it.
 
Zorachus said:
Not to repeat myself, but I still don't understand how the highest end video cards have doubled or even tripled in price in a decade, when literally almost every other piece of tech has not gone up that much or even close. In 2015 a high-end nVidia card ( non titan ) was like $650 - $700 or so, now they are $1,600 to $2,000.
Click to expand...

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Zorachus said:
So again why is a high-end video card double or triple more today than 2015?
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As I mentioned above, I don't think it is any one cause, but rather a large number of combined factors all having an effect. I'm probably missing some, but here is the list I came up with above:
Zarathustra[H] said:
- Sure, there has been inflation, but not that much.
- And sure, crypto mining drove up demand. If by spending money on GPU's you can now make money, there is no limit to how many GPU's people will want to spend so they can make money, and use that money to buy more GPU's.
- And AI is now driving up demand.
- And there are fewer latest node chip fabs than ever, meaning there is a supply limitation that drives up costs.
- And sure, we are starting to reach the point where die shrinks are more and more difficult to achieve due to the limits of particle physics.
- And sure, a lot of bored people sequestered at home during the pandemic caused an explosion in the gaming market to where it is now bigger than the entirety of the film, TV and music industries combined, resulting in an even bigger mismatch in supply and demand.
- And sure, gaming used to be something just young people without professional jobs did, so everyone's budgets were more limited meaning prices didn't get bid up as much
- And sure, marketing assholes have tried to transform PC parts into some sort of liffestyle/designer products instead of just geeky components, further driving up margins
- And scalpers with nothing better to do with their time than stand in line during launch times or mash F5 in their browser windows all to make a quick buck at others expense, also don't help the situation...
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Zorachus said:
I was able to walk into my local Microcenter in November 2020 and pick up a brand new RTX-3080 for $699 and walk out the door with one easily. At the time they were only on sale for like couple months. Same with my RTX-4080 two years later, walked into MC, saw a new 4080 on the shelf in December and bought it.
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Problem is Microcenter is far and few, we have one in Massachusetts in Cambridge. So you get to sit in lovely Boston traffic to maybe get a card. I believe it the only one in all of New England.
 
Decko87 said:
You'd have to look at R&D and BOM cost to make comparisons. It seems to me the two things driving cost are the increased budgets required for performance improvements both at TSMC and Nvidia each generation is increasing massively. Smaller nodes are just getting more and more expensive. I'm sure Nvidia could still make a healthy profit a lower price but they're not going to do that either when there's no incentive. But even if AMD was like 30-40 percent of the market and they had to keep their prices lower to compete, I don't think it would be that much lower on the lower end and mid-range. Also, the iphone is 200 dollars away from being double in your example, so it's not like it's a small price increase. TVs are a whole different beast, things like the top end OLEDs are still hugely expensive.
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In addition to that, “GPUs” today have more customers than just gamers and these customers have far deeper pockets. It used to be companies like Nvidia, AMD/ATI, 3dfx, and Matrox competing with each other for our business. Now it’s us competing with multi billion dollar entities for Nvidia product. It’s a paradigm shift that doesn’t benefit gamers at all.
 
It will be interesting to see how many models and how much inventory MC gets locally. Are they selling founders cards for sure? They have been able to keep the 9800x3d in stock more than not. Like always how many cards does Nvidia have ready for the first month of launch and how much demand is actually there with other economic factors on play right now? Speaking about the US market specifically.
killroy67 said:
Problem is Microcenter is far and few, we have one in Massachusetts in Cambridge. So you get to sit in lovely Boston traffic to maybe get a card. I believe it the only one in all of New England.
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I expect scalping to be in full effect for this launch as well. Should die down after two or three months. I mean, look how quickly the cbyertruck went to supply surplus with "2 million reservations."
 
Luckily I have a Microcenter right in the middle between where I live and where I work so it's very easy for me just to drive by once a week and walk in and see if they have any stock

Typically the sales guy said every delivery they can get anywhere from only 20 cards to maybe 150 cards. It totally would vary per delivery. But if you're persistent enough and just keep walking in the day of delivery, eventually you'll get lucky and find a card there. Might take a couple weeks or a couple months but you'll get one.

As far as FE cards, that was typically only Best Buy never at Microcenter.

The best way to get an Fe card at Best Buy is put your email address in the auto notify thing and it might take a couple months, but you will get notified when they have it in stock. You just have to click purchase. Literally the minute you get the notification.

But this really a silly bullcrap, we're in the year 2025 a video card should be able to be pre-ordered like you can a new smartphone and once they're available and in stock they ship to your house. It's absolutely stupid. They don't do it that way yet. You still got to go through this bull crap of waiting in line at a Microcenter hoping there's one in stock when it's your turn in line. I mean come on this isn't the 2000's.
 
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Randall Stephens said:
I expect scalping to be in full effect for this launch as well. Should die down after two or three months. I mean, look how quickly the cbyertruck went to supply surplus with "2 million reservations."
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Thanks for reminding me. I need to get my $100 back
 
But let's be real, mobody needs a 5090 on January 30th. That's just sick first world problems.

Your life isn't going to change by getting it right away on launch day. It doesn't fucking matter in a grand scheme of the universe. People need to chill the fuck out and stop with the fomo.

If you're patient, go to Microcenter always check the auto notify email with Best Buy stock. You will get a card but it might not be until March, April or May which is okay. It doesn't fucking matter. You don't need the card immediately the week they come out.

People need to relax. It's just a video card not a kidney transplant.
 
Zorachus said:
But let's be real, mobody needs a 5090 on January 30th. That's just sick first world problems.

Your life isn't going to change by getting it right away on launch day. It doesn't fucking matter in a grand scheme of the universe. People need to chill the fuck out and stop with the fomo.

If you're patient, go to Microcenter always check the auto notify email with Best Buy stock. You will get a card but it might not be until March, April or May which is okay. It doesn't fucking matter. You don't need the card immediately the week they come out.

People need to relax. It's just a video card not a kidney transplant.
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The only one who needs to relax here is you, holy shit LOL.
 
killroy67 said:
Problem is Microcenter is far and few, we have one in Massachusetts in Cambridge. So you get to sit in lovely Boston traffic to maybe get a card. I believe it the only one in all of New England.
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Ahh, Fellow Masshole. Not too many of us on here it seems.

Yeah, there are only like 28 Microcenters in total, so not everyone is near one.

I've been impressed with their ability to get things in stock others don't. Makes me wonder how they do it. I was able to pick up a 9800x3d there before the holidays with no difficulty at all. They had like 30 in stock.

Maybe with a little luck, that will be the case with 5000 series GPU's as well.
 
Randall Stephens said:
I expect scalping to be in full effect for this launch as well. Should die down after two or three months. I mean, look how quickly the cbyertruck went to supply surplus with "2 million reservations."
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I think that is comparing apples to cruise ships.

The Cybertruck is a $100k+ car which immediately puts it outside of the budget of the overwhelming majority of people.

That, and it launched to insane ridicule, and that has only grown since it becomes more and more evident how much of a failure of a vehicle it is.

Cracking frames, voiding warranty if driven off-road or in the snow, amputating fingers, so-called "full self driving" tech, that appears to want to ram other drivers, burning people alive after low speed collisions due to hidden door latch releases behind door trim that are impossible to find when the vehicle is filling up with smoke (if you even know they are there).

Seriously. If you see one on the road, keep your distance. Teslas in general are pretty good electric vehicles, but the Cybertruck is a total fail. Probably the biggest fail on the car market in decades (and owners keep defending it, lol. I guess people have to justify not sounding like a fool for spending $100k on junk. Human bias never ceases to amaze me.)

I'm sure lots of reservation holders had second thoughts when they realized how much of a boondoggle the thing is.

On the flipside, the 5090 - while expensive for a video card - is not that unaffordable for a large segment of the population, if they prioritize this sort of thing, is likely going to be the fastest thing you can buy for some time, and is probably not going to kill or dismember anyone. I'm pretty sure demand will remain strong for at least 6-8 months if not longer.

We've seen this story repeat itself over and over now with almost every GPU launch in the last 5 years. Even the Intel Arc B580 is out of stock, and selling for almost twice its MSRP if you can find it. I have no expectations at all this time will be any different.

As I am typing this there are still 4090's in stock on Amazon listed for $3000, despite Nvidia's claims that their $549 successor will perform the same.

Yeah, the GPU market is not about to return to sanity any time soon.
 
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Randall Stephens said:
I expect scalping to be in full effect for this launch as well. Should die down after two or three months. I mean, look how quickly the cbyertruck went to supply surplus with "2 million reservations."
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LOL the Cyberturd. Phony Stark's colossal dumpster fire vehicle.
 
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