Originally, the leaks had pinned the price of the RTX 5090 at $1999, leaving many of us largely unsurprised at Nvidia continuing to push the price of its flagship card even higher. That’s not only because it maintains a market-leading position – with AMD expected not to even try and compete at this extreme end of the GPU market this generation – but also because of the huge uptick in the specification of this new GPU.
I remember back in the day when they made huge leaps every generation but the prices remained fairly stable, not increasing by 33%. This is all due to lack of competition and profit seeking, not technical improvements.
Not to defend nvidia entirely, but there are physical cost savings that used to occur with actual die wafer shrinkage back in the day since process node improvements allowed such a substantial increase in transistor density. Improvements in recent years have been lesser and now they have to use larger and larger dies to increase performance despite the process improvements. This leads to things like the 400w 4090 despite it being significantly more efficient per watt and causes them to get less gpus per silicon wafer since the dies are all industry standardized for the extremely specialized chip manufacturering equipment. Less dies per wafer means higher chip costs by a pretty big factor. That being said they’re certainly… “Proud of their work”.
I remember back in the day when they made huge leaps every generation but the prices remained fairly stable, not increasing by 33%. This is all due to lack of competition and profit seeking, not technical improvements.
Merchant will always charge the highest price they can extract, this is pricing 101. Fuck your economies of scale etc.
And people buying it anyway instead of sticking to actually reasonably priced products.
Not to defend nvidia entirely, but there are physical cost savings that used to occur with actual die wafer shrinkage back in the day since process node improvements allowed such a substantial increase in transistor density. Improvements in recent years have been lesser and now they have to use larger and larger dies to increase performance despite the process improvements. This leads to things like the 400w 4090 despite it being significantly more efficient per watt and causes them to get less gpus per silicon wafer since the dies are all industry standardized for the extremely specialized chip manufacturering equipment. Less dies per wafer means higher chip costs by a pretty big factor. That being said they’re certainly… “Proud of their work”.
Lack of competition or people showing they’ll pay insane prices so they are meeting that demand?