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Comment by Teslazar | Hacker News Reader

The 4060 (non-ti) has only 8GB of ram, which is less than its predecessor, the 3060, which had 12GB and came out in Feb 2021. I wonder if this is unprecedented?

For anyone not really following the current issues with video cards that have only 8GB of VRAM, there are a bunch of modern games that stutter a lot with only 8GB. I have an 8GB 3060 Ti and regret the purchase since it's been a problem for me in several games so far.

AMD is expected to announce new mid-range models soon, which might provide more options to choose from that have 16GB+.

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Just seems like a money grab. The 4060 Ti has half the memory width (128 bit vs the old 256 bit wide) of the 3060 Ti, not much more than half the memory bandwidth. The old 3060 Ti has 448GB/sec and the new 4060 Ti has 288GB/sec.

This card depends on faking textures (DLSS) and faking frames with frame generation to increase performance. Frame generation seems particularly lame since the additional frames are generated without interacting with the game, thus increasing input latency and display latency.

So after 2.5 years you get to pay more for a worse card with less memory bandwidth that depends on cache hits and fakery to show any noticeable performance improvements.

Seems we need a new reversed Moore's style law for the regression taking place in the GPU space.

What we need is more competition. Nvidia has plenty of substantially faster cards they are shipping, they are just minimizing performance delivered and maximizing cost to the consumer.

4070 is comparable in bandwidth to the 3060 Ti and would be a much nicer upgrade for 2.5 years, but instead they increased the price by 50% and named it a 4070 instead of a 4060 ti.

Isn't the current AMD/Nvidia duopoly similar to the Intel/AMD duopoly we had in the CPU race era?

Yes, but AMD GPUs haven't (so far) pulled off any of the triumphs that AMD CPUs have. The ones that spring to mind:

  * Intel tried to reserve 64 bit for servers/Itanium, AMD brought out x86-64 across their line
  * Intel was pushing front side busses or dual busses.  AMD moved the memory controller on chip

As a result Nvidia has a lead in performance (like the 4090), in efficiency (perf/watt), market share, and in software (drivers and CUDA).

I don't think it's fair to say they're winning in drivers. Their driver is an absolute pain to work with. It's to the point that I'd rather have no GPU than an Nvidia one. I'm very much not the common user but their situation is abysmal.

Intel are just starting to enter the discrete GPU space in earnest - I'm hopeful they'll do something innovative, but I'll settle for competition and increased supply at this point.

I am confident that in gaming, AMD and Intel can compete if they can get their act together.

But for AI/ML, we are pretty much stuck with Nvidia.

To me it's more like the 3060 having 16GB is weird. It has the most VRAM in the generation after the 3090 (24GB).

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