Desktop GPU Sales Lowest in Decades: Report | Hacker News Reader

Desktop GPU Sales Lowest in Decades: Report

tomshardware.com

36 pointsbelltaco28 comments

I can buy a 4090.

But why should I? When my 1080Ti is still working? People who can afford the price Nvidia is asking no longer have the need to chase that graphic fidelity. We have jobs and family and other things to occupy ourselves with. Those who want the cards are priced out already. Not many young adults have the kind of disposable income to throw away a grand or two just for kicks.

But that might be what Nvidia want. Why spend effort selling to consumers when the corporations are paying top dollar for that AI silicon?

With consoles more or less dictating hardware requirements, it certainly feels silly to stay on the hardware treadmill. If I bought a 4000 series card, I guess I can see some RTX effects that maybe 2 studios will optimize for in the opening sequence?

Oh its worse. During the pandemic and crypto craze video cards were simply untouchable, but I managed to score aPS5 at close to MSRP.

And guess what… after 3 years without a gaming pc I got used to going to the console first.

I have a 3060 (the smallest from the series, I believe, but still expensive enough) but I only bought it because my old card did have some errors. I don't play that much anymore, but I use it most extensively for image synthesis. I put hours into that...

The small series still have at least some resemblance of a decent price/performance deal. Wouldn't mind some VT100 model, but the prices are just way out of line.

The decline might just indicate that the pricing is wrong. The new cards also have less vram for some reason. I got mine with 12gb and most 4xxx cards only have 8. That would suck for image synthesis again.

The 3060 is kind of hated for it's unexciting performance in more gaming oriented crowd, at least until the uniformly terrible 3050ti showed up to absorb all the hate. But the 12GB is the second highest available on that series and enough to play with AI and other tasks. Having enough vram to get in the door is just more important there.

Nvidia seems to have realized their screw-up through and introduced a 8GB 'updated' version of the 3060 which is an uninteresting product. The bus width of the original 3060 left them with the choice of either 6gb or 12gb so this product only existed original through a quirk of design, not because nvidia actually wanted their second best AI card to be the one at the bottom of the stack.

Yup, that's why I bought the 3060, my first GPU card. For the 12gb. It allows me to play with LLM. I can get 7/13/30B models, but it's dog slow. It's a terrible thing that Nvidia is dragging in increasing the memory or cores just to make a profit. It's so bad, I'm thinking of selling it and buying a used P40 with 24gb which will allow for larger models at almost the same performance.

It’s because GPUs are vastly overpriced and gamers don’t want to be ripped off by greedy GPU manufacturers.

If Nvidia and AMD want to sell GPUs then they should make great products and sell them at compelling prices.

As it stands they deliver the barest minimum at inflated prices.

Heck the newest Nvidia card is SLOWER than previous generation and costs hundreds of $ more.

Newer NV cards are better value at msrp. On sale, previous gens are better value (everywhere. Sick 6800xt deals).

Intel is killing it in providing value. The launch was basically generally competitive but with caveats, and Intel's kick ass amazing software folks - something strongly in Intel's long long suite albeit not evenly across absolutely every product - rapidly iterated & fixed bad spots & found tons of huge wins on their brand new gpu. It's a hero story, but amazing.

What really sucks is that the (rest of the) market degrading like we have is only making the market worse. Some good wins are needed. AMD's rx7600 looks like a solid rx580 value-price replacement, finally. Good stuff.

>> AMD's rx7600 looks like a solid rx580 value-price replacement, finally.

That’s not what the reviews said.

It's sub $300 msrp and doubles a bunch of the numbers on the previous generation at a lower price. Tom's was a dismissive review, and the challenge is real, but it sure looks like a solid value oriented offering to me. Not a ton of lift, but cheaper msrp. And a couple admittedly minorish perks over last gen. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-rx-7600-revi...

There's also a bunch of pretty positive reviews too. Also the competition is o ly so so. Nvidia's up scaling is amazing & probably an easy sell, but the amd card is quite a contender. It really reminds me of the rx580, but which was soo confusing at the time. Prices were going up & up & max killer speed was the only thing the gamer media ranked on or cared about, and the rx580 was so much less. But it was a great & amazing value, that served so many so well. I think amd is at another place of mismatched expectations & desires. But yes, the synthetics are amazing but the actual lift here is lackluster. But it's at an amazing msrp.

> Intel's kick ass amazing software folks

That's probably the first time in history anyone has described them this way, as the software was so atrociously bad at Arc product launch it was famously universally panned + caused most reviewers to say "don't buy this product yet, wait for the software to be fixed".

* https://youtu.be/nEvdrbxTtVo?t=1500

(there are many other reviews like this)

It's good they seem to have gotten their house in order afterwards though. So maybe they'll be regarded this way in future. :)

I agree. It was bad. It still has significant rough edges, yes. But holy shit the team has done such an amazing job & the numbers & stability are sooo much better, but for a card that was already in so many cases competitive with cards that cost sooo much more.

Changing the launch narrative is harder than sending people to the moon. People will cling to this initial knkwledge, I to the original message, for my heavens long.

Cool, sounds like they really are on the right path then. :)

If intel did provide SR-IOV in their ARC cards, sure, I would agree.

But looks like they willingly canibalized a product that could launch their practically non existing GPU server market, so that they wouldn't canibalize the sales of that market.

Which will result in it not achieving actual momentum.

Intel being intel (same silly positioning as with ECC memory).

I say this is a good thing.

Nvidia has been providing excellent software but they overprice their hardware because of AMD's lazy strategy.

$300 used to get you top of the line cards, now you can't even get entry level in that price. Meanwhile, consoles are providing excellent value for cheap, even if they sell at a loss.

It's clear, the high price, high demand strategy did not last for too long and people are realizing that this consumerism hype gives you nothing when they just come up with the 'Latest and the greatest' right after you buy their current offerings.

I just want something with more memory. It is crazy how little GPU memory has moved over the years. I have a 1080ti, and upgrading from there looks like paying a LOT more money for very little more VRAM.

I think the used 3090s on Ebay, going for about $700, are a decent deal, especially since they've 24GB of VRAM.

I suspect the economy in general is a big part of it. That and the high price of the cards. But a lot of things have inflated prices these days.

Honestly I think PC gaming etc. could be the least of our problems pretty soon. It's really about trying to find anyone with a plan for how to avoid WWIII.

Too expensive now. I bought a 3060 a year ago and I'm not really seeing much of an improvement on the 1060 I was using. I'll probably keep this card for the next few years, I'm not chasing after an extra few FPS a year.

...following a surge in sales that hasn't been seen in decades. I thought we were past covidbait headlines.

agreed. did they just forget that cryptomining existed?

Seems like a pretty steady decline over the years judging by this figure: https://d15shllkswkct0.cloudfront.net/wp-content/blogs.dir/1...

Interesting I thought there was a huge increase in sales thanks to the crypto miners? That doesn't seem to be reflected in that chart.

Why would NVIDIA spend silicon on 4060's to sell at a price gamers would buy when they have insatiable demands for giga-margin H100's or GH200's?

Because NVIDIA doesn't have their own fabs, and the fabs they contract with have a good bit of capacity right now in their production lines as output decreases.

Afaik the rtx4000 series uses the TSMC 4N node also used for the H100, which currently seems to be maxed out in capacity.

I use cloud pc to play my games now. 40 bucks a month and I get decent / good graphics.

That’s how I played Elden ring and now Diablo 4 on my MBA

Sadly, the latency of cloud gaming is too high for most users and the input lag too frustrating for some of us who have grown accustomed to better.

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