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Comment by tomohelix | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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?

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