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> (and a fair number of people (including reviewers!) actively propagandize about these cards, like complaining the 4060 or 4060 Ti is actually slower than its predecessor - they're absolutely not, even at 4K (tough for a 6600XT tier card!) the 4060 Ti is still faster on average. And as a general statement, AMD made the same switch to 128b memory bus last gen already without catastrophic issues, like the aforementioned 6600XT. A card can still be a mediocre step without making shit up about it, and the 3060 Ti was the absolute peak of the 30-series value so it's understandable the 40-series struggles to drastically outpace it. But it's not slower, either.)

Yeah, the 3060 Ti was probably the best 30-series card, but the 4060 Ti being 128 bit is a much bigger issue than the 6600 XT or 4060 being 128 bit. You see, the 6600 XT succeeded the 192-bit 5600 XT, and the 4060 succeeded the also 192-bit 3060. But the 3060 Ti was a 256 bit card.

I'm also pretty sure that the 3070, which is only a small step up from the 3060 Ti, often outpacing the 4060 Ti and it becomes a much worse thing, also considering that the 3060 Ti and 4060 Ti both launched for $400. (The 6600 XT also launched for an MSRP of $380, but this was amidst the huge pricing bubble and AMD didn't want to hand over all of that to scalpers.)

To add insult to injury, the 4060 Ti is available in a 16 GB variant, which has so much memory relative to its bit width that Nvidia has to put the chips both front and back. GA104 cards which wouldn't need such tricks did not get one.

The 4070 and 7800 XT are fine from a value perspective, but it's above the price range that most people are in. But the value proposition drops off quite hard there. GPUs like the 7600 or 4060 Ti offer almost nothing over their predecessor in terms of gaming performance, so it makes sense why nobody buys them. But those are the segments that are supposed to sell well.

I agree, 128b is too small for the 4060 Ti's price point. Both AD106 and AD103 really needed another 2 memory controllers per die, that would have given you 4060 Ti 12GB/24GB and 4080 16GB/4080 super 20gb (with quadros using clamshell). They missed the market expectations on VRAM at the price (and performance) levels they wanted to target, and it probably would only have increased the die size by 10% or so to have the extra memory controllers.

My suspicion is that these are pandemic-brain decisions. I think Ada entered mass production at the start of 2022 absolute latest (remember the "TSMC refuses to cancel 5nm wafer order" headlines?) so it would have been specced early/mid 2021 most likely. It's about a year from tapeout to launch typically, and if rumors were true they were ready to launch in june 2022 then they would have taped out in mid-2021 and been in volume late 2021/early 2022.

Everyone in early 2021 was trying to absolutely maximize the number of units shipped, and if you need 4GB more memory per card then you ship 33% less units for your GDDR supply, you get more than 10% less dies per wafer, etc. It would have seemed like a good decision at the time especially with mesh shaders eventually coming in and reducing a bit of the VRAM pressure etc.

As it stands, short of taping out some new dies, NVIDIA really cannot do anything about some of the gaps in the market because their only option is insane cutdowns on AD102 and AD104 to fit the gap. Cutting AD102 down to (rumored) 4080 Super shader count would be a 40% cut. Cutting AD104 down to 4060 Ti shader count would be a 50% cut. That is not yield harvesting, that's throwing away half your die. And that's why a 4080 Super 20GB was absolutely never in the cards once AI started to really take off - NVIDIA can already sell those as Quadro A5000 or A6000 anyway, why would they throw away half of a working chip to make it cheaper for gamers? 4090D is absolutely the final nail in that coffin, it will not happen at this point, every shitty yield they have will go there.

AMD themselves have gone a different route and disambiguated memory from compute. They already put 2 memory PHYs per MCD attached to a single infinity link (so they are "doubling up") which relieves the pressure of GDDR density stalling out at 16gbit for a prolonged (I think unexpectedly) long period of time. It also provides a degree of physical fanout which relieves the routing pressure etc (look at the footprint of an A6000 or RTX 3090, it's crazy how tight they rammed the chips in).

It surprises me that AMD haven't done a 4-PHY MCD. Even if you can't route that many GDDR lanes, you could also do sort of the opposite of the 7900GRE/7900M and put a smaller chip in a larger package but it commands the full memory bus width of a 7900XTX, so you have Radeon Pro 7800 48GB or whatever. It's not without its downsides (RDNA3 idle and low-load power consumption remains atrocious and probably always will due to the link power and due to the caches being on the other side of the link) but they're accidentally sitting on the key to big-VRAM cards at the moment of big-LLM models. What could be more of a push for ROCm then "hey here's a Radeon Pro W7800 48GB for $1499 and we can actually ship them today"?

Yeah, I agree fully on the "pandemic brain" thing. One interesting observation I made is that usually mainstream midrange cards seem to hover just over 200mm². That includes for example cards like the HD 7850, but extends all the way to the likes of the RX 580, RX 5700 XT, but also the GTX 1060 or GTX 660. Those cards are all 256 bit if AMD and 192 bit otherwise, funnily enough.

It seems die sizes are on the rise though! The 6600 XT is a similar size to the 5700 XT despite having much less hardware (except cache), although I guess RDNA2's better clocks also ate some die space. The RTX 3060 is also reasonable large at 276 mm², which seems more like what's usually 60 Ti territory. And the 3070 is even bigger than the 1080!

Even in that context though, the 4060 Ti looks fairly anemic at 188 mm². The 4060 is even smaller at 159 mm², which almost equals the RX 5500 XT that debuted at $170, just over half the cost of the 4060.

Intel's current GPUs are meanwhile comically large seeing as the 400 mm² or so ACM-G10 competes with N23/N33 and GA106 which are much smaller, and even the tiny 4060. I think that's mostly because of the way too fine grained EUs which also makes the architecture very complex with slices and subslices. But at least for Battlemage they seem to be planning to grow the EUs, rather than throwing on more.

It's also worth noting that if Nvidia decided to "double up" the memory on the 3070 in a similar way to the 4060 Ti, they could have made a 32 GB version of it. Intel could also decide to do something like that for Battlemage, or of course AMD could do it with the 7900 XTX or similar. Despite AMDs weaker AI performance (no real matrix multiplication acceleration, unlike Nvidia or Intel) it would at least get AI developers to likely care about their cards as it means they have the best flagship in one important metric.

With the way wafer costs keep increasing, physically smaller dies are inevitable. 50% higher density at 30% higher cost or whatever implies that if you keep the same die size, then cost goes up 30%, and in market terms that die has moved up a product tier. That number I was referring to is total transistor count and transistors-per-$ not die area, the cost of producing the same sized (eg 200mm2) die across nodes has skyrocketed, a 4060 Ti is far far more expensive than a 1060 to produce.

Clamshell also adds PCB/assembly cost which people never account for. And all of this has to have partner margins rolled into it too etc. Eg at one point it was like $3.50 per 8gbit module, assuming 16gbit modules are comparable then 8GB x $4 = $32 of memory, but probably there's another $10-15 in the PCB and assembly, plus partner margin, etc. $50 would be partners losing margin, $75 probably they break even, $100 definitely is pushing up margin a bit, but that's also what people wanted, if you remember back to the bandwagon around EVGA. I think in the rush to bandwagon everyone just forgot who ultimately pays that margin ;)

(and of course in launch terms, once cards are manufactured it's painful to open them up and remanufacture them all, are you going to desolder the BGA to put it on a new PCB, one by one?)

I've commented the same thing before, that 3060 Ti 32GB would also be a very appealing product at the moment. I guess they have their reasons but it seems like a slam-dunk cashgrab at this moment of AI mania?

RDNA3 does have WMMA which should at least get the foot in the door for things like AI/ML(-weighted TAAU) upscaling. I expect them to take a crack at that with FSR4, I strongly discount rumors that they're not working on that, especially with the console refresh (PS5 Pro at least) having RDNA3 and some kind of AI core. Even if sony builds one in-house, AMD totally have to be working on one internally too, just there's various reasons not to talk about it externally etc (people wanted them to not announce overly early etc, this is what that looks like). They'd want something for devs who want to validate once across multiple platforms anyway, they definitely will launch something within a year if not alongside the PS5P itself. WMMA may not be the answer for pure training horsepower though, NVIDIA having full-fat tensor units (like CDNA's) in their gaming GPUs was a good move (I won't even say "lucky", they've worked for it). But RDNA3 WMMA is better than nothing.

I really think Intel's architecture is aimed at a future-node (plus an attempt to get the foot in the door on game/driver support). wave-8 is indeed way too finely grained for most workloads right now, but the pendulum is swinging back from cache to logic, and that means you have more transistors to spend on such frivolities. Growing the EUs definitely makes sense to me, like they were proofing the control/scheduling side at a small scale first, now they build the rest of it, etc. It just feels obviously wrong to do wave-8 right of the gate, on a 3060/3070 tier product at best, so what was the real goal? Some kind of incremental/iterative development, presumably.

But yeah intel is a can of worms. The last time I checked (probably 6mo ago) they were operating the graphics division at -200% margin, which is needless to say stunning. I just also think they really have no choice, the writing is on the wall with NVIDIA Grace and MI300X and Apple Silicon Max/Ultra that big APUs are the future, both for a number of consumer segments but especially for a lot of HPC and even enterprise segments. Can't be competitive in HPC or enterprise if you don't have it, and even for laptops, you can't not have an iGPU. So if you cancel it do you go to Imagination or someone and license PowerVR like the bad old days of Atom? That's not a compelling product when AMD is turning out chips like 7840HS and soon the Strix Point/Strix Halo line.

Other people tend to read that as "-200% margin, they'll cancel it any day now" but I actually read it as the opposite, it's "-200% margin and it's so important they are barreling through anyway". They are canceling stuff left and right but they don't have a choice on Xe/Arc regardless of the cost. And specific dies being canceled based on the current stuff doesn't mean anything in that context - that's just staying agile rather than over-committing to a schedule before you know what product you're going to build.

But in general Intel can't seem to execute much of anything very well these days. Every good release feels like a fluke and they're back to the woodshed in no time. Alder Lake came with the loss of AVX-512, the 2.5gbe NICs are stuck in a state of permanent re-spins and steppings, Sapphire Rapids has some fatal power flaw that needs a 1200W psu (and they're not kidding) due to silly 700W+ transients and is getting a respin just in time for emerald rapids, meteor lake was basically 6mo late and still had a messed-up BIOS and still undershot performance targets, on and on, and they're cutting pay and firing staff. Death-spiral territory right there.

> RDNA3 does have WMMA which should at least get the foot in the door for things like AI/ML(-weighted TAAU) upscaling.

Do keep in mind that RDNA3 WMMA is very slow, running at the same theoretical TFLOPS as shader (which are doubled from RDNA2 due to very limited dual issue support that can be used in WMMA). Nvidia tensor cores and Intel XMX can run closer to 4:1 or 8:1 or so compared to vector workloads.

> It just feels obviously wrong to do wave-8 right of the gate

That's because Alchemist isn't a a true first generation product, it's a scaled-up version of Intel's (relatively mature at this point) integrated graphics product. This means that Alchemist has suffered large growing pains (Gen12 was not really designed to be used in products bigger than maybe 128 EUs, A770 is 512 EUs). It also has some form of separation anxiety, seeing its need for ReBAR. I also recall very early in Alchemist's life (pre-release) some driver optimization that had a huge benefit, which was just the wrong memory region being used, as all memory is the same on an iGPU but not a dGPU.

> It also has some form of separation anxiety, seeing its need for ReBAR. I also recall very early in Alchemist's life (pre-release) some driver optimization that had a huge benefit, which was just the wrong memory region being used, as all memory is the same on an iGPU but not a dGPU.

yes, the iGPU is actually a client of the ringbus on intel so some of these bugs seem to have been overlooked (I'd guess the fix probably improved performance on the iGPUs too lol). AMD has always interfaced the iGPU via PCIe[0] which probably helped modularity.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-5700g/3.html

Plus in general AMD just seems to be better at modularity and re-use period. I think that's the biggest headwind for Intel in general. Every. single. product. is completely one-off and custom and has its own set of bugs. Just define an interface and get used to it.

But I think that's a Conway's Law situation of the hardware design resembling the org structure. Intel is a mess inside and so are their products.

[0] Infinity Fabric is de-facto coherent PCIe fabric, the intel equivalent would be putting it over DMI. And AMD explicitly offers IF as a CXL competitor too. I do love that in the modern era everything is PCIe, the many-faced god. And it all just works - plug your OCP 2.0 card or M.2 card into an adapter and away you go, or tunnel pcie over Oculink or MCIO, etc. The greatest tech success story of the last 30 years.

> One interesting observation I made is that usually mainstream midrange cards seem to hover just over 200mm². That includes for example cards like the HD 7850, but extends all the way to the likes of the RX 580, RX 5700 XT, but also the GTX 1060 or GTX 660. Those cards are all 256 bit if AMD and 192 bit otherwise, funnily enough.

this is indeed an interesting observation btw, and I have mused before that it's interesting how NVIDIA leans towards narrower buses with more advanced tech while AMD tends to lean towards plainer wider buses. Which is sort of the same observation but from the other direction.

by that I mean, they were first to lean into (lossless) delta compression, and continued to retain an advantage in compression ratio for most subsequent generations. They were first to lean into quad-data rate with GDDR5X, first to lean into PAM4 with GDDR6X, etc. They very clearly favor narrower buses with higher "intensity" for their high-end stuff. Supposedly this reduces the power-per-bit-transfered but man looking at GDDR6X I really don't know, 3070 Ti is massively worse at efficiency than the 3070. Evidently they don't clock down the memory very well and at full transfer rate the total power is significantly higher (even if the per-bit is less).

I wonder when we'll see the return of consumer HBM cards. It feels like the time has to be approaching soon, especially with high-NA reticle limit hitting in a gen or two. Memory PHYs are an obvious thing to cut back on for NVIDIA in particular, since they don't have MCM yet.

the analogy also applies to high-end where NVIDIA is usually topping out at 384 and AMD has gone as high as 512b before. I think this is no longer possible with GDDR6/6X due to signal integrity/routing and the pcie card dimensions, everyone is topping out at 384b now, even AMD.

Thanks for this! You perfectly summed up what I've been thinking for the last year.

I would like to add that especially with the Intel Arc GPUs added into the mix, it's a great time for good value GPUs.

In case of the Arc GPUs it often feels like many people want the prices to drop so low that Intel basically gives them away for free.

Super cards are allegedly going to be only 10% faster than non-super cards, at similar pricing #. Not significant enough to change the argument of the article I'd suggest.

# https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/alleged-nvid...

pre-release scalping/placeholder prices have been wrong almost 100% of the time they're brought up. they're absolute staples of the twitter leaker crowd who has absolutely nothing better to do, but they have been wrong almost every time. Literally there were rumors of intel MSRP adjustments for every series since 7th gen, 8th/9th/10th/11th/12th/13th have all had dumb "i7 is now $449! i9 is now $749!" type headlines every single time. Some random hole-in-the-wall computer shop in singapore does not have secret pre-launch info, it's just a placeholder/safely-high scalping price because they know it'll sell out on launch day anyway.

What I expect is:

* 4080 super won't be much of a performance step, but it'll probably move downwards from $1200 to $999. Could even be $899.

* 4070 Ti will be retired and replaced with 4070 Ti Super at the same MSRP. Not much faster, but it'll go from 12GB to 16GB, so NVIDIA will finally have an midrange 16GB option. Upper-midrange to be sure but it's not $1200 either.

* 4070 will likely move down to the $499 price point and 4070 Super takes the $599 or $629 price point. This should be ~95% of a 4070 Ti 12GB at 80% of the price.

It's possible that 4070/4070 Super are a little bit more, the viable range is like $499-549 and $599-649 respectively, if 4070 Ti Super comes in at (eg) $799 and 4080 Super at $999. But in general this whole refresh is strongly constrained by the 4070 Ti Super needing to hit the $749 price point, plus 4070 needing to compete with 7800XT.

AMD actually went pretty hard on the 7800XT, $499 is a good price for that, and it gets you 16GB in a 4070-class card (5% faster than 4070[0]). NVIDIA needs a 16GB card that is not $1200 - or even $999. It's really got to be $749 or at absolute most $799. That sku can only be AD103, so they need to stop using the harvested dies for 4070 Ti and start using them for 4070 Ti Super. That's why 4070 Ti is being retired - those rumors make perfect sense. They can't use AD102 because to hit 4080 Super shader count they'd have to cut >40% of the die and that's a total waste, and they're using every AD102 for AI cards right now. They can't use AD104 because it's only 12GB.

The rest of the pieces fall into place around that. 4070 Ti has to (largely) go away, except for truly failed chips (and these are also used in Quadro 4000 Ada, which is 20GB). 4080 gets a refresh to use the full-die AD103 chips, but it's not worth more than $999 if there is a lower-tier 16GB model, and it could even be $899. AD104 gets the full-die 4070 Super slotted underneath the 4070 Ti Super. 4070 probably needs a small price cut ($499) to compete with 7800XT (and it still only has 12GB, but NVIDIA always does position at a small premium), so 4070 Super has to slot somewhere between those $499 and $749 cards. Which probably means $599. 4080 pricing (the only AD103) was always the most incredibly silly of the whole lineup, so they have the most room to come down. They totally could do 4080 super for $899 if they wanted, the margins are ridiculous on that chip. $749 for 4070 Ti 16GB with AD103 cutdown is super plausible too.

I know everyone is convinced that NVIDIA is going to just keep raising prices forever, but please consider the possibility that the people doing that pitchfork-brigade are just rabble-rousing. The problem is that so many people have bought into the nvidia-bashing over time that it seems reasonable and seems common-sense but it's really not. It is just like last summer before Ada launched, when everyone was absolutely positive that 4090 was going to be 600W, then 800W, finally 900W TBP [1][2][3]. People unironically argued that shrinking two nodes wouldn't buy NVIDIA absolutely anything in terms of efficiency improvements and 4090 was just going to be 3090 perf/w but higher perf. NVIDIA is not going to just stack the supers on top of the existing stuff, there will be some combination of price cuts and faster skus and (for 4070 Ti super) a VRAM increase. 4070 and 4070 Super represent a 15-20% improvement from MSRP and 4070/4070 Ti were alright to begin with, and the 16GB 4070 Ti sku is as good as they can do for a value-oriented 16GB sku with AD102 out of the picture. 4080 Super will continue to undeniably be one of the graphics cards of all time, but there is a price where it makes sense for the performance step too.

People get absolutely silly and buy into the wildest, most nonsensical bullshit as long as it feeds the "green man bad" itch. And they eagerly believe and overhype the most nonsensical pro-AMD bullshit (Zen2[4], fury x, vega, and RDNA3 being the most extreme, but it happens every time to some degree). And there is a whole little media ecosystem devoted to feeding this and catering to it - it's not called "green gaming tech" after all. Many people are generally resentful and bitter about NVIDIA and eagerly soak it up and amplify it. A lot of people have low-key adopted pro-AMD fanboy attitudes and framing (or bashing other brands, like the absurd amount of denial about apple silicon performance/efficiency, at first, or tiger lake/ice lake efficiency, etc), without even realizing it or really thinking of themselves as pro-AMD. It's kinda just the sea in which we swim, on tech-focused social media. PCMR is completely crazy pro-AMD shit all the time f.ex (which makes sense when you see the head mod! [5]).

Like I said, there's a lot of people who are just unhappy that a 4070 isn't $299, the "socially gamer, fiscally conservative" crowd, and they're just kinda gonna continue being unhappy. The overall cost trend is up, it's still an overall fairly cheap hobby, but a high-end GPU with x mm^2 of silicon costs legitimately quite a bit more to design + validate + build now, and it's going to continue to go up in the future. The flip benefit is that hardware ages slower too, and NVIDIA has provided pretty good forward-support for DLSS that will soon be baselined by the switch 2's T239 chip. I fully expect some CUDA-like lifecycle where after 5+ years they may launch "DLSS Hyper Resolution" that uses some new accelerator, but I think they probably won't pull support for older cards etc and the switch 2 commits them to pretty significant ongoing work on Ampere era hardware (possibly with an Ada OFA?). That's the reason they've been on a tear with DLSS 2.5, 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0 (coming soon) all boosting image quality at very low input resolutions+framerates. DLSS needs to run real good on Switch for upscaling those 3rd party ports in docked mode.

But 4070 and 4070 Super should receive some good pricing and 4070 Ti Super finally gets a decent card with DLSS and tensor and 16GB that isn't $1200. I think I was right. That's not an overall bad adjustment, and NVIDIA can't really do a big price cut on AD102 right now due to AI mania, so that's as good as it's gonna get. 4090 dipping below MSRP (got to ~$1400-1450 iirc) was truly the bottom for this gen, I think.

Hopefully there are some lower-end SKUs too, but I think NVIDIA is constrained by a fairly large inventory of 4060 Ti 8GB that they're managing carefully. The 16GB SKU was a last-minute thing, they had already built out a ton of 8GB and they need to let the market absorb them before nuking the price too bad (or else partners get rekt). The 4060 Ti 8GB models have already dropped a ton in street price, they are decently faster and at some point they're worth it too. Rumors are contradictory on this too but Gigabyte EEC filings just disclosed a 7600XT 16GB, which sounds like it'd be based on the Navi 33 die. Deep cuts on Navi 32 parts have always seemed problematic to me due to overall wafer usage (it gets hit hard because it's MCM, it's as much 6nm silicon as a 7600 or somesuch, and also another big piece of 5nm) at the $300-350 price point etc, but N33 7600XT as simply clamshell-memory 7600 is doable and believable and would undercut the 4060 Ti decently. They could offer a 7600XT at $300/$329 for sure. So they may have to do a 4060 super/Ti adjustment at some point regardless.

But the reason AMD isn't just massively undercutting NVIDIA is because they don't have a magic wand on cost either. The economics of a 7700 non-XT will be interesting, I think that's really a lot of silicon to use for not a lot of margin (vs selling datacenter/mobile chips), I think the 7700 would be tough at (eg) $349, but who knows with AMD. The N31 design seems to be where the MCM really hits its stride in terms of scalability being worth the area hit vs monolithic, the power consequences, etc, and they could probably drop both 7800XT and 7900XT prices if needed against 4070 or 4070 Ti Super.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/16guxrk/amd_radeo...

[1] https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-ti-allegedly-fe... (citing kopite7kimi, one of the twitter leaker crowd)

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-reportedly-readies-...

[3] https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-40-graphics-card-rum...

[4] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Tech-Analyst-AdoredTV-leaks-al...

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv9SLtojkTU (this whole video is really good but 18:12 is the real reason people are upset, people want raster to keep scaling even though there's good reasons that it isn't, and working smarter not harder - increasing asymptotic performance-per-transistor - is the only way forward. DLSS would seem like a magic "more frames button" 10 years ago but it's so controversial now for absurd reasons. That video from Steve GN in another comment I made is so incredibly hyperbolic and absurd and that's the thing, a ton of people just lost their shit over the RTX launch and still haven't recovered.)

They want the latest and greatest, ( Leading Node, Latest Software Development and Driver Update improvement ) while not willing to pay much for it. At the same time refuse to learn and understand why something cost as much. And worst case of all? They are also the ones who traded cryptos. The major reason why Nvidia GPU prices had been above average.

source that crypto miners are complaining about gpu prices?

from my experience, it's nearly always the gamers complaining, usually blaming crypto for them not being able to afford a GPU

Do people still mine with GPUs? I thought ASICs blew that opportinity away a long time ago.

Besides, we need to blame amateur AI enthusiasts for the high GPU prices now.

I believe ETH and it's offshoots (e.g. DOGE) didn't have major benefits for ASICs, or at the very least ASICs didn't 'blow away' GPUs the way they did for BTC.

idk about miners being primarily the ones who complain about prices, but honestly they might be a large number of the people who complain about memory bus reductions.

RDNA2 was a relatively poor miner (worse than RDNA1) precisely because RDNA2 already did the same thing as Ada, replaced real bandwidth with cache. And generally that's fine and it performs well, because games are a pretty normal workload. But mining is deliberately completely random and uncacheable (otherwise you could cache the parts of the DAG that you need) and benefits more from the raw bandwidth, because the cache does ~nothing.

Miners have always been fucking great at astroturfing, like in 2021-2022 they had a ton of people convinced that it was just some giant production shortage and NVIDIA just wasn't making any cards etc. Or the arguments about how the mining LHR limiter was "bad for gamers" because you wouldn't be able to mine as profitably in your spare time (of course ignoring that paying double MSRP in the first place kinda offsets that and in fact necessitates mining to even make the purchase make sense). Miners are fundamentally just nerds who post on tech forums and gaming forums and know what arguments are convincing and catch traction etc.

Can I see those guys making a particular stink about the last source of super-wide memory bus cards drying up? Yes. They already bought up all the 5700XTs etc, Ampere was the last hurrah of the Big Memory Bus, and actually it would make sense if a ton of the outright agitators had some history in mining subs/etc.

It shouldn't really matter to gamers where the bandwidth comes from. Yes, cache hit rates decline at higher resolutions, but in reasonable configurations (eg not 4060 at 4K) the cache systems on RDNA2 and Ada are basically seamless/transparent to gamers. Games are cacheable workloads. It's fine. Things like the yuzu dev running 16K downscaled to 4K and complaining he had some performance loss on a 4060 is the extreme exception. They're not transparent to miners though.

In accordance with hanlon's law, however, I will admit that gamers are some extremely dumb motherfuckers (ahem, "often lack understanding of relevant technical details and frequently tend to bandwagon even when it doesn't make sense" etc) and it could just be people getting riled up about stuff they don't fully understand from semi-trusted tech-media figures telling them to be upset. We went through this same "it shouldn't matter how the bandwidth gets there" thing with texture delta compression, there were people insisting for ages that it was bad and hurt image quality despite it being lossless, and that AMD's image quality was better despite them implementing the same lossless delta compression approaches in GCN3 (Tonga/Fiji). It's more bits delivered per bit, without even a real power usage hit (unlike GDDR6X which was an incredibly mixed bag). Or with Fiji's HBM and Vega's HBM2/HBCC supposedly being some magic thing that let you swap across a 16 GB/s pcie bus without any sort of framebuffer size limitation etc... the gaming community is real bad at critical understanding and thinking about some of this deeper tech stuff.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-r...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/8460/amd-radeon-r9-285-review...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ8YlXh-jbI&t=280s

(Reviewers, on the other hand, there's really no excuse, and a lot of them are playing silly buggers largely at the expense of their viewers. People getting surprised by Alan Wake 2 that DX12U/DX12.2 is a thing that matters and is being adopted, people getting surprised that upscalers are a thing that matters and will matter more as UE5/6 and other intensive games come to rely on them, people getting surprised that mesh shaders reduce VRAM utilization, etc. They have basically done nothing to inform their viewers about any of the broader developments in the field other than whining about VRAM. It really does feel like a lot of the last 5 years has been a bunch of the reviewers being activists about the graphics field not going the way they want it to: they don't want upscaling, they want a return to moore's law and real raster gains etc, even though that's not possible and they understand perfectly well why. The trajectory of, eg, Steve Gamersnexus has really been something else, contrast his take on DX12 with his take on the RTX launch and DX12U/DX12.2. And pretty much everyone, too, continues to drag their feet on admitting DLSS is real framerate improvement etc that actually matters to card performance and efficiency etc. Reviewers discussed visual quality/pipeline quirks as part of GPU reviews for ages and it is increasingly going to be necessary again as more of this stuff is shunted into brand-specific platform libraries like DLSS, Metal, XeSS, and FSR. Doesn't matter if they don't wanna, it's necessary. It's very aggravating, for someone who wants to see the tech discussed and move forward.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qiQH29KAXg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=176s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=268 (just buy it!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu7pxJXBBn8&t=273s

Yup. 4060/4060 Ti is a great example.

Apples to apples, the 4060 is under $300 street price vs the 3060 Ti usually riding at $450 absolute minimum, almost as fast , far more efficient, supports newer DLSS features and AV1 encoding, etc. Samsung 8 was an incredibly cheap node and TSMC 4nm is incredibly expensive, so Ada was starting from a disadvantage in terms of perf/$ step, and also 3060 Ti was the absolute king of the "mainstream" value lineup (again, to such an extent that it essentially never sold at MSRP).

How do you cut 1/3 of the product cost in that situation, while only losing 8.7% performance? Some heavy-duty cost-downs. Obviously NVIDIA wasn't going to continue shipping 400-450mm2 of silicon in the x60 tier once they moved back to a modern node (and people have forgotten the die sizes involved with leading node products like 10-series or 600 series, they are quite small). And since PHYs don't really shrink, and since TSMC 7nm and 5nm have really good SRAM density, the obvious strategy is to replace raw memory bandwidth with cache. Which is the same thing AMD did with Infinity Cache in the previous generation. PCIe bus has the same problem, which is why AMD was first to the party with "mainstream" cards like 5500XT and 6600XT with cut-down x8 pcie bus as well.

These compromises are going to become increasingly heavy at the bottom of the stack. Remember, it's not like $150 products don't exist anymore, but they're going to look less like a Radeon 7850 and more like a RX 6500 XT. First they start having "entry-level" characteristics like 4060/7600 currently are, then they become HTPC tier stuff like 6500XT. They cease being products that will interest enthusiasts. Smaller memory buses, VRAM won't keep page with the needs of gaming, poor perf/$ for gaming, or the double-VRAM variants (like 4060 Ti!) will have good VRAM but atrocious value. There rarely is a moment where things actually roll backwards, but prices won't continue to approach $0 infinitely either, it follows a pattern of stagnating performance/VRAM in the face of increasing gaming requirements, and increasing amounts of compromises to get the cost down further.

With how slow modern node progression has gotten, and how many compromises are involved with newer designs, the older nodes remain very very favorable especially for lower-end designs. A bigger design on an older node means you don't have to compromise the memory bus and PCIe bus, and there are definitely customers for whom a 3060 Ti is a better product. AMD leaving the 7600 (another 128b product!) behind on an older-node is (once again) a very forward-thinking cost-reduction attempt, just like their work on reducing memory buses and pcie buses, and frankly it's surprising that NVIDIA isn't continuing to churn out 3060 Ti for the lan cafe type markets etc. 1080 Ti performance in an 8GB card is very adequate at the right price, and inventory stockpiles aside the 3060 Ti is much more attractive than the regular 3060 let alone the weird cutdowns.

If you don't want to make the compromises, you have to follow your product-design-bracket upwards in price. The price for a current-gen mainstream card in terms of the design expectations of mainstream gaming customers is $500-600 now.

And that's the part I think everyone just struggles with. $250-300 is entry-level cards now. The 4060 is perfectly fine in the context of an entry-level design that makes compromises to hit entry-level price points. $500-750 is mainstream where you are getting no-compromises on featureset/VRAM and balanced performance with good overall value. $1200-2000 is the enthusiast range where you get to check all the boxes and have the top-tier card that does RT everything with 24GB of VRAM etc. If you don't follow the design brackets upwards over time, then you are stepping downwards in design tiers from enthusiast to mainstream to entry-level, and you gradually get a more and more compromised product. 7850 becomes 6500XT.

At the end of the day it's already a low-margin, wafer-intensive business with a lot of supply risk (holy shit imagine trying to balance inventory through mining). NVIDIA has enterprise/AI, and AMD has constant supply issues in mobile and wants to take ground in datacenter. There is no real necessity for them to do this as a charity when they could be making more money elsewhere with their supply constraints, and it's actively bad for them to set up these crazy high-value products like 3060 Ti where it ruins the sales of the next 2 gens and breeds bad blood with customers. Arguably it's even bad to be doing the firesales to clear old inventory (as AMD found out with some reviewers panning RDNA3 too). If node progression and gen progression is slowing down, you don't need to firesale it to get it gone, it's not going to be e-waste in another year like in the 2000s.

AMD and NVIDIA are gonna make the products they can afford to make, sustainably, and they're not gonna cut their throat anymore with crazy deals like 970 or 3060 Ti/3080. If some segments are eroding because they're no longer viable gaming products, or because they're being eaten by APUs (and I'm including consoles as GDDR-based APUs) then fine, they won't make those products in the future. The $200-300 segment as a gaming gpu segment is not going to be forever, I expect the 8500XT/5050 and 9500/6030 will be quite boring for gamers just like 6500XT/3050 is.