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Comment by kcb | Hacker News Reader

Yup, the days of the value high end card are dead it seems like. I thought we would see a cut down 4090 at some point last generation but it never happened. Surely there's a market gap somewhere between 5090 and 5080.

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The xx90 cards are really Titan cards. The 3090 was the successor to the Titan RTX, while the 3080 Ti was the successor to the 2080 Ti, which succeeded the 1080 Ti. This succession continued into the 40 series and now the 50 series. If you consider the 2080 Ti to be the "value high end card" of its day, then it would follow that the 5080 is the value high end card today, not the 5090.

In all those historical cases the second tier card was a cut down version of the top tier one. Now the 4080 and 5080 are a different chip and there's a gulf of a performance gap between them and the top tier. That's the issue I am highlighting, the 5080 is half a 5090, in the past a 3080 was only 10% off a 3090 performance wise.

It was not actually. The last time this was the case was Maxwell:

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/nvidia-gm200.g772

Beginning with Pascal, Nvidia’s top GPU was not available in consumer graphics cards:

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/nvidia-gp100.g792

Turing was a bit weird since instead of having a TU100, they instead had Volta’s GV100:

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/nvidia-tu102.g813

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/nvidia-gv100.g809

Then there is Ampere’s GA100 that never was used in a consumer graphics card:

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/nvidia-ga100.g931

Ada was again weird as instead of a AD100, it had the GH100:

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/nvidia-ad102.g1005

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/nvidia-gh100.g1011

Now with Blackwell the GB100 is the high end one that is not going into consumer cards. The 5090 gets GB202 and the 5080 gets GB203.

Rather than the 40 series and 50 series putting the #2 GPU die into the #2 consumer card, they are putting the #3 GPU die into the #2 consumer card.

This is not relevant to what is being discussed. I clearly mean top tier consumer GPU.

3080/3090 - Same die

2080 ti/Titan RTX - Same die

1080 ti/Titan Xp - Same die

980 ti/Titan X - Same die

780/Titan - Same die

670/680 - Same die

570/580 - Same die

470/480 - Same die

Yes, but Nvidia thinks enough of them get pushed up to the 5090 to make the gap worthwhile.

Only way to fix this is for AMD to decide it likes money. I'm not holding my breath.

Don't necessarily count Intel out.

Intel is halting its construction of new factories and mulling over whether to break up the company...

Intel's Board is going full Kodak.

I wouldn't count Intel out in the long term, but it'll take quite a few generations for them to catch up and who knows what the market will be like by then

Intel hate making money even more than AMD.

Starting around 2000, Intel tried to make money via attempts at everything but making a better product (pushing RAMBUS RAM, itanium, cripling low-end chips more than they needed to be, focusing more on keeping chip manufacturing in-house thereby losing out on economy of scale). The result was engineers were (not always, but too often) nowhere near the forefront of technology. Now AMD, NVIDIA, ARM are all chipping away (pun intended).

It's not dissimilar to what happened to Boeing. I'm a capitalist, but the current accounting laws (in particular corporate taxation rules) mean that all companies are pushed to use money for stock buybacks than R&D (which Intel spent more on the former over the latter over the past decade and I'm watching Apple stagnate before my eyes).

Intel's Arc B580 budget card is selling like hotcakes... https://www.pcworld.com/article/2553897/intel-arc-b580-revie...

They fired the CEO for daring to make a product such as this. The 25mil they paid to get rid of him might even wipe out their profits on this product.

AMD announced they aren't making a top tier card for the next generation and is focusing on mid-tier.

Next generation, the are finally reversing course and unifying their AI and GPU architectures (just like nVidia).

2026 is the big year for AMD.

AMD's GPU marketing during CES has been such a shit show. No numbers, just adjectives and vibes. They're either hiding their hand, or they continue to have nothing to bring to the table.

Meanwhile their CPU marketing has numbers and graphs because their at the top of their game and have nothing to hide.

I'm glad they exist because we need the competition, but the GPU market continues to look dreary. At least we have a low/mid range battle going on between the three companies to look forward to for people with sensible gaming budgets.

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