Waiting this generation out until RTX is more wide-spread/tested and going for the next 7nm generation with hopefully AMD having a proper GPU to compete seems like a better strategy for most gamers out there.

The 80 series has always been a low-volume, high-margin halo product within Nvidia's gaming range. It's dirt cheap and high-volume compared to Quadro, but top-of-the-range for gaming. Cryptomania has revealed to Nvidia that they probably priced the 1080 too low at launch - many gamers were in fact willing to pay substantially inflated prices for The Best GPU.

If the mass market decides to wait for the RTX 1060 or 1050, that's fine with Nvidia, as they face no real competition from AMD at the moment. It's very much in Nvidia's interests to make the most of their market dominance.

Sorry, but this comment is really kind of hilarious.

The "PC vs. Console" debate is something that almost predates the Internet and it has generated countless forum wars...

A high range PC has always been the more powerful and expensive gaming machine, since basically the first 3DFX cards in the late 90s, some people are OK with that, other prefer consoles as a perfectly acceptable alternative.

The console might output 4K but that doesn't mean the GPU inside can handle higher settings than a 1060. The $600 GPU is irrelevant to that comparison.

Which is kinda irrelevant too, since console games are highly optimized for exactly 1 graphic card & rest of the setup. You get all the details hardware is capable of smoothly, nothing more or less. No fiddling with tons of settings that most have no clue about.

I don't get this often used argument - my games look better on PC than on consoles. Yes some UI gimmicks look better, textures have higher res, but after 30 minutes of playing it really doesn't matter at all, quality of gameplay and smoothness of experience is the king. Of course if one pours 5x the amount of money into PC that would be spent on console, there needs to be some inner justification. But it still doesn't make sense to me.

This is a view of person who plays only on PC, never had any console.

> Of course if one pours 5x the amount of money into PC that would be spent on console, there needs to be some inner justification.

You can get a prettier and smoother experience if you do that and don't put the settings on super-ultra.

But also, if you're already going to have a computer, popping in a better-than-console GPU is cheaper than a console.

The "smoothly" part is far from guaranteed. cough Dying Light cough

> Of course if one pours 5x the amount of money into PC that would be spent on console, there needs to be some inner justification.

IIRC PC game sales are far juicier than their console counterparts, especially if you don't live in 1st world countries.

The top of the line rigs are what you need to play new titles on Ultra settings, sold at $50-60+

With hardware comparable in pricing to what you'd find in a console (or using something that doesn't make much sense to mine with, like a GTX 780Ti) you can easily play a 3-5 year-old game at 1/2 to 1/4 of it's original price, which might even be reduced further by -50% to -90% during a Steam sale.

Better cancel my pre-order then...

> 2080Ti likely won't be able to do 4k@60Hz like 1080Ti couldn't either

My 1080ti and 4k monitor beg to differ.

I mean you're not countering his point in any way. He didn't say nobody would buy it, but it's a simple fact that most people can't afford or justify a thousand dollar GPU.

The vast majority of people buying Nvidia GPUs in the 10xx generation were going for 1060s and 1070s.

If you're sufficiently dedicated, even with limited funds going for every second or third iteration of halo products can be a great strategy. That way when you get it you'll have the absolutely best there is and a couple of years down the track it'll still be great but maybe it won't quite do Ultra anymore on the latest titles.

The 1080TI transformed my experience of my X34 Predator (it even paid for itself through timely sale of mining profits) which does 3440x1440 @95hz. I certainly wouldn't mind the new card but I'll wait for the next one after that minimum.

Do people really take out loans to get super expensive video cards?

Sure. Either by putting on a credit card or by using some sort of in store financing.

'most people can't afford or justify'. Come one. People buy cars and other stuff. Someone working fulltime and buying a 1k cheaper car can already afford and justify a 1k graphics card.

Cars do last way more than a video card as well, they have increased warranty period(in the EU video cards have 2y, cars usually 5-7y).

Cars tend to be purchased on leasing due to their higher cost and actual necessity. So saving 1k on a car usually doesn't transfer to 1k in cash.

From those people, it is easily justifyable to spend less on a car, a holiday or rent and instead having a nicer gaming rig. If you spend a lot of time playing games why not?

Modern technology is way cheaper than the previous/old status symbols.

I'm thinking about buying a car and one simple calculation is still what else i can do with that money.

And yes in munich, where i live right now, there are enough people with a car who could use public transport and don't us it.

The target group of a 1k graphics card is not someone who can barely afford the car he/she needs every day and would not be able to earn anything if the car breaks down...

There's also the VR factor, as much as Nvidia/AMD like to label their products "VR ready" we are, imho, ways off from actually being there.

At least if the goal is gonna be something like two displays at 4k@90+Hz and upwards.

my 1070 would do it, but it was garbage fps

For me if its not at 60fps or more ALL the time I'm angry. Grew up playing Quake and Unreal Tournament pretty seriously.

For a more casual game like skyrim it might be fine for me.

The last thing you want is having your field of view obscured by colorful explosions, bloom, debris, etc. when your opponent has a crystal clear vision on you.

But that is a completely orthogonal point to the question as to whether doom runs well at 4k with all features on. Because I am asking that question does not mean I would play death match that way. But I might indeed go through the single player campaign that way.

Indeed I didn't play Doom at 4k at all, because as I said, it felt like garbage at 4k, no matter what settings, on 1070

Gamers arent kids anymore. Amongst my friends that game, most are nearly 30 working excellent jobs in software.

They always have been. Still doesn't stop those who can buying them.

One would be forgiven for expecting roughly GTX 1080 Ti performance in the RTX 2070 at around $449-499 USD.

Or did you want to highlight something else I missed?

When you sell a product that actually has less compute performance (the RTX 2080) at the same price point as the higher-end part from the last generation (GTX 1080 Ti) something has gone horribly wrong. A lot of this is likely due to the Tensor/RTX units on the new GPU's taking up die space and there hasn't been an appropriate process shrink to make up for it, but it's all the more reason these are REALLY unappealing options for anyone outside the top-end enthusiast segment (the GTX 1070 is the most popular enthusiast card this generation, because even enthusiasts have budgets - which is usually the $400-500 range for GPUs).

tl;dr; Prices here make no sense, cards with similar or less performance selling at the same price point you could get from the previous gen - just with raytracing support added on top (so it won't net you WORSE performance with this new functionality utilized). I don't know who Nvidia thinks is going to buy these from a gaming perspective.

The hype around "ti" is unreal. Now they're changing it to "RTX" and "ti". /shock /awe /s

To me, it's pretty clear NVIDIA is cashing out.

Have you not noticed the market slaps the word gaming on commodity hardware along with a bunch of christmas lights and people happily pay a premium for it.

Gamers aren't the brightest bunch and a $1000 is the right price point when people are gladly dropping that on a mobile phone now.

Sure compared to a few years ago I'd agree with you, this market? this hype? No.

Even in the initially released marketing material, by Nvidia, the 8800 GTX had the obviously way better raw specs than the 9800 GTX. Took them a couple of days until they changed the material to compare on performance % in different games.

But the 9800 GTX was actually a slower card than the one year older 8800 GTX due to lower memory bandwidth and capacity. As such it was competing against one generation older mid-range cards like the 8800 GTS 512.

Current Steam user survey results (now that the over-counting issue has been fixed) shows the GTX 1060 as the single most popular GPU installed by active Steam users with a 12.5% market share, the GTX 1050 Ti and 1050 take second and third place with ~9.5% and ~6% respectively that means about 30% of Steam users have a current-gen GPU in the $200-300 price range.

So yes, volume != profit, but the consumer obviously trends towards more reasonably priced cards. Cards in the Titan price-point that NVidia is trying to sell the RTX 2080 Ti at are so uncommon that they get lumped into the 'other' category of the Steam survey - and since I highly doubt magic like doing integer operations in tandem with FP32 operations is going to bring that much of a performance improvement to the majority of gaming workloads in tandem with the really weak raw numbers of the just-announced cards (fewer TFLOPS on the 2080 than the 1080 Ti selling in the same price bracket) it's obvious Nvidia is really taking the piss with their pricing. You're paying more for raytracing, that's it - and while it's certainly a cool feature I don't really see gamers caring that much until it becomes usable at that $200-300 price point.

There's many expensive hobbies, but also a ton of cheap ones.

It's just common sense but if anyone needs proof, they could look at the pictures here (e.g. look at 8X MSAA 1080p vs only 2X at 4K, yet the latter has less visible aliasing): https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/180402-five-things-to-kno...

Did you expect it to run everything forever at an extremely high resolution with 60fps?

Why are Nvidia releasing new cards then?

This doesn't affect the argument that you're making. I just think it's actually incredibly absurd to complain as though it's the hardware's fault for not being able to keep up with 4k@60, when it's the devs who you should be looking at when you're disappointed with the performance on a given piece of hardware.

You can “tune” something all you want, you’re always going to have a lower quality representation if you want better performance. The hardware should give the developers the possibility of getting better quality graphics at higher resolutions. We can play the original doom at 4 and probably even 8K without much problems. But that doesn’t mean it’s because they “tuned” it better, it’s because hardware has gotten better and hardware will always be the limiting factor for games.

I have a dual xeon rig with sixteen cores that I used to use for video transcoding. It could transcode a movie in about 12 hours.

I read that a cheap Nvidia GPU could do the job in less than 30 minutes. It seemed way too good to be true, but I figured I'd spend $120 to find out.

It turned out the hype was wrong; it didn't take 30 minutes to do what sixteen Xeons spent 12 hours doing, it took fifteen minutes.

Unreal.

Please don't try to measure lossy-anything-calculation by speed alone, always make sure that the required quality can even be reached, and even if, that it still exhibits the performance benefits, even after you tune these features up far enough.

Many enthusiasts gamers consider gaming at 60 fps to be rather outdated.

I have long since taken to killing every graphical effect game devs can think of throwing into a game (if they supplied a toggle for it) simply so i can tell where the enemy is without wearing sunglasses indoors in a dark room.