Certainly not, but the infuriating part is historically the performance of those cards trickles down to the lower tiers at more reasonable prices as the generations go by. The GTX 1070 beat the GTX 980 Ti at an MSRP $200 less just one generation later, meanwhile at least from pure TFLOPS numbers the RTX 2080 is less powerful than the GTX 1080 Ti while costing around the same.

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

This all sounds like normal r&d and market forces. New stuff is low volume and premium prices. Once it becomes more common and more production lines are switched, the prices fall and the features get included into other models. This applies to virtually every product.

Or did you want to highlight something else I missed?

The new products are launching at the same price point similarly specced parts from the previous generation have been selling at. "Low volume" doesn't really play when you're talking silicon manufacturing, when you spend millions of dollars to make a mask you want to get ROI on it quickly - the GTX 1070 sold at over $200 less than the GTX 980 Ti, for example, at launch.

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.

Lots of people.

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.

Nvidia has a history of just sitting out their performance lead, see Geforce 8800 vs Geforce 9800.

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.