For $2000 you could get better light beams in a game you're already playing, or if you're physically capable you could take a mountaineering course and get a helicopter to and from a remote climb
So if you're in the business of having almost anything else to do with the money, it's going to seem like a really tenous financial choice.
Pricing can't be insane and causing huge demand at the same time...
When it comes to certain luxury products, price increases actually do increase demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
It's why people pay thousands of dollars for a handbag cost maybe tens of dollars to produce. People like playing status games.
This effect is why third richest person on the planet is Bernard Arnault of Louis Vuitton, someone you've likely never heard of. He's currently wealthier than Bezos. He didn't actually improve our lives or revolutionize industry. He just latched into our primitive status seeking behavior.
It's likely he wouldn't be the third richest person with just Louis Vuitton and it's probably mostly because of LVMH.
Nvidia sets the bar and AMD follows. AMDs prices have slowly crept up as well. So no matter what, you're paying much more for a top spec GPU today than you ever have before.
It's in the best interests of both Nvidia and AMD to keep these prices high, and it's a detriment to the consumer.
AMD did it with their CPUs as well. They undercut Intel with some great price/performance deals. Grabbed their market share back and are now bumping those prices back up to parity with Intel. Now neither company has to cut their prices.
Nvidia will use artificial scarcity to push these prices. We know they can produce a shit tonne of GPUs, they did it for years.
Before the first Ryzen, only Intel Atom CPUs had a price around $50/core, while the better Intel Core CPUs had prices around $100/core. Then Intel had to also follow AMD and drop the prices for the top models to around $50/core (the "efficiency" cores in Alder Lake and Raptor Lake count as a half core).
So there is still hope that the RDNA 3 GPUs will have a more decent performance/price ratio, even if it is unlikely that they will be faster than the RTX 40 Series.
$700 USD in 2013 is worth $900 USD in 2022. Almost a decade of inflation.
Also, the GTX Titan was $1000 USD msrp, which was essentially the 780Ti with double the memory.
It feels more like 700$ in 2013 would be worth now 1400$??
No. "Printing Money" is a shortcut term used for many of the measures used by the federal reserve recently, but it's not literally printing money in this case (significantly less than trillion has actually been printed since 2019). Going into the details of the economics of this is a mess, and inflation is absolutely high and causing problems right now, and very likely is higher than official CPI numbers but it's not anywhere near 100% in 3 years. Keep in mind lots of prices dropped in 2020 and were still recovering/suffering in 2021, so that paints a skewed picture vs comparing 2022 to 2019 before covid wrecked things.
> It feels more like 700$ in 2013 would be worth now 1400$??
USD$700 circa 2013 adjusted for inflation is USD$890 in 2022. Feel free to pay more if you feel like it should be more though.
Specially 1600 for a component that need probably at least half that much more just to be fully utilized.
$30/mo doesn't hit as hard as $1100 up front. For some consumers, its a fundamentally different way of thinking.
Reminder that the 780ti was $700. The top spec SKU.
Nvidia has took the GPU shortage and now set that pricing as the norm. And people will eat it up like suckers.