That’s their newest mid-tier consumer card. On the data-center side they can’t make H100s fast enough, all the AI startups are clamoring for them. You also won’t see any reviews like that for the 4090; the only complaint I’ve seen there is that it’s hard to take advantage of it if your’re just gaming (but it’s still great for CUDA development).

Nvidia knows that the profit margins at mid-tier GPUs are tiny - so they're pushing people to buy the 4070, 4080, and 4090.

Wafer prices have increased drastically in the last decade - to the point that midrange cards are no longer midrange priced.

It simply isn't really profitable to make real midrange cards anymore.

In addition, discrete GPUs market is a declining market and has been for 15 years or so. Therefore, in any declining market, the low-end and mid-range products will get squeezed and the high end will get pushed. The remaining buyers of discrete GPUs are willing to pay higher prices. Those who don't will buy a laptop with an Nvidia GPU already in it or some sort of SoC (like Apple Silicon/AMD APUs/Intel APUs).

The market for GOUs is declining because crypto is over and because the GPUs are so underpowered and overpriced that people don’t want to buy them.

And if GPUs cost so much to make, why do they get discounted so drastically when the manufacturers eventually decide to compete?

>The market for GOUs is declining because crypto is over and because the GPUs are so underpowered and overpriced that people don’t want to buy them.

No, this is not true. DIY PCs aren't as popular as before due to the advancements in laptops and interest swinging to mobile. People are buying far more laptops than 10-20 years ago. In fact, gaming laptops outsell gaming desktops 2:1 now.[0] The gap is expected to widen.

The market for discrete GPUs has been declining long before crypto. Crypto just slowed the decline.

Notice the word discrete. The entire GPU market isn't declining. Only discrete.

>And if GPUs cost so much to make, why do they get discounted so drastically when the manufacturers eventually decide to compete?

Part of it is because of price inflation due to covid and crypto bubble. So prices are just going back to a more normal.

[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20210406085311/https://www.idc.c...

>gaming laptops outsell gaming desktops 2:1

Based on desktop CPU sales or based on pre-built sales? I don't know what qualifies as a gaming laptop these days but the best laptops for software development often have discrete graphics cards in them e.g. 1660 Ti

Based on however IDC defines a gaming laptop.

I'm guessing it's having a non-APU AMD/Nvidia GPU inside the laptop.

But it makes sense to me. Laptops have gotten much better, and most gamers aren't buying Nvidia 4090. The most common GPU is just a GeForce GTX 1650 which many laptops have and have thermals that easily fit inside a laptop.

It's not surprising at all that gaming laptops outsell gaming desktops. This isn't the 2000s anymore where if you want to play PC games, you build a DIY desktop tower and buy a discrete GPU.

It's a myth that most PC gamers use top of the range GPUs. Most of them use low-end or mid-range GPUs.

> In fact, gaming laptops outsell gaming desktops 2:1 now.

This doesn't show what you think it does. The majority of desktop gaming PCs are self built and won't show up in that statistic.

Additionally GPUs are the most commonly upgraded component during the lifetime of a built.

>This doesn't show what you think it does. The majority of desktop gaming PCs are self built and won't show up in that statistic.

It probably does. I never paid for the report but I assume IDC collects data on DIY desktop towers and make an educated guess.

Regardless, gaming laptops sells far more than DIY computers.

In 2020 Nvidia + AMD sold 41.5 million desktop GPUs.[1] That doesn't add up at all with 16.7 million desktop PCs.

[1] Second graphic: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-maintains-lead-as-s...

Discrete GPUs can go into old desktop PCs. That's my guess.

And it's not clear what % of them were used for gaming vs crypto mining.

Their margins on their enterprise cards are far far higher.

The A100 which is similar to 4090 in silicon goes for 15-20x. Nvidia is probably deriving as much profit from cloud at this point as gamers.

They offer more than those two cards and the cards they are losing to are other Nvidia cards.

The 4060 is a pretty unusual case. In general NVidia cards fit on a very predictable price/performance curve where you don't get any performance for free, but consequentially you pay more and get more performance.

(admittedly I have zero interest in them as gaming hardware, but on the GPU compute side this is definitely the case)

It's kinda amazing how year after year reviewers release the "new products are crap, buy the thing we told you was crap last year" and people don't catch on.

The low-end is crawling along due to fixed cost overheads from PHY area that doesn't shrink. 4N is ~3x the price per area as Samsung, and PHY area becomes relatively much larger. The incentive is to cut every cost in PHY area - fewer memory channels to reclaim PHY area and using cache instead, cutting PCIe width to reclaim that PHY area, even cannibalizing the media engine/encoders to claw back that last little bit of space. AMD has actively been engaged in this battle with 6600XT (x8 PCIe) and 6500XT (x4 PCIe, no encoder) and RDNA2 generally shrinking memory bus and replacing it with cache in this same way (and 6600/6600XT and 5700/5700XT also regressed performance vs their predecessors in some situations just like 4060/4060 Ti). On top of that you have big fixed increases in manufacturing, shipping, etc, and the rest of the BOM is ballooning over time too (forget VRAM spot prices, ask automakers if their BOM is higher or lower than 2019... and it's not a small difference, it's probably 2x!)

In this world of organically-low performance increase within the low-end product segment, the impact of clearance sales exceeds the impact of new product generations. And this means we end up in this situation where reviewers do the "the new products suck, buy the ones we told you sucked last year" rubber-chicken routine year after year after year. But if everything is constantly bad, kinda nothing is, really. That's just the nature of the product segment.

And when you look at things like the 3060 Ti being $275 on clearance... the market consensus is that the old products are Good Enough. And the new products in fact may be worse in some ways, unless you are willing to step up in price to maintain the same product segment rather than the same price segment. Because TSMC is cranking the prices 25-50% every generation and Samsung was abnormally cheap to begin with, so there is a definite price step happening.

Hard to see how people don't understand that the $200-300 product segment is dying in the same way the $100-150 product segment already died. 6 months after launch you could buy a 7850 2GB for $150, or a 7750 for $100. What does $100 buy you in the new/retail GPU market these days? Does anybody actually seriously think the inability to deliver new $100-150 GPUs with enthusiast-tier performance is due to "greed" or "agreeing not to compete" as opposed to market realities? But people will defend it to the death that the privilege of making $200 GPUs is some massive profit opportunity that AMD and NVIDIA are just choosing to ignore.

We are in the end of silicon in some ways. Post-Moore's Law the costs have been spiraling, and now we are to the point where consumers are deciding that no, it's not worth the cost increases. And companies aren't going to cut their throats and run zero margin or sell at a loss either. And that eventually flows through to TSMC and ASML, and node research will slow (hyper-NA is already effectively canceled) and silicon research becomes incremental and iterative and slower rather than continuing to make even N7->N5->N3 sized progress. It can get slower.