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[Durante]

I don't feel it's as bad as that if you buy wisely and don't have the attitude that you need the newest and best hardware. I have had a I7 2600k for the past four years and it's still fine, only had to update my graphics card in all that time as my 580 died after three and a half years and upgraded to a 970 (which was much cheaper than I feared for the power). Obviously not ideal for 4k, but it's fine for me. I can play almost every game at high/ultra at 60fps 1080p.

Yeah, the 970 was a pretty damn huge step for price/performance, and lots of people (including me) were surprised by how cheap it was at launch.

And even if I'm personally really annoyed by the glacial pace of desktop CPU progress, it undeniably has slowed down the PC upgrade cycle by almost a factor of 3 and made the hobby even cheaper. You can basically expect to keep your CPU for at least 5 years and still remain close to the top end, especially with a bit of overclocking.

I think the key is that the areas where PC Gaming is growing most significantly aren't really the areas where graphics are the big driving force.

While this is abolutely true -- MOBAs aren't exactly the most graphics-intensive genre, and there are probably more people playing them than all other games on consoles & PC combined -- GPU sales (especially gaming-grade GPUs) are outperforming the general PC hardware market pretty significantly.

 

[Kezen]

Poor video. Rambling but no substance, the pace of innovation is mostly tied to node shrinks.
AMD and Nvidia have very competitive products at an attractive price, but I believe AMD are better in the 200€/$ category and under.

 

[LeleSocho]

I don't see how it is way worse to have a low-end card on a new architecture instead of one based on the current high-end offering. The way to compare is to look at how much performance offered then against now. There seemed to be more competition back then, so I'm sure it still rules favorably for the past, but there is still a low-end market and it isn't bad.

Saying it was the third most powerful cards tells nothing. What does it matter that there are more high-end cards now? Do low-end cards suddenly deliver terrible performance nowadays? Reception of the 750 Ti seemed pretty positive. And we do have even lower-end cards, but these don't get any attention at all.

And right now I'm ignoring the AMD offering, but they still have plenty of low-end graphics cards too.

For the life of me i can't understand what are you trying to say... Are you saying that modern mid-low end cards are more powerful and cheaper than old high end cards? Well no shit. Technology advances.

Saying third most powerful card means that you can have a card for that costed much for the price of 10-20-30-40% of full peak performance technology can offer.
Even if we want to remove the TitanX tier because is bonkers for that price... Let's put either 980 or 980ti as highest end, what is the card that is as powerful compared with a 980/980ti as it was a 4830 compared to 4870? A 970? A 960? A theoretical 950? Does it costs 80€ or 150€? No it costs way way more and that's goes for almost all tiers from highest end card to the card the can run decently games on medium settings. That's why nowadays you pay more for a card that has the same relative performance.

 

[Rafterman]

Graphics cards aren't that much more than they used to be. The Geforce 2 GTS that I bought in 2000 for $350 would cost you nearly $500 in today's money, with the Ultra being just shy of $700. The V5 6000 was scheduled to cost $600 before 3DFX hit their problems, which is upwards of $800 now. I'd love GPUs to advance at a faster pace as much as the next guy, but I don't really see the price being the problem.

 

[cyberheater]

Nvidia prices are comical.

It seems like GPU prices remain stagnant for Nvidia cards.

If I spend £200+ on a GPU, I expect it to play games 1080p60 for at least 4 years.

You're expectation does not meet reality.

I bought a GTX970 for £250 a couple of months ago and it plays pretty much everything at 1080 @ 60fps. I don't expect that will be the case in a couple of years time.

 

[| Praxis |]

You're expectation does not meet reality.

I bought a GTX970 for £250 a couple of months ago and it plays pretty much everything at 1080 @ 60fps. I don't expect that will be the case in a couple of years time.

Yeah, as time goes by, the more settings you will have to drop to get 60fps (if that is important to you). My old 580 was a beast when I got it, but towards the end of its life of three and a half years I was having to fine tune my settings more and more. No card is going to last you that long really, whether that's because games are more demanding or your hardware just fails.

 

[Cleve]

Terrible video. The creator is viewing the market only as price per $ and saying it's not growing as fast as he'd like. There's more at play than nvidia and ati stifling the market to make more money. A die shrink is going to help enormously.

I like his graph about the titan in which dual gpu solutions are "cheating" and don't count. Yeah, the titans are way out of line $ to performance, but that's always been the case for the extreme top end of the card line. The Radeon 9700 pro cost $400 at launch in mid 2002. While it's not as extreme at he titan, the nvidia 690 predates the titan and also cost $1000 at launch. Or there's always the Obsidian x24 II that came out in 1997 at $600.

Hyper-premium cards have always existed and always had an absurd premium.

It's also kind of funny that he says at one point that you need multiple top of the line cards to run anything in 4k. Yeah, you certainly wouldn't want to try it on any lower spec cards, but single top of the line cards are managing many games just fine in 4k.

Desktop gpus are moving slower than they used to sure, but a die shrink is going to lead to a huge leap again.

-edit- I will say his point that the naming schemes are stupid is true. There's too many fragmented parts and a lack of foresight with numbering schemes. Both manufacturers looping past 10,000 and coming back was dumb, but to be fair, you're not going to be bamboozled in to buying a radeon 9700 pro from 2004.

 

[Lady Siara]

Absolute nonsense. If you want a clean, tear free image, with better visuals, on a fixed refresh screen (ie a TV) now and over the *next couple of years*, you needs lots of power. I know exactly how my pc performs. You're saying a sub 970 equipped pc is going to be putting out a reliable, tear free 1080p60 at better than console visuals in a couple of years time? Why exaggerate so much?

Mind sharing your components?

My thinking is in line with Durante's at the moment: you overpaid for 1080p performance. If you truly invested that much, why on earth did you settle for 1080p?

 

[velociraptor]

You're expectation does not meet reality.

I bought a GTX970 for £250 a couple of months ago and it plays pretty much everything at 1080 @ 60fps. I don't expect that will be the case in a couple of years time.

Given that PC games are limited by the current gen consoles, I would hope it is capable of running all games at 1080 @ 60. The thing that irks me the most is having to buy a new GPU every year or two just to keep up framerates, particularly as the graphics barely improve. I hope devs are more sensible and try to gain the most out of current GPUs, especially by optimising games instead of relying on the brute force approach.

 

[SneakyStephan]

I'm not really sure I agree, despite the fact that the video raises some good points. While rebrands are definitely disappointing when they are not accompanied by a price drop and it is true that it costs more to remain on the bleeding edge, the cost of entry for PC gaming is dramatically lower and even low-end graphics cards and CPUs provide respectable performance.

The cost is most definitely NOT lower , it's much higher than it was in 2009, it's higher than it was in 2011, it's on par again with what it was in 2003.

-Entry level now is an i3 and 370 = a 130 euro DUAL core cpu and 150-170 euro gpu
This is enough for 30 fps on high settings at 1080p in new gen ports and demanding pc games.

in 2009 you could get the same relative performance with an athlon 2 and 4750 for 50 euros + 90 euros...

-Sweet spot performance (maximum amount of bang for buck, aka highest performance/dollar without any big compromises) is now an i5 and r9 390 or gtx 970
270 euros for the cpu (prices have JUST gone up because of skylake release here, AGAIN), and a 300-380 euro gpu (380 if you want nvidia)

in 2009 the sweet spot for performance was a phenom II x3 (130 euros) and a radeon hd4870 (in july 2009 the good aftermarket cooler 512MB 4870s were 130 euros as well)

I went ahead and dug up my old order receipt email for my 2009 sweet spot build.
This build was beast back then and easily did 60++ fps at 1080p in every game that was out

1 x SAPPHIRE RADEON HD4870 (750 mhz, 512 mb, DDR5, 3600 mhz, 256 bit, 10.1, fan) (11133-03-20R) = 138,85 €
1 x MSI K9A2 Corssfire (790X, 2 x pci-e, ddr2, sata2, 7.1 channel) (7388-010R) = 68,23 €
1 x G.SKILL 4GBPK (4096 mb, 1066 mhz, CL5, 1.85 v, non-ecc, unbuffered, kit of 2) (F2-8500CL5D-4GBPK) = 59,14 €
1 x ARCTIC Freezer 64 Pro (sAM2, s939, s754) (FREEZER 64 PRO PWM) = 19,10 €
1 x SAMSUNG SH-S223F (black, 22x, sata) (SH-S223F/BEBE) = 19,90 €
1 x WESTERN DIGITAL Caviar Green (1000 gb, sata/300, 8.9 ms, 7200 rpm, 32 mb, 3.5") (WD10EADS) = 81,50 €
1 x AMD Phenom II Triple 720 Black edition (2.8 ghz, 7.5 mb, am3, 95 watt, boxed) (ADUHDZ720WFGIBOX) = 130,43 €
1 x ANTEC Sonata III (black, 500 watt, atx) (0761345-08142-9) = 117,70 €
-===================================================-
Sub-Totaal: 634,84 €

634 euros, this was the cost back then to build a powerful bang for buck sweet spot gaming PC from scratch in 2009


Now let me paste my order receipt from 2015 for the same kind of midrange sweetspot maximum performance/dollar build

Product : Intel Core i5 4690K / 3.5 Ghz - 6 MB cache - LGA1150 Socket - doos 
Stukprijs : 245,90 euro 
Aantal : 1 
688194 
Product : Gigabyte Z97P-D3 - Moederbord - ATX - LGA1150 Socket - Z97 - USB 3.0 - Gigabit Ethernet - HD Audio 
Stukprijs : 84,49 euro 
Aantal : 1 
425856 
Product : Corsair Vengeance LP - Geheugen - 8 GB : 2 x 4 GB - DIMM 240-pins low profile - DDR3 - 1600 MHz / PC3-12800 - CL9 - 1.5 V 
Stukprijs : 58,90 euro 
Aantal : 1 
738084 
Product : Be quiet! Pure Rock - Koeler voor processor - PWM Fan - 4 heatpipes - Intel/AMD Compatible 
Stukprijs : 34,90 euro 
Aantal : 1 
2144 
Product : Arctic Silver 5 Premium Silver 3.5g - thermische pasta 
Stukprijs : 6,95 euro 
Aantal : 1 

Subtotaal : 431,14 euro

Now the GPU:

STRIX-GTX970-DC2OC-4GD5, Grafische kaart 
JEXV0A01	1	€ 379,-*	€ 379,-*

This is what I had to pay just to upgrade my pc (kept the PSU, HDD , case, dvd writer) to be at midrange sweetspot bang for buck gaming performance again...
My 2009 build became a potato (6 years out of a build is pretty amazing , but eventually it just becomes too shitty,it was at xbox one performance levels now and not acceptable) so I had to upgrade especially the cpu to be able to enjoy modern games at good framerates.

810 euros... had I made a full build from scratch I would have spent 1000 euros in total.

This is the reality now, the midrange costs 1000 euros now...

You and I both know that if you buy entry level you get LESS performance/dollar (sweetspot builds are always recommended for those who can budget it to get the maximum bang for your buck)

I'm not sure if you're aware but if the 980 was a mid range card then the 670 was a low-mid card when it came out. The 680 was to the 600 series as the 980 was to the 900 series, the "little" chip of that series, which lasts two years instead of one. Little chip -> Big chip is likely the new normal for Nvidia. And based on AMD's hilarious rebadge this year, it seems like they don't really have a better strategy either. It's not just a lack of competition, the R9 290s were good cards, priced aggressively and it aged better than Nvidia's contemporaries did. Fact is though, neither company is capable of bringing out insane new chips every 12-16 months anymore. Clockwork die shrinks are a distant memory. Increasing power draw every year isn't viable. And despite people complaining about price gouging and Titan / Fury overpriced cards, only one of these two companies is currently profitable, and we're not talking scrooge mcduck levels of profitable. Nvidia's profit last quarter was 26 million, off a total operating income of 1.15 billion.

Some context is needed with your nvidia profit numbers
Nvidia's gpu devision is paying for their whole company right now... they are pissing away huge amounts of money on tegra (which keeps being a miserable failure for them)
Their total profit is not representative of how well their gpu devision is doing. And nvidia themselves have said they are doing extremely well with their gpus.

Nvidia IS bringing out insane new chips (not every 12 months no)
I don't know how they did it but you have to admit that maxwell provided a similar leap over kepler that you'd normally expect from a die shrink despite them being stuck at 28nm
Kepler was a similarly huge jump over femri (ofc , going from 40 nm to 28)
Glofo and TSMC have both started 14-16 nm production and next year we will have our 14 or 16nm gpus AND pascal AND HBM2 for another massive leap in performance.

Performance increases in gpu land are very much healthy and alive.
Maxwell is made on a mature 28 process with high yields
midrange maxwell has only a 256 bit memory bus and a very small die so costs are really low.

Sorry man you cannot rationalise away the price increases in this way.

 

[Cleve]

The cost is most definitely NOT lower , it's much higher than it was in 2009, it's higher than it was in 2011, it's on par again with what it was in 2003.

Let's be fair here, the biggest cost of building a quality entry level pc leaping up has a lot more to do with AMD being unable to release a competitive cpu to intel in the past 6 years. Entry level gaming in 2002-2009 was dominated by reasonably priced amd cpus. They haven't put out anything that can compete with intel, and intel knows it.

The 4870 was a great card at a very competitive price, but when you bought it it's more analogous to buying a last gen card. The comparable card from 2009 for the 970 would have been closer to the 4890, which came in around 60 pounds more than you paid. There's still a gap for sure, but it's not a s big.

 

[Prophet Steve]

For the life of me i can't understand what are you trying to say... Are you saying that modern mid-low end cards are more powerful and cheaper than old high end cards? Well no shit. Technology advances.

Saying third most powerful card means that you can have a card for that costed much for the price of 10-20-30-40% of full peak performance technology can offer.
Even if we want to remove the TitanX tier because is bonkers for that price... Let's put either 980 or 980ti as highest end, what is the card that is as powerful compared with a 980/980ti as it was a 4830 compared to 4870? A 970? A 960? A theoretical 950? Does it costs 80€ or 150€? No it costs way way more and that's goes for almost all tiers from highest end card to the card the can run decently games on medium settings. That's why nowadays you pay more for a card that has the same relative performance.

No, I'm asking whether low-end cards give relatively less performance to their value than before.

There is a much wider range of prices and performance levels right now. Those in the higher range keep delivering less and less value.

What was the performance difference between the 4830 and 4870? I'd say 50% would be pretty generous. So you look whether that same price difference with a low-end card and a similarly priced card as the 4870 (300?) would also allow you to get a 50% performance difference.

It just is pretty difficult to do with the current market. Considering there is not a low-end offering the 9 series yet and the cards arrive with wildly different releasedates. The 750ti had the same launch price at the 4830, but hasn't gone down anywhere close to 80 euros, perhaps because there haven't been new offerings on the horizon and competition is lower.

 

[Rafterman]

Let's be fair here, the biggest cost of building a quality entry level pc leaping up has a lot more to do with AMD being unable to release a competitive cpu to intel in the past 6 years. Entry level gaming in 2002-2009 was dominated by reasonably priced amd cpus. They haven't put out anything that can compete with intel, and intel knows it.

The 4870 was a great card at a very competitive price, but when you bought it it's more analogous to buying a last gen card. The comparable card from 2009 for the 970 would have been closer to the 4890, which came in around 60 pounds more than you paid. There's still a gap for sure, but it's not a s big.

This.

Compare mid range Intel/Nvidia parts back then to mid range Intel/Nvidia parts now and the prices haven't really gone up.

 

[tuxfool]

It just is pretty difficult to do with the current market. Considering there is not a low-end offering the 9 series yet and the cards arrive with wildly different releasedates. The 750ti had the same launch price at the 4830, but hasn't gone down anywhere close to 80 euros, perhaps because there haven't been new offerings on the horizon and competition is lower.

Nvidia probably won't offer a low end 9 series, because they know that the client base for such a GPU would be happy to stick with IGP solutions. It has long been the case that value for performance has been parabolic for an entire range of graphics cards. Very low and very high end parts don't provide the bang for buck that the mid range does.

 

[Prophet Steve]

Nvidia probably won't offer a low end 9 series, because they know that the client base for such a GPU would be happy to stick with IGP solutions. It has long been the case that value for performance has been parabolic for an entire range of graphics cards. Very low and very high end parts don't provide the bang for buck that the mid range does.

There is still maybe the 960 coming though, which is something. Lower than that will be difficult to tell, but the 750Ti wasn't that long ago so maybe they'll end up offering something on that price level someday.

 

[ashecitism]

There is still maybe the 960 coming though, which is something. Lower than that will be difficult to tell, but the 750Ti wasn't that long ago so maybe they'll end up offering something on that price level someday.

The 960 has been out since spring. The 950 is this month according to rumors.

 

[danwarb]

Console gaming just seems less of a headache after watching that.

Not really though. You're still better off with a <£100 i3 and a <£100 750ti for console/PC games.

 

[SneakyStephan]

Let's be fair here, the biggest cost of building a quality entry level pc leaping up has a lot more to do with AMD being unable to release a competitive cpu to intel in the past 6 years. Entry level gaming in 2002-2009 was dominated by reasonably priced amd cpus. They haven't put out anything that can compete with intel, and intel knows it.

The 4870 was a great card at a very competitive price, but when you bought it it's more analogous to buying a last gen card.

The 5870 was still 6 months away from release when I bought it.
Where's the 130 euro 280x? oh it's nowhere to be seen :\

cpus are half of it, gpus are the other half.
from 130-200 euro midrange to 300-400 euro midrange, prices here went up more than they did for cpus (the main problem with cpus is that performance has been at a complete literal standstill, which isn't so much a problem for those making their first build but IS a huge issue for those who want to upgrade their old build)

This is a stupid video, because its answer to the question "Why has AMD done this" is simplistic and, well, stupid.

The reason performance growth in the GPU market has slowed down somewhat is that one of the primary drivers of performance growth in all hardware is process shrinks, and we haven't seen a process shrink in GPUs in forever.

Hell, the GPU market is still in much better shape in this regard than the desktop CPU market, where you basically can't get a meaningful upgrade in performance at all. If anything, you should be applauding GPU makers for what they managed to get out of the 28nm process.



.

Nonsense
midrange maxwell (970-980) uses a 256 bit bus (224 bit for the 970 even) has a fairly small die size (and the 150W power consumption is another giveaway of where it sits performance wise relative to 2009 gpus)

2010-2011 gpus being stuck at 40 nm and thus needing larger dies and bigger memory busses (348 bit bus on the high end gpus) was a reason for prices going up by 100 euros back then

A gtx 580 at 500 euros made some sense because it was a big die, had a 384 bit memory bus and because they had incredibly low yields making them (yields are good at 28nm)

What does not make sense from a consumer standpoint is prices having doubled AGAIN since then.

There is no justification other than that consumers are paying the inflated prices. The market is bearing the price increases, but unless you are an nvidia shareholder or you have an nvdia poster on your bedroom ceiling this is not something to be happy about.
It means pc gaming has become a lot more cost prohibitive...
Why are consumers paying it? Because of marketing efforts, rebranding efforts and naming schemes from amd and nvidia as well as some serious collusion going on between the two.

Any attempt at informing fellow consumers about what they are actually buying (in this case rebrands and midrange gpus at heavily inflated prices) is always met by people like you taking up the banner for some corporation and fighting fiercly to make sure people can put their fingers in their ears and rationalise having to pay 1000 euros for midrange gaming.

And it's always done with disingenious arguments
-process shrink (nothing to do with maxwell still providing like 50 percent more performance/watt and 50 percent more performance at the same die space (aka the same cost , with their color compression algorithm letting them using smaller memory busses (cost saving)
It doesn't cost them more to make a gtx 970 than it did to make a gtx 670 nor than it did to make a gtx 460.

the gtx 980 is NOT to the gtx 680 or even the 460 what the hd5870 was to the 4870 (which was a serious die size increase to eek more performance out of the same process node)
There is NO reason for prices to keep going up like this.

- nvidia's profits aren't that high (they are losing their profits with tegra and nvidia stated that their gpu business is highly profitable and successful)

Which is then like clockwork followed by goalpost moving and never aknowledging the fact that the initial arguments were misleading (maybe you're better than that durante)

 

[LiquidMetal14]

Please graph designer dress shirts vs. video card price/performance, tia

Ah ha

I would also like to see this. I do semi agree with the sentiments. Gains vs cost are not what I would want them to be.

 

[Boombox On]

This is a stupid video, because its answer to the question "Why has AMD done this" is simplistic and, well, stupid.

The reason performance growth in the GPU market has slowed down somewhat is that one of the primary drivers of performance growth in all hardware is process shrinks, and we haven't seen a process shrink in GPUs in forever.

Hell, the GPU market is still in much better shape in this regard than the desktop CPU market, where you basically can't get a meaningful upgrade in performance at all. If anything, you should be applauding GPU makers for what they managed to get out of the 28nm process.

I feel sorry for giving this tripe a click.

Saw this coming from a mile away. A lot of people make wild assumptions about how competitors in this industry work based on complete air.

Comparing a "high end" card now to a "high end" card x years ago in terms of some abstract form of performance/$ over time almost never works. There are no standards for what "high end" means, except you pay a lot for it. There are no standards for how "high end" scales... well, if there was, it'd probably look a lot like it does right now.

 

[tuxfool]

There is still maybe the 960 coming though, which is something. Lower than that will be difficult to tell, but the 750Ti wasn't that long ago so maybe they'll end up offering something on that price level someday.

The 960 has been released.

e: beaten.

 

[jacobeid]

I just upgraded to a 970 from a 7850 and I plan on that lasting me for quite some time. Everything did feel much more expensive this time around.

 

[Rafterman]

The 5870 was still 6 months away from release when I bought it.
Where's the 130 euro 280x? oh it's nowhere to be seen :\

cpus are half of it, gpus are the other half.
from 130-200 euro midrange to 300-400 euro midrange, prices here went up more than they did for cpus (the main problem with cpus is that performance has been at a complete literal standstill, which isn't so much a problem for those making their first build but IS a huge issue for those who want to upgrade their old build)




Nonsense
midrange maxwell (970-980) uses a 256 bit bus (224 bit for the 970 even) has a fairly small die size (and the 150W power consumption is another giveaway of where it sits performance wise relative to 2009 gpus)

2010-2011 gpus being stuck at 40 nm and thus needing larger dies and bigger memory busses (348 bit bus on the high end gpus) was a reason for prices going up by 100 euros back then

A gtx 580 at 500 euros made some sense because it was a big die, had a 384 bit memory bus and because they had incredibly low yields making them (yields are good at 28nm)

What does not make sense from a consumer standpoint is prices having doubled AGAIN since then.

There is no justification other than that consumers are paying the inflated prices. The market is bearing the price increases, but unless you are an nvidia shareholder or you have an nvdia poster on your bedroom ceiling this is not something to be happy about.
It means pc gaming has become a lot more cost prohibitive...
Why are consumers paying it? Because of marketing efforts, rebranding efforts and naming schemes from amd and nvidia as well as some serious collusion going on between the two.

Any attempt at informing fellow consumers about what they are actually buying (in this case rebrands and midrange gpus at heavily inflated prices) is always met by people like you taking up the banner for some corporation and fighting fiercly to make sure people can put their fingers in their ears and rationalise having to pay 1000 euros for midrange gaming.

And it's always done with disingenious arguments
-process shrink (nothing to do with maxwell still providing like 50 percent more performance/watt and 50 percent more performance at the same die space (aka the same cost , with their color compression algorithm letting them using smaller memory busses (cost saving)
It doesn't cost them more to make a gtx 970 than it did to make a gtx 670 nor than it did to make a gtx 460.

the gtx 980 is NOT to the gtx 680 or even the 460 what the hd5870 was to the 4870 (which was a serious die size increase to eek more performance out of the same process node)
There is NO reason for prices to keep going up like this.

- nvidia's profits aren't that high (they are losing their profits with tegra and nvidia stated that their gpu business is highly profitable and successful)

Which is then like clockwork followed by goalpost moving and never aknowledging the fact that the initial arguments were misleading (maybe you're better than that durante)

This entire post is just nonsensical babble.

In 2009 my mid range video card cost $400, and my mid range processor cost $300. In 2015 my mid range video card cost $300 and my mid range processor cost $300.

The only and only reason you seem to think PC gaming is now cost prohibitive is because AMD used to make decent hardware for cheap, and now they don't. Anyone who was using Intel/Nvidia in 2009 or 2011 or 2000 and is using the same now is paying about the same or less.

PC gaming is as cheap as it has ever been, even cheaper in most cases. The fact that the Titan exists doesn't change that fact.

 

[Prophet Steve]

The 960 has been out since spring. The 950 is this month according to rumors.

The 960 has been released.

e: beaten.

Sorry, yeah, I forgot, let's see how the 950 does.

 

[SeeNoWeevil]

Are you seriously asking "Why exaggerate so much?" after making an honest-to-god "$2000 PC" argument?

Wow.

I never made that argument. I never said at console settings either. I wanted the absolute best 1080p to use with a strobing TV. You could obviously spend less but I'd still argue maintaining 60fps with minimal tearing over the next couple of years is going to require a 980. That's far more expensive than twice the price of a console.

 

[SneakyStephan]

Saw this coming from a mile away. A lot of people make wild assumptions about how competitors in this industry work based on complete air.

Comparing a "high end" card now to a "high end" card x years ago in terms of some abstract form of performance/$ over time almost never works. There are no standards for what "high end" means, except you pay a lot for it. There are no standards for how "high end" scales... well, if there was, it'd probably look a lot like it does right now.

There's a very clear standard
die size directly translates to cost
memory bus width is another factor of cost.

Yields are another factor (and yields go down exponentially as die size increases, which means smaller dies are muuuuch cheaper to make just as much as larger dies are much more expensive to make)

Did you know the BoM of the 520mm^2 384 bit memory bus gtx 580 was 120 dollars? with the rest of the parts (pcb, power managment, connectors and cooling and packaging) adding up to a 200 dollar bom for the entire card?
This despite the yields for their gtx 580 chips being infamously low?

Now go ahead and guess how much that titan x costs them to make (and yes I am aware that 12GB gddr5 adds to the cost)

Then you say : Oh but we can't know how the cost of a similar sized die on (the now mature) 28nm process compares to that 120 dollar cost (with terrible yields) at 40nm
No we can't, do you know why we can't? Because nvidia have carefully kept the BoM of kepler and maxwell dies and parts a secret.

GEE I wonder why they no longer want consumers to find out what it costs to make a gtx 680, titan, 980 or titan x...
Want me to be on your side of the argument? Find me a source that the bom of a 980 die is 120 euros or more and i'll gladly change my stance.


It's all about perceived value vs real cost ...
It's for this same reason that it's difficult to find out the BoM of a car you want to buy, or why successful care salesmen are encouraged to keep their wages and comission quiet.

Let me end with a nice little excerpt from the last collusion lawsuit that nvidia and amd faced in 2008

"Both of us have spent the last three years trying to bring the perceived value of our products up to the level of Intel. The "GPU" category is clean and has served us well that way. We both have increased the price of our high end product several fold over the last 4 years while Intel&#8217;s high end prices have more than halved.

 

[tallbroski]

Hmm I have a FX6300 Cpu and a 7950, am i better off upgrading just the cpu to a 4690k instead of getting a new GPU? Besides i can always get crossfire in future right

 

[tuxfool]

Any attempt at informing fellow consumers about what they are actually buying (in this case rebrands and midrange gpus at heavily inflated prices) is always met by people like you taking up the banner for some corporation and fighting fiercly to make sure people can put their fingers in their ears and rationalise having to pay 1000 euros for midrange gaming.

The market sets the prices, regardless of what you, personally, think is fair. If the market didn't bear it, you'd see gpu sales stagnate, a decline in in sales of gaming hardware.

Ranting about it really isn't going to fix, or reduce whatever price gouging you think the GPU manufacturers are placing on graphics cards, unless people stop buying them.

They're not going to stop buying them. Now, beyond design/manufacturing issues and the slowing of moores law, prices would improve if competition (especially in the mid/high range) were better. This would require people to buy AMD cards, which they're also not doing.

 

[Prophet Steve]

I never made that argument. I wanted the absolute best 1080p to use with a strobing TV. You could obviously spend less but I'd still argue maintaining 60fps with minimal tearing over the next couple of years is going to require a 980. That's far more expensive than twice the price of a console.

Which is still not anywhere close to five times the price of a console. You can get much better value later on. Hell, if the reason is because you aren't sure how well it holds up after a few years you would be better off to buy a 970 and buy a new one later on.

But otherwise just share the build that you paid five times the price of consoles for, for a bit better than twice the console performance. However, the 980 is a lot more than twice the console performance.

 

[SpiceMelange]

Yeah prices have increased. But we don't need a new GPU every 2-3 years either. In the long run I think we spend about the same or less than before (the late 90 early 00s were crazy in gpu advancement).

I'm still sitting on my HD5850, waiting for Pascal haha

 

[SneakyStephan]

Hmm I have a FX6300 Cpu and a 7950, am i better off upgrading just the cpu to a 4690k instead of getting a new GPU? Besides i can always get crossfire in future right

off topic but yes, your 7950 is already bottlenecked in some games by your cpu , if you're going to upgrade you should do the cpu first before you go for a better gpu (your 7950 is still pretty good, even my ancient 6870 saw a new life when I upgraded my cpu)

 

[dr_rus]

The 300 series did increase performance versus the 200 series. Not through architecture but process improvements and base clocks. It also wasn't significant enough that one would typically justify for a new series, but it is there.

390X is 20% faster than 290X while it's price is almost 25% higher.
390 is 15% faster than 290 while it's price is almost 25% higher.
380 seems like the only card in the 300 series which is actually offering more perfromance per buck compared to 285.
So no, it didn't increase performance as much as it upped the costs for the consumers. AMD's 300 series is rather bad all around, including Fury/X.

 

[nib95]

390X is 20% faster than 290X while it's price is almost 25% higher.
390 is 15% faster than 290 while it's price is almost 25% higher.
380 seems like the only card in the 300 series which is actually offering more perfromance per buck compared to 285.
So no, it didn't increase performance as much as it upped the costs for the consumers. AMD's 300 series is rather bad all around, including Fury/X.

Well that's depressing. Is it a similar situation with Nvidia's new cards? And have publications and reviews etc called them out on this shit?

Honestly, I'm annoyed the Titan and similar cards were so successful. Essentially it opened these manufacturers up to the idea of being able to more liberaly charge extortionate amounts for these things.

 

[tuxfool]

390X is 20% faster than 290X while it's price is almost 25% higher.
390 is 15% faster than 290 while it's price is almost 25% higher.
380 seems like the only card in the 300 series which is actually offering more perfromance per buck compared to 285.
So no, it didn't increase performance as much as it upped the costs for the consumers. AMD's 300 series is rather bad all around, including Fury/X.

You're right. Perf/price isn't better. The cards in the 390 series also have double the vram, though it is arguable about how much that matters to the card as a product.

 

[Odrion]

Incorrect about what the 380 videocard is. And for saying Nvidia is just as fucked up about these naming conventions he doesn't really offer any evidence.

If anything, Nvidia did the opposite by creating the 750ti - a Maxwell (current gen) graphics card given the name of a Kepler (previous gen) branded card.

But yeah AMD is really fucking up here, and it shows the amount of market share it's bleeding out.

 

[Lonely1]

This video fall to account for the 980ti, which is nearly a Titan X and great cards like the 970. It's more like a summary of current AMD woes, which are worrying but for other reasons.

A 970 is not going to be putting out a tear free 1080p60 at meaningful high settings in 2 years time. It can't even do that now.

Pro-tip: You don't need all the sliders up to beat consoles. In fact, in some cases you can't even get the sliders down enough to match them on certain aspects. This scenario will only become more common.

 

[dr_rus]

You're right. Perf/price isn't better. The cards the 390 series also have double the vram, though it is arguable about how much that matters to the card as a product.

This thread is about prices, is it not?

 

[tuxfool]

I never made that argument. I never said at console settings either. I wanted the absolute best 1080p to use with a strobing TV. You could obviously spend less but I'd still argue maintaining 60fps with minimal tearing over the next couple of years is going to require a 980. That's far more expensive than twice the price of a console.

Then obviously you're no longer just comparing performance, but also image quality and graphical richness, possibly even overall game experience.

 

[tuxfool]

This thread is about prices, is it not?

Well, yeah. Twice the RAM isn't free though. It would be more appropriate to compare it 8GB variants of the 290x.

 

[dr_rus]

Well that's depressing. Is it a similar situation with Nvidia's new cards? And have publications and reviews etc called them out on this shit?

No, the situation is different with NV because they actually made a new Maxwell architecture for the 900 series which did increase the performance quite a bit overall on the same price levels and the only card which seems to be a bit worse in price/perf is 960 when compared to 770 -- although I'm not sure that this will hold in the long run considering how bad Kepler is in newer workloads.

Honestly, I'm annoyed the Titan and similar cards were so successful. Essentially it opened these manufacturers up to the idea of being able to more liberaly charge extortionate amounts for these things.

There always was a Titan level graphics proposition. Well, maybe there wasn't in the days between the fall of 3dfx and the introduction of 8800Ultra and NV's SLI but that was an exception really. I don't see anything bad in this. If you don't have the money - don't buy these cards. It's not like you need a Titan X Triple SLI to run modern games on your PC.

 

[Dec]

AMD's 300 series is rather bad all around, including Fury/X.

Not sure where you get that.

No matter how you look at it AMD has cards at the same or cheaper price point as Nvidia that are the same performance or better. The 390 for example is 5%~ better than a 970 with double the memory bus and vram. The only reason to get a 970 is heat/power/noise, brand loyalty and game pack-ins (which are actually a huge plus for the card).

That near exactly is the case for the 960 vs. 380 as well.

 

[Cleve]

390X is 20% faster than 290X while it's price is almost 25% higher.
390 is 15% faster than 290 while it's price is almost 25% higher.
380 seems like the only card in the 300 series which is actually offering more perfromance per buck compared to 285.
So no, it didn't increase performance as much as it upped the costs for the consumers. AMD's 300 series is rather bad all around, including Fury/X.

Huh? Products becoming a lesser value/$ spent as they push further in to premium tiers is nothing new, or even unique to this market.

The new cards still perform better than the old ones, and command an additional premium. Price isn't directly related to performance. I could make some false equivalencies about cars here, but come on. This sucks for people looking to upgrade, but the options are all there for new consumers.

What needs to be sorted out is the awful naming schemes that seem to be deliberately made to confused uneducated buyers.

 

[alexandros]

The cost is most definitely NOT lower , it's much higher than it was in 2009, it's higher than it was in 2011, it's on par again with what it was in 2003.

2009 was four years into the PS360 generation, the situation is not comparable. If you compare apples to apples the results are quite different. I made a thread some time ago about this:

http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=649379

 

[dr_rus]

Huh? Products becoming a lesser value/$ spent as they push further in to premium tiers is nothing new, or even unique to this market.

The new cards still perform better than the old ones, and command an additional premium. Price isn't directly related to performance. I could make some false equivalencies about cars here, but come on. This sucks for people looking to upgrade, but the options are all there for new consumers.

What needs to be sorted out is the awful naming schemes that seem to be deliberately made to confused uneducated buyers.

These products are straight rebrands though, the only thing they have new is the 8GBs of VRAM on them. In case of 770 vs 960 the latter is bringing DX12 FL12_1 support at least and seems to fair much better in GCN optimized games from new console h/w.

 

[Boombox On]

There's a very clear standard

With high end, the only sentiment that is relatively close to a standard is that over time, performance delta decreases with the same amount of investment.

And that's not even exclusive to GPUs. That's pretty much anything that has to do with economics and/or physics.

 

[SeeNoWeevil]

Which is still not anywhere close to five times the price of a console. You can get much better value later on. Hell, if the reason is because you aren't sure how well it holds up after a few years you would be better off to buy a 970 and buy a new one later on.

But otherwise just share the build that you paid five times the price of consoles for, for a bit better than twice the console performance. However, the 980 is a lot more than twice the console performance.

4790k, 980ti, 16Gb, Samsung Evo. I intend to dabble with VR also. Without that I would still be looking at 980 builds around £1000 all in. pCars gets the most play from me and even reducing quite a few settings I can't hold 60fps in places.

 

[Odrion]

This video fall to account for the 980ti, which is nearly a Titan X and great cards like the 970.

No, instead he's complaining that the 980ti is now being sold at $650 while the 970 and 980 are at the same price. Disregarding that 970 is a fucking deal in terms of price = power.

You can get a 970 for almost $300, and you get a free copy of MGSV. The 970 can play nearly everything on Ultra with 1080p @ 60fps if you disregard the gimmick stuff like hair options.

 

[SneakyStephan]

Well that's depressing. Is it a similar situation with Nvidia's new cards? And have publications and reviews etc called them out on this shit?

Honestly, I'm annoyed the Titan and similar cards were so successful. Essentially it opened these manufacturers up to the idea of being able to more liberaly charge extortionate amounts for these things.

Maxwell (900 series) offered significantly much better power efficiency over kepler (600 series)
the 980ti crushes the old kepler titan in performance , maxwell is a very impressive architecture.
Nvidia already did their doubling of the prices with kepler 2 (or is it 3 years now?) years ago by renaming their midrange to x80 and making their high end titan.
As the video explains they could get away with that because kepler demolished GCN so hard that amd had nothing to compete with until they released the 290-290x much later.

Amd actually did disrupt things for a little while by significantly lowering their prices on their 7970 range parts (280x rebrand) and seriously undercutting the 780 with their r9 290.
Unfortunately this was negated by the bitcoin craze (not amd but retailed hiked up the prices for amd cards super high for a while and the perceived demand from mining (much larger than the actual demand) caused people to pay these prices

But those sweet sweet titan margins must have been too tempting for AMD , and now that nvidia have repeated the titan trick again with the titan X amd did some pathetic 'ME TOO' attempt with the "Fury" brand (a card that cannot compete with the titan x performance or power consumption wise and that is a big ugly compromise becuase of only having 4GB vram).

Amd for now seem content to keep losing all their market share to nvidia for higher margins rather than actually attempt to compete.

One has to wonder what will happen to AMD when nvidia decides it's time to stop tolerating AMD in the market by colluding in the name of high margins.

Amd is currently sitting at 24 percent marketshare and freefalling:

Scenario: (this is off topic but pertaining to your post)
-pascal comes out with HMB2 at 16nm, obviously sees an enormous performance increase.
-amd's next architecture (which we are still waiting on as they've been stuck on GCN for 3+ years now , similar to how they were stuck on their phenom architecture in cpu) is a failure similar to bulldozer
-nvidia decides to take what little market share AMD have left in 2016 by very agressively pricing their pascal cards. Temporary razor thin margins for nvidia, losses for amd

Maybe for good measure they pull an intel and pay/incentivize OEM's to no longer sell amd gpu laptops and desktops.
Intel proved that if you're willing to take the L in court and pay that 100 million dollar slap on the wrist fine it pays off IMMENSELY over the next decade.

No more R&D money, no more market share for AMD

CPU market is replicated in the GPU market

We all get to enjoy our 10 percent faster gpus every year at a 10 percent price increase.

 

[SneakyStephan]

2009 was four years into the PS360 generation, the situation is not comparable. If you compare apples to apples the results are quite different. I made a thread some time ago about this:

http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=649379

I don't want to derail this into a console thing (I know you're not trying to do that either)
I don't even want to dignify these garbage console apus, the point is you need a midrange cpu to run pc exclusivess at good framerates.
Dirty bomb, natural selection 2, star citizen, total war series, mmos (especially mmos, don't even bother with gw2 or tera if you have an entry level cpu), arma etc etc etc

In that way the situation is quite different too, in 2009 midrange was extra beast because the pc was getting a lot of ports and the main pc genres were not seeing many releases (space sims, pc shooters etc)
It didn't take much to run just cause 2 or other console ports and there wasn't the vast amount of high end pc exclusives that we are getting now. It made the entry level a lot more viable then (without constantly feeling like you have to compromise at console style framerates)

That's why it stings even more that a midrange pc costs so much to build now, because you do actually need one if you want to play these games at a decent framerate.

 

[nib95]

Pro-tip: You don't need all the sliders up to beat consoles. In fact, in some cases you can't even get the sliders down enough to match them on certain aspects. This scenario will only become more common.

Consoles are cheap though. If you use BoM to work out the cost of the individual parts in the console's, out of the £250/$350 we're usually paying for them (minus free bundled games etc), the actual GPU and CPU portion of that cost only works out to about £100/$150. And that's including 8GB of GDDR5, which costs almost the same as the GPU itself. And tbh, PS4's really due a price drop too.