Maybe NVIDIA is reconsidering pricing seeing as the RX 7900 variants are positioned against it performance-wise.
But only time and release day information will tell!
It's very simple, really. The prices are set at what the consumer is willing to pay. If people keep buying, the prices will keep rising, right up to the point where they won't. In 1999 a Pentium III cost $1000, in 2008 one of the top C2Ds could be had for $300. The market ebbs and flows, and right now we're reaching peak crazy. In five years' time we'll be wondering how a GPU could ever cost this much. Until it costs this much again.
Assuming there is a DYI PC market in five years' time. Many of my friends have exited the market and their kids are now playing on consoles and mobiles, they couldn't care less about PC gaming.
I wish all cards could be bought PCB only, i would save a fortune on HSF's I take off immediately and store in a cupboard.
Well, maybe not all, but I've been saying for years that it'd be great to have GPUs without a cooler, and perhaps even support holes for CPU mounting brackets. That's less ridiculous than it sounds when you consider the AIOs and water blocks you could attach. Gives a lot more opportunities, and I'm sure companies like Corsair, Noctua, and Cooler Master would be thrilled to have their sales go up from another whole market. But even with air coolers, it'd be nice to be able to direct the heat outside the case, rather than just "smear" it everywhere like most GPU heatsinks do.
It's very simple, really. The prices are set at what the consumer is willing to pay. If people keep buying, the prices will keep rising, right up to the point where they won't. In 1999 a Pentium III cost $1000, in 2008 one of the top C2Ds could be had for $300. The market ebbs and flows, and right now we're reaching peak crazy. In five years' time we'll be wondering how a GPU could ever cost this much. Until it costs this much again.
Assuming there is a DYI PC market in five years' time. Many of my friends have exited the market and their kids are now playing on consoles and mobiles, they couldn't care less about PC gaming.
When you can have a console for 300 to 600€ and a cheap game pass to play all your favourite games and new releases, doesn't make any sense to pay +1000€ for a GPU alone. People are stupid and blinded, they don't want to see we're getting screwed.
It's like what you said, the market dictates prices and eventually this will all crumble down. AMD is feeling it with AM5 right now, and It shows with the new GPUs: price has kept the same because they know it will be a hard sell.
When you can have a console for 300 to 600€ and a cheap game pass to play all your favourite games and new releases, doesn't make any sense to pay +1000€ for a GPU alone. People are stupid and blinded, they don't want to see we're getting screwed.
It's like what you said, the market dictates prices and eventually this will all crumble down. AMD is feeling it with AM5 right now, and It shows with the new GPUs: price has kept the same because they know it will be a hard sell.
I was thinking that as well. In the past with the consoles vs pc "wars", your average upto date gaming pc was a bit more expensive than consoles but it was offset with their versatility. Now just the midrange gpus are more expensive than consoles, let alone adding the rest of the components. I can't imagine anyone wanting to get into gaming now, seeing the prices of consoles and pcs and deciding to go with the latter. I can't imagine where prices are gonna end up in a decade from now.
When you can have a console for 300 to 600€ and a cheap game pass to play all your favourite games and new releases, doesn't make any sense to pay +1000€ for a GPU alone. People are stupid and blinded, they don't want to see we're getting screwed.
- consoles screwed you over game and peripherals prices decades ago
young people don't realize but when consoles were king it wasn't rare to see games at 120$ that's what Sony and the others are trying to go back to with their recent price increase, it's not new at all, the fall of game prices is entirely due to Steam release, PC became a small nuisance but when Steam started it's summer sales it became a major competitor, console gamers owe lower priced games to steam...and now MS game pass it's not something that always was and it should not be taken for granted, that's why locked environment and exclusivities are bad, Sony fans and epic game stores exclusivity games buyers on pc are begging to pay their games 100$
- about the price per perf
in borderlands 3 1080p badass my 1080ti did barely 120fps I paid around 845$ for it (not in NA)
in borderlands 3 1080p badass my 3090 does 220-320fps I paid around 1600$ for it (before scalping craze)
technically I paid for what I got double the fps (everywhere from hd to 4k btw) double the price
which is how things work for most of normal life, a 400hp car was never the price of a 200hp equivalent model/brand
that said....if I count a rough price increase between each nvidia x80 because I bought every x80 since the beginning it should have been more around the 1200$ for rtx 3080 which it wasn't because of mining but it's now around 900$ here which is totally ok because it's still almost double a 1080ti that I paid 845 at release
also the 4090 is not the new 4080 it's something more people seem to forget
people think they always get more and more for the same price, like tvs for example, but this isn't true for pretty much everything else in life
an RTX 3070 is faster than a 1080ti for less money (600-700 here) so you have no reason to complain, the problem is that you want to pay the same price for something in the case of the 4090 that is 270% faster + has rt cores + dual av1 encoder...this is not happening
- has it become too expensive ?
the gpus not really, not with today's rtx 3000 prices, at release for sure yes but nobody forces you to upgrade day 1
the motherboards on the other hand YES my X570 hero is 414$ the X670 is now 728$ o_O and unlike the gpus you're not getting almost double the fps out of them, because of how bad compatibility and stability of DDR5 is and how awful PCIE5.0 actually is in terms of lanes and bandwith sharing, you actually get less when you upgrade
talking from experience here as I jumped from X570 dark hero to Z690 asust extreme which felt like going back to a very unstable broken Z390 "with more nvmes"
edit : I can say without lying that this Z690 is the worst purchase of my pc life I beta tested ddr5 and pcie5 and it was baaaad
I'm not new on pc gaming
2002 processor : AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1,4Ghz
2002 motherboard : ASUS A7V266
2002 RAM : 512Mbs PC2100
2002 video card : Guillemot Prophet 2 GTS 64Mbs ( overclocked at 215Mhz/380Mhz ) edit : that's a geforce 2 fyi
2002 sound card : Guillemot Maxi sound fortissimo II
lulz 1.4Ghz cpu 512mbs of ram and a 64Mbs vram gpu at 215Mhz
insane the improvements we had in 20 years
Recently I did a comparison between my old R9 280x and new 4090, because I wanted to know if 10y ago prices really were cheaper. Heck, if you take MSRP + Rel. Perf. only, I must say NO, they were not. BUT: 10y ago you had three advantages: great stock, few demand, street prices (for my card I payed €200.- street price):
edit: WTF from a PCIe3.0 GPU to 4.0 in 10 years, omg?
edit: WTF from a PCIe3.0 GPU to 4.0 in 10 years, omg?