Game market forcing you to buy high-end cards, if you not buy game will be unplayable, but game market is influenced by gpu market, they even pay them to games have high requarment and play only on theirs gpu,

Not really... The 1060 is good enough for the vast majority of gamers out there. But, it's not the best, so people feel inadequate and get something with more FPS than their monitor will render. Even though AMD has products very competitive to the 1060, people will still buy the 1060 anyway simply because of the prestige of the brand. It's kind of like buying a BMW 2 series simply because you want the prestige of owning a BMW, when you could have spent the same money on something like a VW that might feel a little cheaper and won't impress anyone but is overall more practical. Those who have something like a 2K 144Hz monitor are a very small minority, so it wouldn't surprise me if the majority of 1070 and 1080 owners aren't taking advantage of the money they spent and likely won't for a while.

There is competition just fine actually. This is the first year that AMD didn't have a $400+ contender, and it's starting to look that it happened because their next top end is going to be here almost a year earlier than NVIDIA's. This is not at all like the CPU race. NVIDIA is making a lot of money because they had the brains to invest in using GPUs for other tasks, most notably deep learning. They are getting crazy amounts of money from that, and CUDA is the de facto standard for the academia.

From their market expectations for this year, I highly doubt Nvidia are going to wait a year before releasing Volta. Don't forget, when Pascal was released, no-one expected it. They were very quiet on the matter. It was rumoured for last quarter of 2016, then, boom it got released very quickly after presentation. Next time, when Nvidia does a reveal for their next-gen card, I fully anticipate fast availability, even if it is "limited" like Pascal. Without question, in terms of hyping their products, they've nailed it. At most, I give Vega 6months before next-gen Nvidia comes along. Also, look at the charts here; h ttp://www.anandtech.com/show/7900/nvidia-updates-gpu-roadmap-unveils-pascal-architecture-for-2016 Pascal wasn't even on their original roadmap in 2014 (was added later). It's obvious now that the memory they wanted to use (HBM2) wasn't ready so they made the choice to go GDDR5+X, which allowed them to get to market a lot quicker. This decision also had to be made by AMD because RX480 became a GDDR5 product. This 2015 wccftech article (slap on wrist) also says GDDR6 and HBM2 will both be used for Volta. It also says Pascal was expected 2nd half of 2016. h ttp://w ccftech.com/nvidia-roadmap-2017-volta-gpu/ My conclusion is Volta will be a 2017 product.

Each generation of smartphones are 2-5x faster then previos, but they are cheaper and cheaper btw did you know that production cost of that 9000$ intel procesor is the same as 500$ procesors? and maybe even lower because of clocks? but there is no competition Game market forcing you to buy high-end cards, if you not buy game will be unplayable, but game market is influenced by gpu market, they even pay them to games have high requarment and play only on theirs gpu, it is the same forced business like microsoft doings, when you have to have lastest bloatware system with only apps from their market because lastest cpu and gpu and games will work only on that, because they payed for that and they get profit from that

Literally nothing about this post is accurate. Smartphone SoCs definitely do not increase 500% per generation, in fact newer generations barely hit 50% increases. $9000 - 24 core Intel processors do not cost as much as 6 core processors to produce. The vast majority of gamers are running 1080p, the vast majority of games can now be played by a ~$250 card (480/1060) at Ultra settings at 1080p - never in the history of gaming has this every been true. There are people in this forum running six year old sandybridge processors just fine. Neither Microsoft nor modern games really require much more in the vast majority of circumstances.

My conclusion is Volta will be a 2017 product.

I think it will be detailed in 2017, similar to how Pascal was in 2015 - I think the GV100 chips might show in 2017 in the super computers.. but I don't think consumer based Volta cards will be out until March 2018. That being said, I don't see how AMD releasing Vega this year makes it "a year early" - most of the additions to Vega are things Pascal already does. Packed math, HBM2, Large Addressing, Binned Raster - Pascal already does all this. The tessellation improvements are essentially catch-up and the changes they made to the CU aren't something Nvidia would do anyway (since they don't have utilization problems).

Literally nothing about this post is accurate. Smartphone SoCs definitely do not increase 500% per generation, in fact newer generations barely hit 50% increases. $9000 - 24 core Intel processors do not cost as much as 6 core processors to produce. The vast majority of gamers are running 1080p, the vast majority of games can now be played by a ~$250 card (480/1060) at Ultra settings at 1080p - never in the history of gaming has this every been true. There are people in this forum running six year old sandybridge processors just fine. Neither Microsoft nor modern games really require much more in the vast majority of circumstances. I think it will be detailed in 2017, similar to how Pascal was in 2015 - I think the GV100 chips might show in 2017 in the super computers.. but I don't think consumer based Volta cards will be out until March 2018. That being said, I don't see how AMD releasing Vega this year makes it "a year early" - most of the additions to Vega are things Pascal already does. Packed math, HBM2, Large Addressing, Binned Raster - Pascal already does all this. The tessellation improvements are essentially catch-up and the changes they made to the CU aren't something Nvidia would do anyway (since they don't have utilization problems).

We have the consoles to thank for PC gaming stagnation. However, the positive outcome is more people can enjoy the latest games.

We have the consoles to thank for PC gaming stagnation. However, the positive outcome is more people can enjoy the latest games.

Honestly, I think the stagnation is a good thing, for now. 4K gaming still isn't really a viable option (without spending huge amounts of cash), even for the GTX 1080 and there aren't many affordable GPUs out there that can easily keep up with VR. In other words, GPU manufacturers still have some work to do when it comes to "next-gen" tech. Meanwhile for those who are waiting for these issues to be addressed, they can game at 1080p with ultra details for relatively low prices.

@chronek we werent talking about smartphones nor (intel) cpus. and just because 400M phones sold last year, doesnt mean 400M gpus were sold (less than 15M actually). so your comparing a product that gets replaced every 1-2y (so it has to cost less or ppl wont), and costs way less to manufacture, as fixed cost is lower, with something most will replace every 3-5y. right. i wont start about the cpus.

Game market forcing you to buy high-end cards

i have a brain, in combination with my wallet, makes the decision when/how much on what. if you/others cant, not really the sellers/manufacturers problem. ever seen a liquor/whiskey maker (repeatedly) financially help alcoholics (e.g. their customers) or ppl that directly/indirectly got hurt/killed by someone drunk?? so why would Nv care if "overbuy", as they are here to make money, like most businesses are... i'm out.

With all that money nvidia made from us , why they don't hire more and better driver support teams. The state of the drivers has been a royal mess for quite some time ehh ....

well they where able to sell founders edition cards as soon as they bring em out ...an extra cap 50-100 usd per card ...is quiet the thing ...the best reaction to that would have been not even a single sale of FE cards to happen so they won't do that again....apparently people don't mind paying for FE so why they would not sell it like that ? in the business stand point you sell as high as you can also what the hell are people talking about that cards are to be changed every year and you HAVE to do that? Really ?sure yeah if you want 4k with everything maxed out yeah you need to change hardware pretty fast and it will cost you ...although when you can not spend 1000 usd a year for a new video card you learn that what do you know ... you can click some details off and you are good to go ... that's why i am not jumping on 4k my self i can not afford it simple as that am i an enthusiast ? yes i am ! i love messing with my pc and reading *hardware porn* and every time i pick up a new piece for my pc is Christmas all over but when i can not afford a Ferrari i will settle of with a punto and try to maximize it's performance do i need to do that ? no not really but i enjoy doing it! ...so i am gaming on 1080 p and i am ok closing anti aliasing even setting shadows on medium keeping textures on high and most of the other things on high the visual difference is minuscule and i enjoy my games .... i still to meet a game that i can not play on almost everything high 1080p on my gtx 770 ...although admittedly i am looking to change my 770 i am not in a rush but hell this summer my 770 would be 4 years on service ! that said i do not blame people that own 1080 cards if my wallet was giving me the "ok" i would have had one my self or two !

im sure it had notthing do with they keep increasing prices every gen

It has very little to do with that, gamers vastly overestimate their importance. They are doing very well in many fields, whether that will help fund improvements in gaming or not remains to be seen. No idea what the stagnation talk is about, i personally don't see any stagnation.

Insane profits and all around growth. Nvidia is 60 billion $ company as of today. Three years ago when GTX 780 Ti launched, Nvidia's total enterprise value was only 6 billion. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/enterprisevalue.asp

Memo to self: follow own advise I didn't follow X years ago and start investing in tech companies their stock.

The problem a profitable company like Nvidia poses for AMD, is that richer companies will tend to have a technological advantage over poorer ones (through increased R&D). Hence we may see a performance gap widening between the two. This has already begun to show with AMD unable to compete with the 1070/1080 for almost a year.

R&D isn't like a thing where if you put more money, it suddenly becomes better. The number of people who know how to do this is very limited.

Entry level gaming cards used to cost £60-£70, just couple years ago. Now price is doubled. When you have 2 major players only (nVidia and AMD), then it is very easy to fix and control prices without the need to say anything to the competitor. If it becomes too profitable then Intel, probably will improve their cards. I doubt that new player will come into the market, because patent laws will be used to crush it.

R&D is all about money. The more money you have the more can be done, and the better staff you can attract.

Yeah, but, Nvidia, AMD and Intel aren't the only players who work on graphics hardware.

Yeah, but, Nvidia, AMD and Intel aren't the only players who work on graphics hardware.

I do not know any other, and 99,9% gamers too... It means they are no competition. Nvidia, Amd, Intel just split market, they are no compete within self

It's better that there are only 2, maybe 3 in the market. Things would be awful if there were a lot more.

Nvidia should not make a same mistakes Intel currently makes. Intel slacked far too long, and result is now AMD will introduce a better product at lower price. Might be a substential kick for them, i doubt Vega will be much better then Pascal ( i will be disgusted if AMD wont at least match the gtx 1080 performance ) otherwise we will see next nvidia card gtx 1180 at 1500$ per piece. Disgusting.

Do elaborate?

With all that money nvidia made from us , why they don't hire more and better driver support teams. The state of the drivers has been a royal mess for quite some time ehh ....

I think you have mistaken Nvidia for AMD.