The lesson Nvidia learned in the last 2 years is that it wasn't just miners who were willing to pay 2x MSRP for GPUs. Regular folks (gamers or ML people) were paying those prices a well. Now, the reason those people were paying those ridiculous prices was because they were competing with the crypto fruitcakes and there was a huge supply shortage. So they weren't happy to pay those inflated prices, but, they were still willing (or forced) to. And Nvidia seems to be okay with that. They don't need you to be happy with the price as long as you're willing to pay it. People who need these GPUs for work will have to buy them. The rest of us are hosed. We can decide to skip the entire 4xxx generation but what comes next? Do you reckon the RTX 5080 is going to be $600 card? The RTX 6080? The best we can hope for is that in 2 years the RTX 4080 performance is delivered at the $600 price point (either the RTX 5070 or maybe RTX 5060) and that's going to feel bad as well.
Those who are hoping AMD is going to save the day need to look at recent history and recalibrate their expectations. Starting with the Radeon 7 GPU from a few years ago, AMD pricing has more or less matched Nvidia pricing whenever they are close in performance. Maybe slightly cheaper at the lower end. These RDNA3 cards probably won't be as good as the RTX 40 series. Maybe they match them in rasterization performance but they'll probably still be behind on ray tracing and whatever this fancy shader re-ordering business enables. So even if they match the rasterization performance of the $1200 4080, you're still not getting that AMD card for $600. Nor $800. Nor $1000. It's going to be more, unless AMD pull off the most aggressive market share play ever. Odds are they'll just go with being slightly better in the 'performance per dollar' metric and have better thermals, which will actually matter with the price of energy being what it is these days.
In my country the 16GB 4080 is listed for about $1660 USD. That's literally double the price the 3080 launched at. It actually matches the price the 3090 launched at. And these are just founder edition cards. Once the AIBs get in on it, I expect prices will reach $2000 if not more. That's just madness for a third world country. That's 6 months salary for a kid just out of college. We are so. properly. fucked.
Last note, I'm sort of amused that they're using the standard shrouded, single fan design for the 4090 FE that's rated at 450W. For a card that will likely have power spikes 'power excursions' (thank you Intel for that amazing euphemism) of up to 1000W. How is that cooling solution supposed to work for a card that's likely going to be super hot? We're seeing photos of how the card is 3-4 slots wide. Is that one massive heatsink or what?
