You're not wrong, inflation is far from the only reason prices are so high. But we have been over that and over that, some are being willfully ignorant of it, because it gets in the way of manufactured outrage towards certain IHVs.
Material shortages, massive increases in shipping and transportation costs, unprecedented demand, bots enabling scalpers better than ever before. But no, let's roast AMD for asking more monopoly money than the old Ferengi math says is okay. A point that is whooshing over far too many heads it seems. That being, the old Ferengi math is no good now, and any analysis based on it is inane IMO.
By that same token, Nvidia should not have been roasted for Turings pricing.
High demand, monopoly conditions(AMD would not released anything for months) and increased cost(new memory larger dies, increased R and D expenditure) basically meant Turing had just as much right to increase cost over pascal.
But no, we roasted Nvidia like a toaster oven.
If Nvidia priced themselves lower than or the same as pascal, they would no incentive to release or even release turing because the chips were larger and the memory more expensive than the chips they were releasing along with the R and D spent on them.
The thing is what people don't realize is AMD is what keeps Nvidia prices in check. If Nvidia value prices their cards while being the more prestigious brand, they would have grinded AMD into dust. That is Nvidia lowering their prices thus, lowering their margins, would force AMD to accept even smaller margins. So low they could not afford to pay the bills or pay R and D. Same thing with Intel. If Intel just made better products, kept die sizes the same, increase core count and kept die sizes the same while not increasing prices, AMD would have died years ago.
The problem with AMD's current pricing is that they are basically equal to Nvidia's which just puts pressure on Nvidia to raise their pricing when you add in their mining performance.
That is AMD is the value brand which basically sets the floor pricing on video cards. Consumers will pay a premium for Nvidia cards vs AMD. So when AMD prices their cards high, it gives Nvidia a licence to raise their prices.
The best example of this is pitcairns or AMD 7870. This is the single greediest price increase graphic cards history because it had none of the cost increase with wafers(cost per transistor was still going down) and it was basically a small die selling at big die prices(when inflation is taken into account, it was more expensive than todays pricing for midrange dies). This was a 212mm2 selling for $350 in 2012 on 28nm!! Along with not moving the graphic card segment forward in terms of price to performance. This while AMD was still solidly the value brand in the market place.
Today AMD released their new Radeon HD 7800 Series, which is based on their new 28 nm Pitcairn graphics processor. The HD 7850 and HD 7870 offer a significant performance increase over the previous generation - up to 40% faster in our testing. Power consumption is also at a new record low...
www.techpowerup.com
Considering Nvidia was just about to release their cards, it didn't even make sense economically and was just greed over taking sense. What this allowed Nvidia to do is raise pricing on all their cards, even their smaller dies because economically speaking it would make zero sense to price them selves below AMD. We will be paying this price on the next generation as AMD increase prices beyond Nvidia levels.
Consumers need to stop buying videocards in general and particularly, AMD cards at these inflated prices to correct the market.