RussianSensation
Elite Member
- Sep 5, 2003
- 19,458
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I get the whole monopoly thing, but isn't it a little funny when Nvidia tells themselves, "ZOMG its just us left now. Lets charge a BILLION DOLLARS for the mid range and a life of hard labor for the high end!"
I mean, there is a point at which people just won't be able to afford these things. For crying out loud, isn't $1,200 already there? A single GPU costing $1,200? Really guys? You guys bought that. You straight up bought that thing, lol. Throw away product. Lasts 12 months until it becomes a joke, and you guys bought it. Holy cow.
NV's strategy is a lot more intelligent than it seems.
1) Increasing prices to the moon means the next generation looks that much better. Recall how NV compared the $379 1070 to the $999 Titan Maxwell. Just imagine how amazing of a value the $449-499 Volta 2070 will be compared to the $1200 Titan XP! Imagine $1,400 1080 SLI performance in a GTX2080 for only $749; a bargain if it beats the 250W $800 1080Ti by 25-30%, while using 185W of power!
2) The Apple strategy - the most expensive SKUs make lower end SKUs seem like an amazing value.
GTX1080 seems like an amazing value compared to the Titan XP. The 1070 seems like an amazing value compared to the 1080.
In the past, cards like 8800GT/S, 6800GT, GeForce 4 Ti 4200, GTX570, made the flagship far less desirable.
3) The higher the GPUs are priced at launch, the more they will lose in resale value (on average). Knowing this, NV's customers are better off buying & reselling, buying & reselling. Think about it - they know mid-range 2080 will destroy the 1080Ti/Titan XP for less $. In fact, it can cost $800 and beat 1080Ti by just 20-25% and it will already make sense to sell the 1080Ti/Titan XP before they lose hundreds of dollars in resale value.
It will make sense to dump high-end Pascal to less knowledgeable PC gamers and upgrade. Repeat the cycle. This means not only does NV's strategy encourage its customers to upgrade EVERY generation, but by splitting the generation into 2 or even 3 parts, they are setting the generation up for at least 2 flagship upgrades over 2 years:
Kepler: 670/680 --> 780/OG Titan -> 780Ti (many bought 680, then 780Ti)
Maxwell: 980-> 980Ti
Pascal: 1080-> 1080Ti/Titan XP
It's conceivable that a high-end PC gamer went like this too:
680->780->780Ti->980->980Ti->1080->1080Ti/Titan XP.
That's 6-7 $500-700+ GPUs in 4 years. In the past, they would have purchased only roughly 3 @ $500-600 flagship Kepler + Maxwell + Pascal.
NV is making 2X the gross margin on the 1st half of a new generation by front-loading the mid-range marketing flagship at $500-700. Then, they double their revenue since this user is very likely to upgrade again to the Titan/Ti series. Haha. It's bloody brilliant way to milk the same customer over and over.
Furthermore, since Kepler (and including GF5 & 7), NV's architectures have not even been that future proof. That only instills more fear into high-end gamers that "I better dump my 2-year-old high-end NV card before its performance and resale value tank."
Your point of waiting for Volta is not a solution either because NV will launch mid-range first at $400-700 as they did during Kepler, Maxwell and Pascal generations. If you pay $700 for 2080, you get screwed. If you wait a year for 2080Ti and buy that for $800, you are screwed since 2019 Volta successor for $450 will be better again. The only way out is to buy and dump the soon to be replaced high-end NV card on PC noobs about a month before the launch of the next NV card -- keep some spare decent GPU for that 1 month of gaming.
Another way could be to buy the x70 series mid-range and upgrade on that 2-year cycle because the upfront cash outlay is 1/2 of a Ti card. I haven't figured out the best way to upgrade now because even AMD threw in the towel last gen with $650 Fury X -- and that card can easily be purchased for $379 barely a year later. Seems like buying flagship cards and holding onto to them is one of the worst ways to spend $$$ nowadays. [Of course if you have a 4K, 3440x1440 100Hz or 2560x1440 144Hz monitor, you may not have much choice but to pay these prices].
P.S. AMD and NV have to be nervous because the vast majority of PC gamers on Steam still run 1080p 60Hz and below. A $450 2070 will bottleneck 95%+ of Steam CPUs at 1080p 60Hz, and the extra performance will also be wasted. By 2018, the average PC gamer will need nothing more than a $250/300 GPU. The lag in PC gamers upgrading to monitors higher than 1080p 60Hz is immense compared to how fast GPUs are improving. VR is barely taking off...we desperately need next generation PS5/XB2 by 2019/2020 or by then a $150-200 dGPU will be super high-end in context of peasant 1080p resolution.
The reluctance of PC gamers to abandon 1080p and lower is simply mind-blowing.
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