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[JEMC]

Captain_Yuri said:

JEMC said:

I'll be honest. If the price of the current 4080 cards is to scare people into buying Ampere ones, I don't understand what the 4080 12GB is doing there. Nvidia could have launched the 4090, which has an ok price given the past history of those cards and the 4080 16GB to push people into buying Ampere, but what's the purpose of the 4080 12GB? To be mocked for?

Yea it's hard to tell what the grand scheme of their strategy is and more importantly when Nvidia expects the excess Ampere stock to clear out. I am sure they want to sell those cards at some point so my theory is that:

a) If they only announced the 4090, people would still wait for the 4080s because the 4090 performance leap is massive for its price

b) The 4080s are set to release in mid-November so that gives ample time for Ampere stock to clear. The 3080/3090 both released within a week of each other for comparison.

c) 4080s are bait for AMD. In the past, Nvidia went first and AMD was able to position their cards accordingly while giving Nvidia very little room to maneuver. This time around though, because there is such a drastic difference between 4080s and 4090s, it gives Nvidia a lot of room to position their cards after AMD launches their RDNA 3 cards in November. So if AMD announces 7900XT at $1300, 7800XT at $1000, 7700XT at $800, Nvidia can slash 4080 16GB to $850 and introduce 4080 Ti at $1200 with more cuda cores than 4080 16GB. Remember that Nvidia knew about RDNA 3 release date before their conference even started yet choose to release the 4080s after the announcement date.

I'd love to believe it, I really do. For the sake of competition, PC gaming and common sense, but it's a very risky strategy that can go wrong. From AMD pricing their cards lower than Nvidia expects (not likely given their recent announcement regarding the revenue drop), to customers expecting that price drop and holding their purchases (which would hurt Nvidia and create another stock problem), to other that I'm too tired to think of.

And let's not forget about what would happen with those that had purchased one only to see them massively drop in price a couple months later.

It's a very risky strategy that can fail.