Carzy Zarx’s PC Gaming Emporium - Catch Up on All the Latest PC Gaming Related News

[Chazore]

Captain_Yuri said:

So overall, it feels like Nvidia and AMD are price fixing the GPU market instead of actually being competitive like in the CPU market.

If you look at the CPU market for example, AMD launched Zen 4 at dumb prices and what did Intel do? They didn't position their CPUs in such a way that would allow them to sell at a much higher margin. Instead they came out with CPUs that destroyed any value proposition that Zen 4 had. 7600X 6 core 12 thread for $300? Lol here's our i5 for $329 that has 14 cores (6p 12 threads + 8e cores). They did that with their i7 and i9 which absolutely demolished Zen 4s lineup to the point where either most people are buying Zen 3 with 5800X3D or going Raptor Lake and AMD was forced to give out massive discounts.

But in the GPU landscape, it's so clear that neither companies are competing to the point where it feels like there's collusion going on. Nvidia has a 4090 which has the performance crown by a pretty large margin, great. But they come out with a 4080 that is horribly priced because they somehow knew that the 7900XTX couldn't compete with a 4090. Like after how close RDNA 2 was, wouldn't a company without spies think oh, perhaps we should take our competitor seriously? But nope, they knew the exact price and performance of the 7900XTX.

So AMD has the choice of destroying the 4080 by pricing the 7900XTX $900 or even lower but they don't. But alright, 7900XTX is slightly faster so perhaps its priced fairly enough. But then they release a 7900XT at $900. So now Nvidia has the chance to make the 7900XT DoA while keeping a good margin. If they released the 4070 Ti at $600 or even $700, would have demolished the 7900XT in value and forced a big discount. But nope, they price it at $800 which allows the 7900XT to exist at it's current price point and they configure the 4070 Ti just enough so that a 7900XT is 5-10% faster for 12% increase in price. Nvidia could have easily configured the 4070 Ti to be as fast as a 7900XT while leaving plenty of room against the 4080 but nope. So now AMD is likely going to release a 7800XT that won't offend 4070 Ti too much from it's price/performance position.

Hell the biggest kicker is that Nvidia could have easily made Radeon choke if they priced the 4080 at $800. Because of how cutdown it is, even with TSMCs price increases and inflation, it would have been doable. I get the whole, need to sell last gen cards but this is nuts.

Hopefully they will get sued for it like how they got sued back in 2008 for price fixing as well:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-amd-ati-graphics,6311.html

It's like how phone companies in Canada don't compete with each other. They simply just match each others prices and offers similar plans and such.

I swear the past 2 yrs of having lockdowns and ppl staying indoors that then caused big consumer retention/spending, has cast some weird and yet vile spell on companies.

I say this, because this starting year should have been one where Jan new yr sales should have offered the usual discount that ppl expect from their usual stores (clothes shops and such), yet when I went downtown this week, there was hardly any of that, which lead to me thinking that companies became too used to having 2 yrs of ppl just shopping online and paying whatever to get it sent to their doorstep, that they would rather retain as higher price as they can and still expect ppl to pay.

I'm starting to see this with nvidia and AMD now, both are absolutely refusing to compete and both have at some point, been greatly aided by the mining/scalping shitshows, that I feel like those two are used to that level of retention/sales, that they now just don't want to compete, don't want to read the room as soon as they step inside it, and would rather just happily coast yet another gen of doing sweet fuck all, yet charging more for less.

Like god damn have the past 3 fucking gens of GPU's been utter garbage for me, be it price, availability, drivers or shit I want locked down to a GPU I can neither afford nor find. I hope to god Nvidia/AMD get sued for this shitshow of theirs, because it's been 3 gens now, this is getting really tiresome and really fucking stupid, about as stupid as watching the FTC/Sony acting like manbabies against MS. 

I just want a god damn good GPU that doesn't cost more than my 1080ti and lasts me as long as it has. I'm never going back to consoles, they are a step back for what I'm after in gaming, and cost too much over the long-term. I hate being gated this hard in a hobby I've loved for 3 decades. 

Last edited by Chazore - on 04 January 2023