We've made it to February, and you know what that means?

*** NEW COMPETITION ***

Win an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition graphics card
https://www.club386.com/win-an-nvidia-geforce-rtx-5080/
or https://gleam.io/xAN1W/win-an-nvidia-geforce-rtx-5080-founders-edition-graphics-card

The ciompetition is GLOBAL.

Good luck!

The RTX 5080 and 5090 just dropped and instantly vanished. Like, poof gone. Almost suspiciously fast. Feels like Nvidia is pulling a "fake it till you make it" strategy, hyping up demand because, well who's stopping them? AMD sure isn't, with no $2000 card to rival the 5090 or a $1000 card to challenge the 5080.

Not only does this artificial scarcity make Nvidia GPUs seem wildly popular, but it also gives them a golden excuse to crank up prices because, you know, "supply and demand". They could restock quickly but why would they?

Joke's on them, cause I wasn't planning to buy one anyway. We're both getting what we want.

I snipped this screenshot from Gamers Nexus on youtube, and here is a fun little spreadsheet showing just how limited this "high demand" really is. Some stores got a whopping four cards, while Tustin, CA, somehow turned into GPU heaven with 67 RTX 5090s and nearly 200 RTX 5080s. Meanwhile, Chicago and Rockville got a solid zero. So yeah, Nvidia is definitely cooking something, but it's not stock.

I'm not a fan of seeing any article on the front page mentioning games on Steam with CCU data being used as a primary focal point of a game's sales.

For say, a live service MP game, yeah CCU data can be important for that side of gaming, but for SP games?, not even remotely. So now people are looking at the recent release of Spider-man 2 and assuming the CUU data is *all sales* and making a thing out of the fact that a year old exclusive isn't selling in the millions or hitting Wukong numbers day 1.

Spider-Man has been around for longer than I've been alive, and there are billions of us on this planet, and when you factor in the heavily declining comic book industry, the game being ported a year later to PC, and Sony only just recently easing up on PSN enforcement, along with the port's asking price, yeah I'm not expecting the sequel to sell like absolute hotcakes.

There are multiple factors and people on this site are banking on brand recognition alone. PC gamers aren't like that with Spider-man. We're more like that with other franchises that are active on PC, or that cater to us day 1 and not 1-4years later. Despite Sony easing up on PSN, I'm not going to buy Spidey 2, because I'm just not interested in Western comic media that much these days (after activists rolled in and started retconning and ruining what I once loved/grew up with).

I am however super interested in buying Tempest Rising, a C&C inspired RTS, that's due out in April.

High Yield taking a deep look into a GB202 die of a 5090:

He makes it very clear that the chip is axed direction AI and not so much towards gaming, and that it's so overengineered that NVidia doesn't have that much of a margin here to make a profit from those chips due to their sheer size and engineering of the cooler and the board.

Well, Jensen called Nvidia an AI company last year and Nvidia focused a lot on the AI capabilities of the 5000 cards, so this shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone.

They're the ones that have digged this hole and it's up to them to realize it and get out of it.

I mean, it is pretty obvious why they have gone all in with deep-learning acceleration hardware and built out the software infrastructure for it as well. 

vs. 

Even if the data-center bubble busted to 50% of its current state (which probably won't remain the case in the medium term given Jevons Paradox), that is still roughly 3.2 times its gaming revenue. 

Breaking even profit-wise on a consumer GPU that even very few consumers buy isn't bad when you have high profits in the other 90% of your business. 

But yeah, that is probably why 5090 stock is so low. 

The thing with Nvidia is that their venture into Ai has largely worked out really well for them and I wouldn't be surprised if it continues to do so even in the gaming space.

The sad part is that even though Ai and Ray Tracing Cores take up such a large chunk of the die area, their competitors still can't keep up with Nvidia when it comes to raster. Flagship RDNA3 being able to only compete with the AD103 based 4080 in Raster is pathetic when Nvidia is going so hard on Ai and RT. Like Radeon should have been able to beat the 4090 easily with how little they focus on Ai/RT and how much they focus on Raster but nope.

And this really shows how good Nvidia really is that even when Raster plays the third wheel, when it comes right down to it, they are still the king of Raster but also are generations ahead in Ai features and Ray Tracing. Hopefully RDNA4 and UDNA will start challenging some of that but it feels like this is the third deja vu we are experiencing.

What is crazier is that even now Intel and Nvidia's revenue aren't that far apart, which shows how much Nvidia overprices their HPC stuff (and how poor Intel has been in converting revenue to actual profit).

I'm seeing 5080s on sale second-hand here for almost 3500$, and a few 5090s at 4500$ and climbing in the bidding rounds. All still unopened. Scalpers are making a killing right now. One of the 5090s had 8 new bids over the course of 5 hours today (I think it just reached 4700$ now). Good times. My 4090 purchase is looking more and more worth it in hindsight.

All I need is a decent OLED screen, and I'm good to go for a good, long while with my rig.

Two more days for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2! Just watched the DF analysis, it's honestly looking amazing, and it performs so much better than any major release of the past year. Warhorse Studios have worked wonders with the engine.

Well Intel has a pretty big money sink in the form of fabs. If Intel didn't have fabs to pour billions into, they would likely be making decently close to Nvidia in profits. TSMC has been eating Intels breakfast, lunch and dinner while AMD has been finishing the desserts. If Intel does not get their CPUs shat together, they will end up a penny stock. Ironically long term wise, their GPU division might be a light at the end of the tunnel if Radeon keeps shitting the bed and Nvidia keeps being greedy. But while Nvidia will always be greedy, Radeon can certainly fight back if they get their act together.

Yea 4090 was a stellar GPU even if it was expensive. I certainly saw the writing on the wall where it was very unlikely we would get a node jump to this degree for quite some time. The fact that it was only $100 more than the $1500 3090 while providing a 60-70% raster jump was nuts. With 24GB of vram and all dem Nvidia goodies, it was hard to pass if you had the money.

Fast forward today, even at MSRP, the 4090 would have kept it's value slotting in between a 5080 and 5090 very nicely. But both of those being out of stock and scalped hard basically means the 4090 will retain or up it's value since 4090s have been discontinued for some time. According to GNs video, the shipments of 4090s were around 130,000 units within the first 3 weeks of launch vs like what? Under 10,000 units for 5090s? Maybe under 1000? That's like universes apart lol. Doesn't help that all the factories in China and such are closed due to Lunar new year so these gpus aren't even being produced... Yea no wonder the msrp is nuts cause this shit is gonna be out of stock for some time.