I was implying the whole unique MCD arrangement but yes in the end, from a consumer perspective, it's not novel.
blckgrffn
Diamond Member
Revisiting the topic of the thread, maybe not on the newest and greatest parts but at least yes!
In our FS/FT forum, you can get admittedly lightly mined 1660 Supers for $80-$100 shipped. My local CL has a 6500XT in box for $80, I just got a New/Open Box EVGA 2060 12GB for right at $200 shipped on eBay. A year to 18 months ago the cards in the "under $200" range was bleak. Super bleak. Buying old quadros bleak. Now a discerning buyer has many choices.
A tier or three above that, slickdeals has several links to cards at $250, $320-$350 and 6800-6800XTs in the $480-$550 range. Relatively speaking, this is so much better than it was just a short time ago.
Probably in late 2019 and early 2020, I remarked here how great it would be when we could get our hands on 2060 cards for under $200 and ideally closer to $100, as they were such a huge step up from the Polaris and 1060s that were so prevalent at the time. It seemed so close then, it should have been. Alas, it's only three years later and you have to wonder if used cards spent three years mining. I'll be sticking to the 12GB versions that premiered in January 2022 at least!
As much gnashing of teeth we might be having over the very limited release of macho new cards, at least it is super duper possible to be a low to mid budget PC gamer again, especially if your target resolution is 1080p.
The answer to the OPs question is a definite yes, the cost of video cards has come down.
In our FS/FT forum, you can get admittedly lightly mined 1660 Supers for $80-$100 shipped. My local CL has a 6500XT in box for $80, I just got a New/Open Box EVGA 2060 12GB for right at $200 shipped on eBay. A year to 18 months ago the cards in the "under $200" range was bleak. Super bleak. Buying old quadros bleak. Now a discerning buyer has many choices.
A tier or three above that, slickdeals has several links to cards at $250, $320-$350 and 6800-6800XTs in the $480-$550 range. Relatively speaking, this is so much better than it was just a short time ago.
Probably in late 2019 and early 2020, I remarked here how great it would be when we could get our hands on 2060 cards for under $200 and ideally closer to $100, as they were such a huge step up from the Polaris and 1060s that were so prevalent at the time. It seemed so close then, it should have been. Alas, it's only three years later and you have to wonder if used cards spent three years mining. I'll be sticking to the 12GB versions that premiered in January 2022 at least!
As much gnashing of teeth we might be having over the very limited release of macho new cards, at least it is super duper possible to be a low to mid budget PC gamer again, especially if your target resolution is 1080p.
The answer to the OPs question is a definite yes, the cost of video cards has come down.
blckgrffn
Diamond Member
@DAPUNISHER this is so painful though 
Direct link to the card for those that want to get the deal or even just see the listing:
For what its worth, I got a used RX 5500 for $90 shipped on eBay, but the dunce literally put the card in a large box not even in a static bag, no packing support and it was quite dead as one might expect. However, the 4 GB version in XT flavors too, is typically available at about $90 used on eBay. I prefer the 4GB as it is unlikely to have been mined on:
About as strong as a RX570/580 at about half the power usage and the drivers are fully baked now
Direct link to the card for those that want to get the deal or even just see the listing:
For what its worth, I got a used RX 5500 for $90 shipped on eBay, but the dunce literally put the card in a large box not even in a static bag, no packing support and it was quite dead as one might expect. However, the 4 GB version in XT flavors too, is typically available at about $90 used on eBay. I prefer the 4GB as it is unlikely to have been mined on:
About as strong as a RX570/580 at about half the power usage and the drivers are fully baked now
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DeathReborn
Platinum Member
- Oct 11, 2005
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I picked up 2x used ASUS RX5500XT 8GB Strix OC cards for £160 total, about the same price as a new 6500XT. They're going into a couple of HTPC's but with FSR they can run some games at "4K" or natively at 1080p. The Strix is similar to a 590 performance wise and it has everything but AV1/VP9 on the decoder side, although I suspect they will mostly be used for APEX or Fortnite & Netflix.
blckgrffn
Diamond Member
Did you buy them at the same time as a sort of bundle? That’s the kind of deal I can get behind! 8GB of full fat memory is no joke these days either, preferred to 4GB no matter how wide or skinny or fast the PCIe connection is.
DeathReborn
Platinum Member
- Oct 11, 2005
- 2,746
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Yea, same seller had 2, I did check and they were used in his kids PC's for gaming and was upgrading, his listings (current & past) did go with that. Both cards have passed 48 hours of stress testing and I did repaste them before testing. I am making the 2 HTPC's for my nephews, gonna go 12100, 16GB, 1TB NVMe + 4TB HDD. I already have the ITX mobos, RAM, cases & PSU's for a nice SFF setup. I nearly bought a 6750XT for £280 but decided to not buy any performance cards until the next round of 40x0/7000 series cards get reviewed.
It does make me laugh when I see new 6600/3060 cards going for £600 plus, those sellers (ebay & Amazon) are on some kind of trip.
psolord
Golden Member
- Sep 16, 2009
- 1,918
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Aisurix really?
Sounds like Asterix's son, left Asus and made his own company! xD
Sounds like Asterix's son, left Asus and made his own company! xD
coercitiv
Diamond Member
- Jan 24, 2014
- 6,204
- 11,909
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Life will better and stronger, AISURIX believed that.
Considering their slogan, I think you're on to something.
GodisanAtheist
Diamond Member
- Nov 16, 2006
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*Looks around* Uh... It is 2023 right? Or did the time machine actually work?
- Jun 10, 2004
- 14,330
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Video card prices as a whole are slowly adjusting. Used market is somewhat in lala land still due to all the people who paid mining prices for GPUs.
The promos on new 6000 series card mean at pretty much every price point that is under $700 they are the cards to buy.
1080p: 6600/XT/6650XT
1440p: 6700XT/6800
1440p high refresh rate or 4K: 6800XT/6900XT/6950XT
Being able to get a aftermarket, overbuilt 6950XT for $699 with 2 bundled games is the deal to beat if you need that kind of power.
Now if we're talking 4000 series RTX or 7000 series AMD... I expect inevitable price cuts and/or bundle deals. Because the prices are too dang high for the performance increase.
The promos on new 6000 series card mean at pretty much every price point that is under $700 they are the cards to buy.
1080p: 6600/XT/6650XT
1440p: 6700XT/6800
1440p high refresh rate or 4K: 6800XT/6900XT/6950XT
Being able to get a aftermarket, overbuilt 6950XT for $699 with 2 bundled games is the deal to beat if you need that kind of power.
Now if we're talking 4000 series RTX or 7000 series AMD... I expect inevitable price cuts and/or bundle deals. Because the prices are too dang high for the performance increase.
blckgrffn
Diamond Member
You have a Time Machine and used it to get early 2020 GPU pricing? Are you mad, sir?
But… yeah.
GodisanAtheist
Diamond Member
- Nov 16, 2006
- 6,815
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-The plan was to skip over the whole pandemic but I see the future is more nightmarish than I had anticipated.
People reminiscing about 2019 like it was the good old days...
Ahh, the good old days of a $400 2060S with a $30 rebate and free game. Hmm, seems a lot like 2022-23.
Yes. This is the result of a shifting strategy. Mining showed that the real value of GPUs is not in gaming. So the companies decided to try and take professional margins in case the next usecase gets found. They are willing to loose the gamers who are not hyped enough to pay any price.
On the gaming side, they can milk the chills more while the others where harder and harder to convince anyway (if fewer games need high end hardware and that high end hardware now needs two gens for the same performance gain used to be had in one, why upgrade?). I expect that strategy to stay.
Aapje
Golden Member
- Mar 21, 2022
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This makes no sense. First of all, mining on GPUs has become relatively insignificant and that is unlikely to change. So any company that keeps prices high hoping for mining demand to come back is probably going to face a permanent slump in sales until they start pricing in accordance to actual demand.
That GPU's have applications beyond gaming is well known and mining wasn't needed for anyone to recognize that. However, it is questionable to what extent some of these markets will persist. For example, I strongly suspect that machine learning will move to specialized hardware like Tenstorrent (it is probably no coincidence that Jim Keller went there, an engineer with great insight). Right now, ML cores are tacked on to GPU's, which is not efficient, since a machine learning application won't use a lot of the other parts of the chip. A chip completely dominated by machine learning cores should wipe the floor with any GPU for ML applications.
Nvidia's attempts to shift the gaming market over to raytracing may actually be an attempt to prevent their GPUs becoming nonviable for ML, but I have my doubts whether it will be enough to keep the same GPU-chips viable for both gaming and ML even if they succeed in that.
However, the biggest weakness in your story is to assume that they need to choose. Nvidia has been constantly gimping their cheaper cards (why do you think they put so little memory on most of their consumer cards?). At the end of the day, the market is there and in the absence of monopolistic behavior, some company should fill the gap (Intel seems to want to go for it).
Well, I don‘t have a crystal ball. As with all analysis of economics, it is a very complex dynamic system and I might be completely wrong.
That being said, most consumers have shown in the past, that they really don‘t care about value. Nvidia‘s marketshare in gaming has much more to do with mindshare then with value. AMD has been trying to gain marketshare with better price/performance for years and failed. Partly due to other issues like botched launches, but still.
So why not milk the shills? They will give their allocated GPU budget to nvidia anyway. The ones who don‘t want to spend obscene amounts of money on hardware have become harder and harder to retain as customers anyway. Those buyers realized there are tons of great games that run on a toaster. Look at the steam top 250 and count the games that need new hardware. Those buyers may also consider consoles or other SOCs as an alternative.
Most of my friends think spending 300€ on a GPU is too much, although they earn 80+k per year. Some have switched to consoles, some just enjoy older games. Some people in my wider circle are more hardcore gamers, but those bought GPUs even when the prices where ridiculously high. The gap between those two consumer groups seems to widen more and more. Raising prices for GPUs seems like a logical consequence.
So there is really no reason for GPU manufacturers to miss out on the next big run on general parallel compute. If the application will be mining or not is hard to tell.
Don't get me wrong, I'm think this sucks. I was in between enthusiast and low budget gaming. I liked the times you could get the cut down high end chip for ~400 bucks and get 90% performance for 50% of the price. But I bought new GPUs every 2-3 generations, often switching brands and mostly buying when some ridiculous value card came out (radeon 5700, 9800gts, r9 290, etc). I don't think companies earned that much with people like me, and I think my buying behavior is in the vast minority.
That being said, most consumers have shown in the past, that they really don‘t care about value. Nvidia‘s marketshare in gaming has much more to do with mindshare then with value. AMD has been trying to gain marketshare with better price/performance for years and failed. Partly due to other issues like botched launches, but still.
So why not milk the shills? They will give their allocated GPU budget to nvidia anyway. The ones who don‘t want to spend obscene amounts of money on hardware have become harder and harder to retain as customers anyway. Those buyers realized there are tons of great games that run on a toaster. Look at the steam top 250 and count the games that need new hardware. Those buyers may also consider consoles or other SOCs as an alternative.
Most of my friends think spending 300€ on a GPU is too much, although they earn 80+k per year. Some have switched to consoles, some just enjoy older games. Some people in my wider circle are more hardcore gamers, but those bought GPUs even when the prices where ridiculously high. The gap between those two consumer groups seems to widen more and more. Raising prices for GPUs seems like a logical consequence.
So there is really no reason for GPU manufacturers to miss out on the next big run on general parallel compute. If the application will be mining or not is hard to tell.
Don't get me wrong, I'm think this sucks. I was in between enthusiast and low budget gaming. I liked the times you could get the cut down high end chip for ~400 bucks and get 90% performance for 50% of the price. But I bought new GPUs every 2-3 generations, often switching brands and mostly buying when some ridiculous value card came out (radeon 5700, 9800gts, r9 290, etc). I don't think companies earned that much with people like me, and I think my buying behavior is in the vast minority.
Aapje
Golden Member
- Mar 21, 2022
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You are essentially undermining your own point here. You claim that most consumers don't care about value, yet your own evidence points to the opposite.
Of course, better evidence than your bubble is that both sales data and surveys point to cheaper GPUs being way more popular than more expensive GPUs. Of course Nvidia can turn PC gamers into console gamers or cause many gamers to upgrade far less often. However, that is not evidence of most gamers not caring about value, but of those gamers not being catered to.
You are correct that economics is a very complex dynamic system, but there are some pretty simple rules like a huge increase in demand with a fairly fixed supply causing huge price increases and a drop once a lot of that demand goes away. It's also well-established that companies cannot simply make every consumer pay their maximum, but have to select a price where many people pay less than they would if prices were higher.
So it is a mistake to think that just because a portion of the gamer market is willing to pay high prices, Nvidia can actually get away with asking that much in a situation without huge demand, without having fairly low sales.
Nvidia has actually been working very hard to differentiate themselves from AMD by providing better value, even at the same (raw) FPS. If you actually listen to consumers' reason for getting Nvidia, they often point to the better value.
Ultimately, whether you consider the average consumer's willingness to pay a significant premium for Nvidia to be sensible or just mindshare is more a matter of belief than of fact. In reality, it is both, so fully attributing it to one or the other is a mistake.
Don't feel bad. Even people with crystal balls get it wrong most of the time.
But due to the changes in supply chains and the big second hand market, I would suspect making money in the sub 300 or sub 250 marked has become harder.
If your new generation gains only +20% more performance for the same production price, something like an extra 20 bucks in labor cost or due to some component shortage, lockdown or taxes (or some other change in the economic climate I forgot), will eat all your margin.
Since at the end of the day GPU makers are companies, I don‘t think they would leave money on the table if they could just grab it.
Who can proof the sales wouldn‘t have been low anyway? I haven‘t seen any numbers on margins, but I suspect the money-leeches probably spend a lot of time calculating how to make the most.
Yeah… It just works!
Seriously, hairworks, physx, true audio, TressFX (I had to look up some of the names of these forgettable features) have always been 2 title marketing tricks. There where 0 games with ray tracing when it launched. There are still only a few games where the better raytracing performance on nvidia cards actually matters. And there are already things like lumen coming, which are vendor agnostic (because luckily, that vendor locking bs mostly hasn‘t worked so far).
AI up- and downscalers are a feature imho. But I‘m also the kind of guy spending way too much time with madVR settings (often to the annoyance of my company).
Aapje
Golden Member
- Mar 21, 2022
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Yes, those supply chain problems that the companies blamed when they increased the prices a lot during the mining boom and that then suddenly didn't stop them from lowering the prices a ton once that demand dried up. Color me skeptical. There has also always been a large second hand market, but plenty of people only want new cards.
The problem with all of these explanations is that we can just tell they are nonsense because the prices are simply not consistent with any of these explanations, which should give a certain pattern. For example, I can get a 6600 for 270 euros, but a 6600 XT for 360 euros. Yet these should have pretty much the same BOM cost. Same chip, same memory. The entire card is the same except the binning. So common sense is that the 90 euro difference is not because the 6600 XT costs more to make, but is purely more profit. And quite excessive too. They could easily sell it for 300 euro or so.
The 3060 has 4 GB more of memory, which should cost less than 40 euros. The chip is a little bigger than the N32 chip, but should be cheaper per mm2, so it probably isn't more expensive. So common sense says that they could sell the 3060 for 270+40 = 310 euros and have no worse profit margin than AMD has for the 6600. Yet the cheapest is 383 euros. So either you have to believe that a company with more volume that could logically work more efficiently, is actually less efficient, or you can believe that the extra 73 euros are profit. I believe the latter.
Companies are not gods. Nvidia has already proven that they make mistakes like with the 4080 12 GB. I don't get all these fantasies that these companies are some godlike entities that never make misjudgements.
When it comes to RDNA 2, you have to assume that the retailer/AMD/AIB is losing money at current prices.
Aapje
Golden Member
- Mar 21, 2022
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LOL, no. We constantly see that businesses prefer to sit on stock, rather than make a loss. I'm definitely not just going to assume that they are making a loss.
We know that margins are much larger than the BOM cost and they have to be, to pay for the high R&D costs. So at most the prices will be too low to pay for the R&D and are not sustainable in the long term. However, for RDNA2, the R&D costs have been more than paid for during the mining boom.
But having high R&D costs has never stopped these companies from having fairly cheap cards. A ton of sales with relatively small margins still adds up to a lot of money.
We know that margins are much larger than the BOM cost and they have to be, to pay for the high R&D costs. So at most the prices will be too low to pay for the R&D and are not sustainable in the long term. However, for RDNA2, the R&D costs have been more than paid for during the mining boom.
But having high R&D costs has never stopped these companies from having fairly cheap cards. A ton of sales with relatively small margins still adds up to a lot of money.
Worked in the past of zero to low interest rates. The dummies expecting this to return soon and restart the free money ride will pay for their stupidity. I'm being very harsh in my words deliberately as to try and shock some change of thinking. Costly money aka, non zero interest rates, means that holding inventory is a cost. Many years of destructively low interest rates have changed the thinking of a generation that are now in managerial positions and seem to be clueless. We see losses mounting in many sectors. New lessons will have to be learnt.
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