I'll be yelling at clouds while doing circles on the ground like Homer.
YES THIS IS WHAT I WILL COME BACK TO THE FORUMS FOR.
Regarding that 4070 price, I simply have to wonder at what point does demand start to wane? If miners aren't a factor this time, then seriously how many gamers are going to get excited and actually buy an $800 4070? I also expect them to come in high around that price, and they will sell, but in what numbers? I'm sure Nvidia will have all sorts of smart excuses like supply chain this, inflation that, blah blah. But if the card is just too expensive then how will their excuses put money in people's pockets? You're telling me a high school kid or someone just out of high school is going to pay $800 for a GPU to play COD? $800 used to be way high in the clouds kind of pricing, like super halo pricing. Now it's just basic mid range pricing because Nvidia has excuses? Help me understand because I can't. The price increase of GPUs has left inflation in the dust, it's not even close.
Honestly, I don't know. The cards themselves have gotten so big, so hungry, and have so much cutting edge stuff in them that I think they are just going to cost more.
How about this, I think that the actual performance increases that we all notice in games has gotten harder in a non-linear fashion to obtain. We are pushing for 120+fps 4k? Seriously? With RTX, naturally. And oh yeah, with a huge gob of silicon to make up for the fact that doing that straight away is a bit of pipe dream but obviously costs us something because that's not free.
I think the hypothetical teenager in your scenario is actually really happy with their 1080p 24' monitor and 3050 $250 card because they are playing to be
with their friends.
It's us older set that's got too much money and no time to actually play games mucking it all up. (IMO) All the builds I have done for teens (and pre-teens) in this mess have used sub $200 gpus. At one point that was a 1070 FE (woo!) all the way down to $45 maxwell based quadros. So many GTX 970s, 980tis, 1060 3gb, GTX950 and even older radeons (290's represent!) right through the pandemic. All work fine (some worse, some better) at 1080p. These kids are the most likely to benefit from a used card tsunami, imo.
Getting back to the issue of whether or not our dumb demographic of working gamers is going to scoop up
any next gen cards at what AMD and clearly nvidia hope are the new MSRPs are great questions. Everyone talked up (so so so much, it was mind boggling) Cyberpunk for the RTX3xxx launch. Is there anything like that at all right now?
So maybe the real next battlefield isn't really the 4070 at all, but rather the 3060 12GB and 6600 replacements, where the sales volume is likely to be ($300+inflation nonsense) and this top end stuff is just low volume, high margin fluff that nvidia and AMD finally had the excuse to go find. Both were probably nervous of the $1K MSRP before, but noooooo way are they now.
My too long $.02.
And here, for random speculation - when we get into this next gen nvidia rollout, what if it looks like this:
3060 - $350, 3080 12GB - $600, 4070 - $800, 4080 - $1200, 4090 - $2000
Of course all those miner 8GB cards are so 2020 trash! (this is in reference to my earlier point).
All numbers are butt pulls, of course, but why not? Especially if the supply of the new shiny is thin and they yields on samsung are finally really dialed in. They gotta extract maximum value from us. That's their duty to their shareholders (roll eye emoji here).
I'll be yelling at clouds while doing circles on the ground like Homer.
Again, I look forward to this because I am hoping that you are laugh/crying along with the rest of us.
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