Bruh
nm and mm matters to interested followers of tech, and to Nvidia/TSMC/GF etc. I guarantee most everyone just looking for a gaming card doesn't know, and it doesn't matter to them.
How can we be spoiled if we get the same basic $/performance going over two solid years?
I am actually kind of hopeful for RTX2, because if you think about it, if tensor cores weren't taking up so much die space, this would have been a pretty huge upgrade in performance even just 14nm to 12nm with the other architecture tweaks. I'm definitely not saying Nvidia didn't put in work here, and we can't discount that maybe RTX features will eventually pay off.
But taking it back to 2016. Say someone bought a 1070 AIB for $379. About the price we'll probably see for retail 2060. And, about the same performance. A bit better sure, but hardly worth someone spending the money to go 1070 to 2060.
Now think about the previous gens. It made sense to go 970 to 1070. It made sense for someone to go 760 to 960. It made sense for someone to go 980 to 1080. Etc. More importantly, if you had $200, $300, $400 to spend, that money would get you MORE performance than it did a year or two before. You feel me? It extra hurts when you know new consoles are coming next year with a lot more available ram for textures and push for 4k. Going from an 8gb card in the segment to a 6gb card is tough bro.
A lot of this is elements beyond Nvidias control like the outsourced foundries having trouble with die shrinks. The mining craze causing a bunch of weird juju with inventory and stock prices and production commitments. And I actually applaud them for actually pushing new tech, even if I personally lean towards this kind of feeling like a 'beta' of the thing considering the ruthless performance penalty it's shown so far (I reserve the hope that maybe future titles will come out far better with implementation and efficiency).
But come on. AMD has let us down with serious stagnation, and then a fairly poor $/perf RX7 or whatever. And RTX is a situation where literally two+ years went by for next to zero movement on performance per dollar. That's crazy. I'm not kidding. At 10xx launch, whatever you had for that lineup, $250, $400, $600, etc, the same money today doesn't buy you any more performance in any real way unless you go so far as to reach the 2080ti. To be fair, the 1080ti took a while to hit, but an 11GB 1080ti AIB like a Strict or Aorus is still better the majority of the time vs the 2080FE.
It's less than ideal. I do think RTX2 and forward should get back on track however.
And what's with the 2050? There's a massive hole in the lineup under the 2060 in both price and performance unless they have such an inventory of 1050/60/etc that they can sit on it for the gen.