nVidia restricts 3080 12GB reviews

[BFG10K]

Basically nVidia don't want reviews until people buy the cards, after the fact.

I'm not surprised to be honest. The cards are basically going straight to crypto, and My-Nahs don't care about reviews.

Just as well they weren't allowed to buy Arm.

 

[Shivansps]

That really is impressive for a 30W card. But hadn't really thought about that, was more after the media engine. And the "low" asking price. From the specs it should be somewhere around 1030 performance, just with a newer architecture and more bandwidth due to GDDR6.

It outperforms the Intel DG1 as well. Just not enoght to call it an upgrade.

 

[beginner99]

Would I start looking at $450/$500 cards now since they would still offer a performance boost?

Are the current $500 cards really faster than a 980TI? Maybe but not by that much,

 

[Stuka87]

Are the current $500 cards really faster than a 980TI? Maybe but not by that much,

Depends if you are talking MSRP or street price. MSRP, $500 is the 3070 FE, which is WAY faster than a 980Ti. Like, not even comparable.

If you are talking street prices, thats more like an RTX 3060. Which is again, much faster than a 980Ti, as a 3060 is similar to a 1080Ti.

 

[moonbogg]

If I had mind control abilities, I'd prevent every gamer on earth from buying an Nvidia GPU for the next three years. You know, so they can experience their own GPU drought. Also for the lolz.

 

[Mopetar]

If I had mind control abilities, I'd prevent every gamer on earth from buying an Nvidia GPU for the next three years. You know, so they can experience their own GPU drought. Also for the lolz.

We now know that Moonbogg is a mad evil supervillain. Most men would be busy using their mind control powers to hook up with models, but he's running around terrorizing gamers to even give it any thought.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Most men would be busy using their mind control powers to hook up with models,

If you ever wanted to know what it was (sort of) like to be Scott Baio.

btw the 3080 12GB must be a pretty unimpressive part if we've gotten this badly sidetracked.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

btw the 3080 12GB must be a pretty unimpressive part if we've gotten this badly sidetracked.

3080MG (Money Grabbing) 12GB...?

 

[Golgatha]

3080MG (Money Grabbing) 12GB...?

3080 BFG (because redacted gamers) 12GB?



No profanity in the tech forums.


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

 

[ultimatebob]

If I had mind control abilities, I'd prevent every gamer on earth from buying an Nvidia GPU for the next three years. You know, so they can experience their own GPU drought. Also for the lolz.

Can we somehow mind block the miners from getting them as well?

That would be awesome... suddenly all the scalpers trying to sell these cards for 2X MSRP would be hung out to dry because NOBODY would want them, and Newegg would have to find a new product to price gouge customers on.

 

[moonbogg]

Can we somehow mind block the miners from getting them as well?

That would be awesome... suddenly all the scalpers trying to sell these cards for 2X MSRP would be hung out to dry because NOBODY would want them, and Newegg would have to find a new product to price gouge customers on.

I'm actually working on this now...

 

[beginner99]

That would be awesome... suddenly all the scalpers trying to sell these cards for 2X MSRP would be hung out to dry because NOBODY would want them, and Newegg would have to find a new product to price gouge customers on.

Once Ethereum has switched I doubt it will be profitable to GPU mine and other crypto. All the modern ones use some form of PoS or in case of bitcoin ASICs. Still prices will remain high as once they start dropping people waiting the last 2 years for sane prices all will buy up the inventory quickly. I predict this will permanently move the top pf the line to >$1500, the same chip with some limitations to $1000 and "midrange" to $800. (6700 xt here is $1000 so that would be cheaper than now but still very high priced)

 

[CP5670]

btw the 3080 12GB must be a pretty unimpressive part if we've gotten this badly sidetracked.

They have like 4 cards now that are all within 10% of each other, both performance and MSRP wise. Hard to get interested in it. I want to hear more about Lovelace at this point.

 

[dlerious]

This does answer my previous question about why NVidia didn't announce this at all during their presentation at CES.

Compared to a 3080 this won't perform significantly better. Unless you're mining ETH. Then you're going to get a nice bump from the added memory bandwidth.

I think they were unhappy about the price of the original 3080 and wanted more profits. It'll be interesting to see if they still sell the original or transition to the 12GB only.

 

[Saylick]

I think they were unhappy about the price of the original 3080 and wanted more profits. It'll be interesting to see if they still sell the original or transition to the 12GB only.

It was possible for Nvidia to be price aggressive in the first place because Samsung gave them a better price than TSMC, but now that everything semiconductor is in high demand, Nvidia found no reason to continue to be price aggressive. I suspect that they will offer the original but at much lower quantities. If everything they make sells, why continue to offer the 10GB version outside of token amounts just to claim that it is still sold?

 

[dlerious]

It was possible for Nvidia to be price aggressive in the first place because Samsung gave them a better price than TSMC, but now that everything semiconductor is in high demand, Nvidia found no reason to continue to be price aggressive. I suspect that they will offer the original but at much lower quantities. If everything they make sells, why continue to offer the 10GB version outside of token amounts just to claim that it is still sold?

That's possible. I'm just unhappy about current conditions and miss the days when $300-$400 would get you a really good mid-tier card and anything over $1000 was a halo product.

 

[Saylick]

That's possible. I'm just unhappy about current conditions and miss the days when $300-$400 would get you a really good mid-tier card and anything over $1000 was a halo product.

You're preaching to the choir. I, too, hate what the graphics card market has become. I'm not much of a PC gamer these days (*hugs PS5*) but my brother is. I wanted to get him some parts but I refuse to pay scalper prices.

 

[beginner99]

That's possible. I'm just unhappy about current conditions and miss the days when $300-$400 would get you a really good mid-tier card and anything over $1000 was a halo product.

it's hilarious in same way that there were discussions here about 5 years ago how GPU prices would get higher and higher because iGPUs would take over and lower demand so making dGPUs would become less and less profitable and hence higher and higher prices.

Well, the were right with the prices...but completely wrong with the cause.

 

[aigomorla]

anything over $1000 was a halo product.

they need to somehow break that 3 digit mark for high end gpu segment since they killed off SLI.
😱

I really miss building systems with SLI... they looked really sharp and eye candy like when you had 2 large massive gpu's slung on a board.
But then we got intel and AMD both going really cheap with PCI-E lanes on consumer boards, and HEDT segment sometimes is too expensive for what you get, hence why its called HEDT.

 

[Shmee]

I remember 290 crossfire was some great bang for buck back in the day.

 

[Mopetar]

SLI and Crossfire largely died off because single cards became capable of delivering the level of performance that those technologies were previously used to obtain.

60 FPS as a minimum for gaming is a somewhat recent phenomenon and if you look back at the times where SLI/Crossfire were used it was often impossible to hit 60 FPS in modern titles at prevailing resolutions with only a single card, even if it was the top of the line from either Nvidia or ATI/AMD.

The extra hassle of developing for those technologies stopped being worthwhile as the performance for even midrange cards became capable of delivering 60 FPS at resolutions like 1440p.

Take a look at the 4K results for the 6700 XT from TPU where the card has a 69 FPS average across all games. It's certainly not a 4K gaming card, but it does admirably well considering there are only 6 games where it's far enough below 60 FPS to generally be considered unacceptable.

Source:https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-radeon-rx-6700-xt/28.html

Unless you're a technophile or a competitive player, you can get more than acceptable performance for many games even at extreme resolutions with even midrange cards. Dropping down to 1440p sees that 6700 XT pull ~120 FPS on average and above 60 FPS in all but one game. SLI and Crossfire just aren't necessary when we can get this kind of performance.

 

[CP5670]

they need to somehow break that 3 digit mark for high end gpu segment since they killed off SLI.
😱

I really miss building systems with SLI... they looked really sharp and eye candy like when you had 2 large massive gpu's slung on a board.

They looked great in your case, but gaming with them was another matter. They only worked properly with a few AAA games of the time, and 90% of other games had either microstuttering or no perceptible performance increase. I ditched SLI when I found I was spending more time getting it to work right than gaming with it.

 

[beginner99]

SLI and Crossfire largely died off because single cards became capable of delivering the level of performance that those technologies were previously used to obtain.

Isn't that mostly due to stagnation of resolution? 1080p is still the most common display type and has been around for over a decade and with increasing GPU prices it is here to stay for probably another decade. And it makes sense. what is the point of 4k in something as small as 27 or 30? You just end up using OS scaling so the fonts and icons aren't too tiny while you now need $2000 worth of GPU on top.

SLI/CF was always ultra niche high end. I think it is more the low level apis that killed it because that made it too hard to maintain or to limited to only some games. We would still greatly profit from multi-gpu. 1440p 144fps is more taxing than 4k60 not to speak of 4k144.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Isn't that mostly due to stagnation of resolution? 1080p is still the most common display type and has been around for over a decade and with increasing GPU prices it is here to stay for probably another decade. And it makes sense. what is the point of 4k in something as small as 27 or 30? You just end up using OS scaling so the fonts and icons aren't too tiny while you now need $2000 worth of GPU on top.

I actually prefer 1440p on 27-30" monitors. There is just -something- about 1080p/2160p that gets me, and I really like the additional vertical space of 1440p. 1080p works fine on 22-24", while 2160p works if you go above 32". I've tried one of those Philips 43" monitors with 2160p, and rather like it. Too big for my desk unfortunately.

 

[Mopetar]

Isn't that mostly due to stagnation of resolution? 1080p is still the most common display type and has been around for over a decade and with increasing GPU prices it is here to stay for probably another decade.

To some degree you can adjust for resolution since even back when SLI/Crossfire were popular, we still had a similar situation to today. However instead of 1080p, 1440p, and 4K being the primary resolutions you would see a shift where 1080p (or the 16:10 equivalent since that was more common) was the middle resolution.

Here's some of the benchmark results from the AT review of the 4870 which shows why SLI was necessary. Even at the middle resolution of 1920 x 1200 the top cards struggled to hit would be considered a minimum acceptable frame rate today.

That's just for games like Oblivion which weren't the most demanding titles. If you look at the results they have for Crysis then 1920x1200 is the top resolution that's benchmarked.

We don't have a situation where a top-end card like a 3080 or a 6800 XT needs SLI/Crossfire because it can't even manage to hit 60 FPS in a resolution like 1440p in many titles. There aren't even a lot of games where this is true in 4K. There are even a few games that these cards will run well enough that most people are unlikely to have a monitor capable of displaying all of the frame since the refresh rate isn't high enough or would often require a monitor that's even more expensive than that top-end GPU.

And there were even cases where SLI/Crossfire still wasn't good enough. Some games were just that demanding. Here's results from a different AT review showing off Metro 2033 results in 1920x1200 where outside of the most powerful GPUs, it's just not possible to hit 60 FPS even when using an SLI or Crossfire setup. Move up to 2560x1600 and even a pair of 580s in SLI are only going to get 35.5 FPS. Those cards retailed for $500 when they came out, which is about $650 today when adjusting for inflation.

So in a decade we've gone from where the effective maximum resolution for many games, even when running SLI/Crossfire, has become the lowest resolution and there's a top-end resolution (4K) is effectively 4x the pixels as that. The MSRP for a 3080 wasn't too far off of what a 580 would cost in today's dollars and that single card delivers more than acceptable performance in that high-end resolution.

 

[Aikouka]

That's possible. I'm just unhappy about current conditions and miss the days when $300-$400 would get you a really good mid-tier card and anything over $1000 was a halo product.

I wonder how much of our issues also come down to how graphics cards are moving further away from simply being strictly about 3D graphics. For example, when we buy an RTX card today, we're not just paying for CUDA cores, but also the RT cores and Tensor (AI/NN) cores. It's really hard to break down just how much all that extra functionality costs us as there's R&D that gets amortized across cards. You can also add in how Nvidia has heavily pushed extra features (that cost them money) such as GeForce Experience, RTX Voice, etc.

This is really just my opinion, but I think the most useful thing we've seen so far out of all of that extra fluff is DLSS. Ray tracing is nice... if you enjoy taking screenshots.

I actually prefer 1440p on 27-30" monitors. There is just -something- about 1080p/2160p that gets me, and I really like the additional vertical space of 1440p. 1080p works fine on 22-24", while 2160p works if you go above 32". I've tried one of those Philips 43" monitors with 2160p, and rather like it. Too big for my desk unfortunately.

I feel the same way in regard to monitor size. I've grown so accustomed to it that when I encounter something like a 4K 27" monitor, it really throws me off. That's especially since I've used plenty of 30"+ 4K monitors and 27" 1440p monitors, so I've really got those sizes ingrained in my mind.