- Nov 20, 2005
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If feels like the demand for GPUs, and therefore their price, is more varied than any time I can remember. In the past there used to be MSRP tiers you could almost live by (+$10-20 for better cooling or maybe a mail in rebate) but today we now get pricing that changes greatly over the life of card.
This is reflected on the Nvidia side through a blatant early adopter tax on the first run of cards via the Founder's Edition, and the fact that AIBs are sticking closer to the FE price than the MSRP price. It almost feels like the MSRP will be the average price for the cards over their life, as in some value that you might hit six months after release and you might do better than in a year after rebate.
But it isn't just Nvidia, AMD did a similiar thing. It put out a $200 price on its "4GB card" that might as well be the MSRP on the 1080 given the very low availability of the 4GB card. I got one, but reviews of the 480 acted like they would be as common as a GTX 960 is today when in reality most 4GB models sold will be some AIB model that is really $220 bucks. Once again the $199 price is probably something we will see again in six months around Black Friday when one of the AIB models goes for $199 after rebate but until then most people will be buying more expensive 480s. Therefore the 8GB model that sells for $250 on Newegg has a similar early adopter tax on its price that a Founder Edition 1080 has.
Point being, the competition to get a new GPU is very intense almost to the level of when new consoles are released and because of that the price of new GPUs seems to be this floating value that gradually drops over time instead of being a solid MSRP drop like in the past. I remember back in the day people got excited about GPUs but they also got excited about fast RAM or new CPUs. Nowadays it feels most of the pent up demand for gaming hardware is felt on the GPU side, and we don't get the huge leaps in value we used to get.
Instead of going from a $300 970 to a $200 480, we instead went from a $300 970 (even cheaper in a current clearance sales) to a $250 480 which is half the leap in value. The high end is a little better as the $650 980 ti basically was replaced by the $450 FE 1070, but considering the fact that the "MSRP" of the 1070 is $380 we saw a 31% decrease in relative cost instead of the full 42% that the 1070 MSRP price would have given us.
Is CPU stagnation the reason for a really intense GPU marketplace? Or are there yield problems this generation we have never seen before? Or were GPUs prices always variable like this and I never noticed?
This is reflected on the Nvidia side through a blatant early adopter tax on the first run of cards via the Founder's Edition, and the fact that AIBs are sticking closer to the FE price than the MSRP price. It almost feels like the MSRP will be the average price for the cards over their life, as in some value that you might hit six months after release and you might do better than in a year after rebate.
But it isn't just Nvidia, AMD did a similiar thing. It put out a $200 price on its "4GB card" that might as well be the MSRP on the 1080 given the very low availability of the 4GB card. I got one, but reviews of the 480 acted like they would be as common as a GTX 960 is today when in reality most 4GB models sold will be some AIB model that is really $220 bucks. Once again the $199 price is probably something we will see again in six months around Black Friday when one of the AIB models goes for $199 after rebate but until then most people will be buying more expensive 480s. Therefore the 8GB model that sells for $250 on Newegg has a similar early adopter tax on its price that a Founder Edition 1080 has.
Point being, the competition to get a new GPU is very intense almost to the level of when new consoles are released and because of that the price of new GPUs seems to be this floating value that gradually drops over time instead of being a solid MSRP drop like in the past. I remember back in the day people got excited about GPUs but they also got excited about fast RAM or new CPUs. Nowadays it feels most of the pent up demand for gaming hardware is felt on the GPU side, and we don't get the huge leaps in value we used to get.
Instead of going from a $300 970 to a $200 480, we instead went from a $300 970 (even cheaper in a current clearance sales) to a $250 480 which is half the leap in value. The high end is a little better as the $650 980 ti basically was replaced by the $450 FE 1070, but considering the fact that the "MSRP" of the 1070 is $380 we saw a 31% decrease in relative cost instead of the full 42% that the 1070 MSRP price would have given us.
Is CPU stagnation the reason for a really intense GPU marketplace? Or are there yield problems this generation we have never seen before? Or were GPUs prices always variable like this and I never noticed?