I basically started this line of the thread.
This discourse is incredibly popular on the internet in general, peddled by techtubers for whom any Nvidia bashing essentially equals money for additional views.
It didn't make any sense back when it started. "AI will result in rising prices! We are doomed!!!" was a thing with them a year ago, nothing happened yet we're still discussing now how inevitable it is.
When I look at the gpu market where I live, the RTX 4080 is still about $1300 CAD, which is $300 more than I paid for my $3080 right as the crypto boom took off.
Does 4080 have the same performance as 3080? No? Then it's not a "price increase" by any measure.
Also a 1000 CAD something in 2020 is 1170 CAD in 2024 thanks to inflation alone. I don't know if Canada added import tariffs as US did but that can be another part of the retail price added between these years.
The whole blind comparison by name alone makes no sense whatsoever and shouldn't even be done at all.
Now we have an ai boom, and people that want to work on ai buy up the highest-end model gaming gpus.
I don't see these people have any effect on said GPUs pricing, do you? This is a relatively small market likely way smaller than the gaming one for that same GPU. 4090 is not production constrained, it is being produced exactly in quantities needed for the demand at hand. Why would this change with 50 series?
The crypto problem was that one person could be buying 1000s of GPUs and then they instantly printed money for them. AI dev/researchers won't be buying more than 1 per person and even then they will think twice on if they even need it - or it would be cheaper for their work/research to just rent a server with the same AI capabilities. AI on a 4090 does not print any money and I don't think that it ever will.
Nvidia never released a desktop 4050, or something really low-end. Maybe that'll change with 50 series.
Nvidia sells RTX GPUs starting with 3050 6GB at $170 now (everyone was laughing when that launched yet it's a great GPU for a HTPC-like config which doesn't really have any competition on the market). And IIRC there are cards being made for prices below that, GT1030 and such. The fact that they didn't release anything from 40 series specifically doesn't mean that they don't have any products for <$300 markets.
The trend seems to be that prices are staying high, Nvidia is less interested in the mid to budget market. They can build bigger and more expensive gpus and sell them to professionals and ai people. The trend looks like it's towards lower volume and higher margins. We'll see if that continues but if there's going to be any price competition and sanity, I think it's going to have to come from intel and amd offering super competitive low to mid-range gpus, because Nvidia doesn't look interested anymore.
The prices haven't really changed since the (re)introduction of SLI on GFFX. Tripple SLI configs were putting you at about the same $$1500-2000 price range where current top end GPUs are sitting. The only range which kinda became stale and is being filled with old chips is the lowest end one where iGPUs became enough for the business users. This segment is the most likely candidate for the loss of sales volume since ~2005 you can see on the graph above. It also was basically unprofitable for the GPU makers.