Who would have imagined 10 years ago, that a midrange card in 2022 would cost almost $1000. Nobody making a prediction like that would have been taken seriously. I keep thinking it can't get worse, but it keeps getting worse.
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If its faster than a 3080 its not really mid-range by any means, were looking at a strictly high-end lineup in that case. If its getting worse and worse, then chip prices will be so high in half a decade that it will be impossible to manufacture consoles bar ultra low end.
neckthrough
Regular
Chip costs are far less of a problem with consoles, phones etc., where the closed-ecosystem revenues can help subsidize some of the fixed hardware costs. Laptops don't have this ecosystem advantage but can still amortize the chip costs to some extent. Desktop dGPUs are challenging because the market is so damn horizontal. The chip is 90%+ of the cost, they are huge, and there is no ecosystem to subsidize the cost.
DegustatoR
Legend
"A midrange card" is a card which costs a midrange amount of money.
A card which costs $1000 is thus by a definition no "midrange".
It doesn't matter which chip this card is built upon.
It would/will effect the consoles and phones too, just to a smaller extend. Were basically already seeing that today.
It’s not uncommon for the midrange card of a new generation to be faster than the old high end. A 192bit card like the 4080 12GB is at the lower end of midrange.
That would mean 3060/3060Ti beating 2080Ti. Almost true i guess?
Well for Nvidia, a midrange amount of money is about $1,000 now
apparently we're all rich from crypto mining.4080 12Gb is what was midrange in all but price.
DegustatoR
Legend
Midrange is price.
The only way 4080 12GB will become a "midrange card" is if some other GPU maker would launch a similarly performing product at ~$500 forcing Nvidia to cut the price in about half.
What do you think the chances of that happening are?
neckthrough
Regular
I'm not saying it won't happen, but so far the console makers have transferred those costs into the software side.
Take a look at this excellent website that shows the inflation-adjusted price of each console: https://www.inflationstation.net/
For example, here are Sony's machines:
PS1: $562
PS2: $500
PS3: $713
PS4: $488
PS5: $547
Consoles have always been tough for chip vendors though. Margins are very thin.
Yeah, i mean from now on because 'we hit a brick wall/moores law'. Its now when we hit 4nm and all that. Chips are getting more and more expensive and thats going to lead to problems no matter what platform thats chasing performance like gaming machines and gpus. With those small margins, console vendors are going to have to increase prices or similar action. Were probably looking at longer lasting generations and alot of cross-gens going forwards.
Well for Nvidia, a midrange amount of money is about $1,000 now
4080 12Gb is what was midrange in all but price.
Midrange to me is still x60 between $250-$350. The 4080 12GB isn’t an x60 part. If it was called the 4070 priced at $500 it would still be high end not midrange.
DegustatoR
Legend
It kinda drifted up though as the low end is now "free" inside CPUs.
So $100-$300 is low end these days. $300-500 is midrange. Above that is high end.
I kind of agree, x70 part always seemed like the first high end part, likely due to Nvidias price creep (and now leap) since Turing.
I still think the performance tier is dictated by performance relative to the other cards of the same generation. If the price shifts up across all performance tiers, it doesn’t change which tier a particular card is in. Also, the previous generation has no bearing on the performance tiers of the new generation. For example the the GTX1060 was not a high end card even though it performed like a GTX970, and it would not have been a high end card even if it was priced like a GTX970.
Maybe mainstream is a better word than midrange. I look at it as what hardware does the average gamer need to run current games smoothly at common resolutions. That used to be 1080p 60fps but a more contemporary target is probably 4K upscaled 60fps.
Well I understand that. At 1080p/60Hz, for most games even RTX3050 is more than enough.
I think gamers are more concerned with higher refresh rates than going beyond 1440p. And I think gamers are far more likely to just get multiple 1080p monitors than anything 4K. Sadly Steam doesn't track refresh rates.
DavidGraham
Veteran
RTX 3060 now holds the number one spot in the Steam Survey (desktop + laptop variant).
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