Speculation and Rumors: Nvidia Blackwell ...

[DegustatoR]

But why? That's the bit I'm not getting. They can showcase games on the 5090, that no-one can afford. What's the downside to that for nVidia? Will they lose sales?

It's not that Nvidia would lose anything from that, it's more that game developers won't support a card which would sell in thousands (probably) over its lifetime - which means that Nvidia won't have anything to show really aside from 8K (pointless) and 200+ fps (also a bit pointless as you won't see these through YouTube).

Producing such expensive tier makes little sense if the next one lower to it isn't capable of running the same s/w at an acceptable performance.

 

[Seanspeed]

You can always reduce resolution or other options to gain performance. Path tracing with Cyberpunk 2077 is insanely demanding, but still usable on lower tier cards if you are willing to sacrifice resolution fairly heavily. Things dont need to run really well on lower tier parts to still be implemented. There's always the occasional developer who likes pushing super taxing graphics features in games even if there's not gonna be some big audience for it. I mean, I think we've all talked about the merits of games including 'Future' options that might only be more usable for people playing the game in the future with more powerful GPU's. There's not always some great immediate financial benefit to doing so, but sometimes devs just like to showcase their tech. There's still good publicity from it.

 

[trinibwoy]

Tim weighs in.

Interestingly he's framing it as "weakest 80 class" instead "strongest 90 class". Funny how people can look at the same situation and interpret it very differently.

 

[DegustatoR]

Interestingly he's framing it as "weakest 80 class"

680, 980, 1080, 2080 were all about similar to their respective previous gen higher tier parts. If we account for things like 590 and 690 (when they actually worked) then this seems like a far cry from "weakest 80 class" really.

But anyway, no one can say anything about how weak something is without knowing the retail price of that product. 5090 looks like a huge jump up from specs but I can easily see a situation in which it will in fact be the 5080 which will provide a much better price/perf improvement.