I'm running a 1080Ti I picked up used in early 2020 and threw on a kraken g12 with an AIO, it dropped temps down to a max of 61c and increased FPS on most games by 30%.
It's been a while since I've updated my GPU (I have an RTX 2060 XC Black), so I'm out of the loop: what's the gpu market like now? I'm assuming we're seeing less fewer GPUs being purchased for crypto. Are prices normal now?
MSRPs for a given market segment seem to have permanently increased significantly. This generation is expected to be available at this higher MSRP, however.
No, the prices are still pretty high (although not insane anymore). They're probably not going down.
On the other hand, these GPUs are very very good for gaming - with DLSS, most of modern games will run at high details at 4K and look like something that scifi shows dreamed of just 10 years back.
With Ethereum's transition to PoS and the crypto crash, the only demand bottlenecks I can foresee are scalpers and hungry gamers. Indeed, we may see a repeat of what happened with the PS5, when finding a product from a store was impossible because scalpers had bought them all.
Could be. Here in Italy is still hard to buy a PS5. I was smart enough to pre-order mine and score other 2 consoles (for friends, not scalping), but after 2 years that's ridiculous. They're not even on display in shops.
But then they'll also create a 4070 here. And then a 4070 ti, and 4080 ti, and then.... But that's another complaint. The 4080 is a different problem entirely - not enough names. Somehow they have too many names but also not enough so they can only differentiate via GB.
Their Performance section shows that the 12GB is 50%-150% faster than the 3080 Ti (so better than 3090 Ti!), and it also has more cuda cores and memory than the 3070.
Yea but that's how new tech works. If the price of every new generation of hardware scaled linearily with the increase in performance we'd be needing mortgages for a new PC/GPU.
I think typically the XX70 has been in line with the xx90 TI of the last generation, so this is in fact a better improvement over that. It's still dumb though to have two xx80's.
That's how new tech worked in the Moore's Law era. Times are changing and you're observing the evidence of that.
And yes moore's law notionally died a long time ago, but it's been able to be hidden in various ways... and things are getting past the point where it can be hidden anymore.
Node costs are way way up these days, TSMC is expensive as hell and everyone else is at least 1 node behind. Samsung 5nm is worse than TSMC N7 for instance, and TSMC N7 is 5+ years old at this point.
Samsung 8nm (a 10+ node) used for Ampere was cheap as hell, that's why they did it, same for Turing, 12FFN is a rebranded 16nm non-plus with a larger reticle. People booed the low-cost offering and wanted something on a competitive, performant, efficient node... and now NVIDIA hopped to a very advanced customized N5P node (4N - not to be confused with TSMC N4, it is not N4, it is N5P with a small additional optical shrink etc) and people are back to whining about the cost. If they keep cost and power down by making the die size smaller... people whine they're stonewalling progress / selling small chips at big chip prices.
Finally we get a big chip on a competitive node, this is much closer to the edge of what the tech can deliver, and... people whine about the TDP and the cost.
Sadly, you don't get the competitive node, giant chip, and low prices all at the same time, that's not how the world works. Pick any two.
AMD is making some progress at shuffling the memory controller off to separate dies, which helps, but generally they're probably going to be fairly expensive too... they're launching the top of the stack first which is a similar Turing-style "capture the whales while the inventory of last-gen cards and miner inventory sells through" strategy. That likely implies decently high prices too.
There's nothing that can really be done about TDP either - thermal density is creeping up on these newer nodes too, and when you make a big chip at reasonable clocks the power gets high these days. AMD is expected to come in at >400W TBP on their products too.
Seems they don't want to eat up market share of their "professional" cards with the consumer cards. Want above 24GB? Better put up money for the data center cards.
Guess A6000 is in the middle of those two options, comes with 48GB of memory. Not so cheap if you're just using it for gaming, but if you're using your GPU for professional work, could be worth the price.
Does VRChat count as a game? In a very populated instance with 50+ people it can take up to about 20gb of vram.
Honestly everything VR takes up huge amounts of vram, it's not possible to run No Man's Sky at max settings with only 8gb vram, and you still might need to dial down some settings with 12gb vram.
This is with a Quest 2, I'm guessing headsets with higher resolution will be even more demanding.
> €5500 compared to €1200 for just double the memory at the price of less performance is not really worth it in my opinion.
It's not just double the memory, is faster memory as well. Although, less CUDA cores and also doesn't include latest NVENC encoder/decoder, nor AV1 encoder, so... Tradeoffs I guess :) For some people it will be worth it, for others no.
Well, yeah, broski. GPUs are just highly optimized matrix multipliers, so they're for any computation involving matrix multiplication...such computations arise in computer graphics, crypto mining, and machine learning (aka AI shit). And yes, memory size is important for some applications. Is that okay?
this simplification to “everything needs matrix multiply and GPUs are matrix multipliers” doesn’t really match the actual architecture.
the hardware for low-precision matrix multiplications in ML is mostly independent of the hardware that’s typically utilized for vertex and fragment shaders in computer graphics. It really only gets used for graphics if using DLSS. It’s not used at all for (integer) computations in cryptomining.
Are they for high-precision scientific simulations because it’s possible to multiply matrices on them? These cards are probably quite shit at double-precision matrix multiplications.
Today is a gaming product announcement and I'm not sure that games have a need even beyond 12 GB today. I suspect that the 4090 price not budging much is telling as far as what ram amount demand has been focused on for games.
I assume they will soon have a professional card announcement that includes 48GB+ cards. Assuming that the high ram cards have improvements similar to this generational leap in the gaming market, they will be in high demand.
Sure, but you dont buy a high end GPU and then buy the best one next generation... I mean some do sure but a high end GPU like this you keep for a few years...
I believe part of the problem is they went with 24 GB gaming cards a couple years ago and the need for that didn't materialize. Hence, cold feet for launching with 48 GB because there still isn't a need for more than 12 GB and 48 GB impinges on their high margin professional market.
Is it though? I guess it is for machine learning. But do games require that much memory? Remember that GeForce is the consumer line. I would expect it to mainly target the gamer market.
Realistically speaking, the 3090 targets enthusiasts and hobbyist ML work. There’s not much need for a card of that size for gaming, but there’s definitely room for a card that can do ML and gaming.
At least in the games I play usually texture detail and screen resolution are two independent settings (and if you play windowed it can be any arbitrary resolution), I am mostly a PC gamer though, not sure what console games do.
You can absolutely get away with 12gb, 10gb, even 8gb vram and play 4k high refresh rate.
But also doesn't account for poor programming. I remember a reddit post about God of War using 15gb of vram after a while of playing, probably a memory leak.
Having available vram just gives yourself headroom for newer games with higher quality textures, there was a game which name eludes me which shipped with 8k resolution textures for 4k gaming so it used like 10gb of vram? Or something along those lines.
But it can also be used for pre-caching stuff, like if you were playing WoW and the next zone was already precached so you don't need to load it from the disk.
I think that new tech Sony and MS were working on, direct storage access? Will play a bigger and better role than higher vram.
I only game at 1440p so I don't care for more than 8gb of vram.
I do much more inference than training, but a bit of both.
Speed is generally not a serious issue:
- I'm not trying to scale to millions of users on inference; it's a dev machine
- Training is a bit of fine-tuning; I'm not building big models from scratch.
- Worst-case speed has gone into "annoying" territory, but never into prohibitive. Worst case, I can grab a coffee while things run.
- It's not a lot of coffee, since I'm trying to visualize some interesting things about some data. The majority of that is data cleaning, visualization, data engineering, UI/UX, meetings, and a million other things. My GPU is sitting idle >>95% of the time.
I am constrained by RAM. In the era of GPT2 -> GPT3, Stable Diffusion, etc., RAM becomes a major bottleneck. There are cloud workflows, but they aren't a great fit, both due to data security / regulatory issues, to how we plan to do dev ops / deployment, as well as just to time for integration.
Dropping $8k on 4x 24GB GPUs would be a no-brainer if it let me work with bigger models.
I'm sure people can describe Better Ways to Do Things, but changing workflows, system architecture, etc. to those workflows would be obviously out-of-scope for what I'm trying to do. At that point, I'm better off working with smaller models. They're good enough.
The 30xx cards needs a wide bus to feed it, but with the L2 cache on the GPU, you can get away with a smaller bus width (and faster memory on top, things shifted in the last couple of years and DDR6(X) memory is even faster now than it was).
Some of this also has to do with what kind of memory configurations you want to offer, as they are tied to the bus width. So if you widen the bus, you are looking at using more memory chips and having more memory. This pushes the price point upward, and you want it to tier somewhere in the middle of it all.
One "mistake" on the 30xx (Ampere) series were that the 3080 was much too powerful for its price point, and you couldn't really cram too much more power out above it due to its memory config. With this change, you can introduce a 4080Ti in between the 4080 16Gb and the 4090 as a mid-seasonal upgrade, and widen the bus a bit to satisfy it.
This looks like a smaller bump than Ampere. 3090 seems cheaper and better than 4080. As people have pointed out, what I'd really like is more / upgradeable RAM. NVidia is trying to not compete with their higher-end cards, but ML tools are increasingly consumer.
If it’s not visually distinguishable, it won’t matter. I hear recent versions of DLSS are very good at 4k despite earlier versions having some bad artifacts. I guess we’ll have to wait for the reviews :)
I guess it depends on your definition if distinguishable, but as someone who has dabbled with most ML frame interpolation techniques, this appears just as artifact ridden.
https://i.imgur.com/9U9HIpH.jpeg
Because that's the way they have named their architectures since... For as long as I can remember. Previous generations include: Ampere, Volta, Turing, Kepler, Fermi and more.
To be pedantic, it was units of temperature at first, with a well-chosen segue of Curie to the superset of other names.
This does mark a departure from a convention of only single surnames, and one could surmise as to why that decision was made. Though one might also consult a Falsehoods list, since 'Ada Lovelace' was never $first_name $last_name to begin with, having been derived from something like /(Augusta Ada|Ada Augusta) King \(née Byron\), Countess of Lovelace/
> Until the mid-1990s, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel internally named its processors after cartoons, dead musicians and other well-known monikers. Attorneys for the late rocker Frank Zappa helped put an end to that practice after reaching out to the company about a potential trademark violation, said Intel spokesman Bill Calder. The legal team for the world’s largest computer-chip maker subsequently ordered that any new product code names be based on “existing, non-trademarked places in North America that can be found on a map,” Calder said.
> After struggling to find a suitable or available name in Oregon, where much of the chip design team is based, he stumbled upon Haswell in his ZIP code database.
> “I didn’t know anything about Haswell other than that it’s a good name,” Hampsten said. “Another reason I liked it, it had a suffix — well — which I could use for various other names.”
Compared to the 3090, the 4090 has about 60% more CUDA cores (16k vs 10k), runs at ~2.2GHz (up from 1.4GHz) and eats about an extra 100W of power.
Over the last couple weeks, it's been possible to get 3090's on sale for juuuust under $1k (I picked one up after watching the prices come down from like $3k over the last couple years). The 4090 is priced at $1500... (and for me at least would require a new power supply.)
RTX 3090 was $1500 at launch, and was a 50% boost over the previous gen at best.
RTX 4090 is $1700 an is asserted to be ~1.9x performance, when taken with salt grain.
You can buy a 3090 for $999 today at Best Buy. That's not a bad price per frame.
$1700 for the 4090, if 1.9x speed for raster, is not a bad price per frame either.
Both are stupid. Anyone spending $2k for video games graphics cards is wasting money in a stupid way: they are big, hot, shipped from far away, and turn into toxic landfill garbage in a matter of years. They mark the worst form of destructive consumerism that late-stage capitalism has produced, on par with leasing a new vehicle every 2 years: both are bad as products that turn into needless waste and both consume energy and produce unnecessary heat.
I am definitely going to buy a 4090 on October 12.
I mean it’s getting there. Add this to a best in class desktop processor at 300W and add in all the other power consumption and you are close to the wattage of a hot plate, kettle or small space heater.
What the hell Nvidia. Post EVGA breakup, this is a bad look. Seems like they're setting MSRP ridiculously high in order to undercut board partners down the line.
Not with even 50% of the FLOPS. The 4090 won't be the best perf/$, but considering how much perf/$ and perf/watt you can get these days, I think it's pretty hard to complain that these are available. If you don't play games, get a Ryzen 5 7600X for $300 with an iGPU more than capable of high-quality desktop computing.
You can also get a brand new laptop for $130 right now https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-14-0-laptop-intel-celeron-... , which is $57.37 in 1990 dollars. (according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ ). The high-end is more expensive than ever, and the low-end is cheaper than ever. The Apple Lisa was $10k in 1983, which is about $30k today. You can get a Boxx Apex with multiple $10k Quadro GV100 GPUs and 8TB SSDs for that money today, or roughly a dozen high-end (but not TOTL) gaming PCs.
They are probably working towards cleaning out the 30 series stock given that crypto demand is dying off. It takes a lot to put 3060 prices on a marketing slide for 40 series.
That sort of make sense... I was thinking of upgrading when the 40 series came out, but looking at these prices, it makes the 30 series look a lot more affordable for what I need, even if it's less performant.
Especially when they've been have lower than expected revenue because of the crypto crash. You'd think that they would drop the price a bit to entice the people who've been waiting for GPU prices to drop to buy the new version.
A Series X will not render very many AAA games at 4k/120fps (if any at all). And it definitely won't do at Ultra level settings.
PC gaming at the high end has always been about spending a lot of money to get the best graphics possible. Consoles always have much better bang for the buck early in a new console generation.
The 4K 144hz you get on the Xbox Series X is almost certainly lower graphics settings than you could run at 4K 144hz on the RTX 4080. I don't think the difference is enough to justify the price difference but comparing resolution and framerates isn't apples to apples.
And you'll still be playing the same game. If you want to spend almost a thousand dollars so your game renders more eyelashes that's your choice. My point is that NVidia's pricing is making PC gaming inaccessible to people who don't have wads of disposable cash to spend on diminishing returns. I would strongly recommend anybody who's looking into getting into current gen gaming to steer clear of playing on PC as the pricing of PC components is completely out of control and console pricing is looking increasingly more reasonable.
How is it making PC gaming inaccessible? You don't need top of the line hardware to play even the most recent PC games. You need top of the line hardware for "more eyelashes", but that's very much a choice (that you get with PCs but not with consoles).
4K 120hz is merely the limit of the HDMI standard used on the Series X. It is not a hard requirement needed to publish on the platform. This would be akin to claiming that the PS3 was a 1080p 60Hz console, when the vast majority of the library managed closer to 720p 30hz.
While developers are free to make 4K 120hz their target, few games attempt it, and the ones that do, often make significant graphical compromises or are graphically undemanding to begin with.
24GB is enough for some serious AI work. 48GB would be better, of course. But high end GPUs are still used for other things than gaming, from ML/AI stuff to creative work like video editing, animation renders and more.
I completely agree. In the past I dropped a ton of money on gaming rig hardware that aged like milk. With a console you get the advantage of exclusives, majority of PC game releases, and a longer upgrade cycle versus a gaming rig. If you own a PS5, you got the PS VR2 coming out soon at a decent price point. If you own an Xbox, add in the amazing value of the Xbox Games Pass and I just don't see the need to be subsidising Hardware Manufacturers' bottom lines anymore.
I have a desktop PC that I sometimes use for gaming, everything from demanding simulators (like Flight Simulator and X-Plane) to grand strategy games and other more mainstream games. Last GPU I bought was a 2080ti that still is my GPU, and I bought that something like 3 years ago. I can still game mainstream games on very high settings without issues. So not sure why your setup aged like milk but mine didn't...
On my home machine, I'm running SLI'd GTX480's. They still do 99.9% of the gaming I want to do. I have only found ray tracing (which I don't like anyway) and for some reason water reflections to cause problems. But I can still run most games on high or better settings.
I don't know why OP's setup would age like milk. As long as you keep them clean, games haven't really advanced that much in the last few years, in terms of graphics requirements.
Also, if anyone has advice on building a new machine, I'm listening. I've been out of the game so long that I don't even know where to start, and have children that want towers built.
Yeah, it's kinda bizarre - I've been running GTX970 for 5 years and it still runs things acceptably today (although I've replaced it with 3080 at launch).
It really didn't last any less time than PS4 or any other console.
Consoles are subsidized and benefit from quantity. PC gaming has always been more expensive and benefitted from more cutting-edge technology. I love that consoles make gaming more accessible to more people, especially now with online multiplayer, which was once reserved for PC gamers. Even phones can do VR now, but PC is still the highest resolution, best texture quality, most detail, etc. Driving games in particular, with a Fanatec wheel, IEMs, Index or Vive Pro 2, and TOTL GPU + CPU are pretty damn spectacular, but the fact that you can get something 50-70% as good for ~1/5th the cost with a console is impressive.
ps5 hardware is sold at a profit (they hit profitability within 6-9 months of launch) and while microsoft claimed to a court that their hardware was subsidized as a justification for refusing to open the platform to alternate stores (so, somewhat self-interested of course), if you believe the production costs are fundamentally similar to PS5 then this is most likely "hollywood accounting".
It's real easy to have the xbox division license their branding from a parent company and if we set that at $100 a console then oops, there went all the profit.
It's not the PS3 days anymore where sony is losing 30% of the value of the console on the initial sale (and actually that wasn't the case for the other vendors even back in the PS3 days). Consoles are sold at a slight profit these days.
That said, having a "big APU" where everything shares a single bank of RAM and a single cooler/etc is a massive cost advantage. There is a lot of redundant cooling and memory in an ATX/PCIe spec PC and it all adds up. A console is one product with one assembly/testing line and one cooling/fan system and one set of memory. Clearly there is a market for "console-style PCs" which apply similar cost-optimizations, with a similar model to Steam Deck. Just so far there's nobody who's been willing to do the up-front cost and yet will choose not to lock down the resulting platform - Valve is somewhat unique on that front.
As a side-note, the X-Box series S was the cheapest and most effective way for me to buy a 4K-UHD blu-ray player.
I did try to do some CUDA based AI rendering stuff on my 2080S but 8GB didn't seem to be enough.
Its weird to comprehend the 'stretching' of technology advance over time as I age, especially on the value side. There hasn't ever been the same 'feel' for me from the first leap of moving from software rendered Quake to a 3D-card - despite the various advances since, although I remember bump-mapping as another massive leap.
It's totally unfair in some ways. As an example the control you have over lighting a scene (either in a game or something you're rendering) is way beyond what multi-million dollar studios were using in my younger years.
What happens to society/reality when technology capable of producing video content indistinguishable from reality is affordable to many? Its already happening. Its going to become more commonplace.
The problem of 'truth' becomes massive - is the thing presented to you something that actually happened or was it fabricated?
It absolutely can. There's only 2 players in this business, 3 if you count Intel but their GPU future doesn't sound promising.
Nvidia sets the bar and AMD follows. AMDs prices have slowly crept up as well. So no matter what, you're paying much more for a top spec GPU today than you ever have before.
It's in the best interests of both Nvidia and AMD to keep these prices high, and it's a detriment to the consumer.
AMD did it with their CPUs as well. They undercut Intel with some great price/performance deals. Grabbed their market share back and are now bumping those prices back up to parity with Intel. Now neither company has to cut their prices.
Nvidia will use artificial scarcity to push these prices. We know they can produce a shit tonne of GPUs, they did it for years.
While what you say is correct, the recent Ryzen 7000 announcement has shown that AMD remains much less greedy than NVIDIA, because with the top Ryzen 9 7950X at $700, the price per core has remained less than $50, about the same as it has been since the first Ryzen, even if the cores are now much faster.
Before the first Ryzen, only Intel Atom CPUs had a price around $50/core, while the better Intel Core CPUs had prices around $100/core. Then Intel had to also follow AMD and drop the prices for the top models to around $50/core (the "efficiency" cores in Alder Lake and Raptor Lake count as a half core).
So there is still hope that the RDNA 3 GPUs will have a more decent performance/price ratio, even if it is unlikely that they will be faster than the RTX 40 Series.
It's why people pay thousands of dollars for a handbag cost maybe tens of dollars to produce. People like playing status games.
This effect is why third richest person on the planet is Bernard Arnault of Louis Vuitton, someone you've likely never heard of. He's currently wealthier than Bezos. He didn't actually improve our lives or revolutionize industry. He just latched into our primitive status seeking behavior.
To be fair to Arnault, he isn't just CEO of Louis Vuitton but LVMH which owns something like ~100 brands, ranging from clocks, wines, fashion, cosmetics, boats, jewelry and other retailing. Although to be fair to you, most of what they sell could go into the "luxury" category.
It's likely he wouldn't be the third richest person with just Louis Vuitton and it's probably mostly because of LVMH.
Graphics cards are not some idiotic luxury good. They are a tool, used for work or leisure, whose price points seem to be set at luxury level for essentially arbitrary business reasons.
Kind of. Vendor lock-in is only a part of why it's the only game in the town. Another, larger part is that AMD's software support is awful, and also that ATI/AMD were ignoring GPGPU/ML stuff for a while, letting Nvidia indoctrinate academia into using their stack.
I wish there was a more open adoption of CUDA like functionality. I use an astrophography imaging tool called PixInsight and it's very parallel math heavy. It supports CUDA, and you can offload some tasks to the GPU and it makes a world of difference (computing a mask of stars takes seconds instead of 5-15 minutes). It's certainly got me locked into NVIDIA.
It’s funny, I just had to have 40 feet of wood fence replaced and paid ~4K for parts and 1 day of labor. They also took away the old fence. My point, electronics are cheap. I know this point will not be received well though.
I had a similar sentiment when I had to purchase a set of new tires for my car. It is amazing how an assembly of rubber and steel can cost roughly as much as a device that has billions of transistors on it.
Bigger and thinner tires looks ridiculously expensive than it should (as a noob). I don't know the reason, does every tire manufacturers want to earn more from riches (who can buy a car with bigger and thinner tires)? This is important factor when I choose car.
I paid 1600€ for my last full PC (kept the old chasis and GPU) and 1700€ for my current work laptop. No, 1600$ (1900€ in Europe) is not cheap by any stretch of imagination.
I feel like both of those might be frivolous, but wood and labour are a more easily arguable expenditure. They're physical and do something physical with finite resources. A gpu often just gives you imaginary shadows faster. TVs just show you stuff, but for the same price of a nice one you could eat food for a year or travel overseas.
For $2000 you could get better light beams in a game you're already playing, or if you're physically capable you could take a mountaineering course and get a helicopter to and from a remote climb
So if you're in the business of having almost anything else to do with the money, it's going to seem like a really tenous financial choice.
I’m a little envious of people that can get away with that. I never will as a developer. But I would definitely switch from Apple to Samsung if I only had a phone. Life would be a lot easier with Dex docking.
In the US, at least, its common to simply pay that $1k phone over time on a plan - or simply never stop paying off a phone through an upgrade program, either through their carrier or direct (e.g. iPhone Upgrade Program).
$30/mo doesn't hit as hard as $1100 up front. For some consumers, its a fundamentally different way of thinking.
When it's not a phone, but an always-on 6.5" tablet computer with an excellent camera, persistent wireless high-speed internet, amazing screen, thousands of incredibly useful apps that obviate the need for dozens of other electronic devices, and near-desktop performance for web browsing anywhere, I don't mind paying mid-range laptop prices every few years when I use it literally 4-6 hours per day, every day.
>Wasnt like half of all US dollars printed in last 3 years ?
No. "Printing Money" is a shortcut term used for many of the measures used by the federal reserve recently, but it's not literally printing money in this case (significantly less than trillion has actually been printed since 2019). Going into the details of the economics of this is a mess, and inflation is absolutely high and causing problems right now, and very likely is higher than official CPI numbers but it's not anywhere near 100% in 3 years. Keep in mind lots of prices dropped in 2020 and were still recovering/suffering in 2021, so that paints a skewed picture vs comparing 2022 to 2019 before covid wrecked things.
> It feels more like 700$ in 2013 would be worth now 1400$??
USD$700 circa 2013 adjusted for inflation is USD$890 in 2022. Feel free to pay more if you feel like it should be more though.
For awhile some of the Titan lines though got major features unlocked from their workstation graphic cards. I specifically bought a Titan XP used after the last crypto crash in 2018 for 350$ because I needed 10 bit colour output to a special 10 bit capable monitor for video editing and colour correction. I probably would have bought a 1080 ti instead with a much nicer cooler (for overclocking) which is a pretty similar card but that card was locked out of these features.
Raising MSRP doesn't undercut board partners, it allows board partners to charge more which is what they want.
Personally I think what they're doing is maximizing launch profit without totally crashing the 30x0 market which has a supply glut, something else board partners are worried about.
I'm really not sure why you think this is bad for board partners - you haven't really explained your reasoning and what you did say doesn't make much sense. This is all positive for board partners. It's the cheap founders edition cards that undercut board partners.
> Raising MSRP doesn't undercut board partners, it allows board partners to charge more which is what they want.
My understanding regarding the EVGA debacle is that Nvidia sets really high MSRP along with charging for the chips & giving themselves a headstart and the partners can't go above the MSRP then Nvidia comes in and slashes prices that only Nvidia can compete at (since they can give themselves discounts on the chips along with all of the other advantages they have).
What board partners likely want is either: Nvidia is time-limited to a few months with Founder Cards or Nvidia allows them to sell cards for more money and Nvidia can't make any card except Founder.
GPU prices will trend towards market prices either way. I'd rather them somewhat overshoot MSRP rather than undershoot, which is what happened with the 30-series GPU. It's not fair that scalpers were getting rich while EVGA was operating at a loss.
I am pretty sure EVGA sold directly to miners, likely at a good margin: my day-one EVGA queue was never fullfilled, while miners showed warehouses full of EVGA cards.
Mine was, something like 9 months later. But I got my queue email & had 24 hours to buy. Maybe dig through your emails to see if you just missed it? Or maybe the model you waitlisted on was basically cancelled.
wonder if he's one of the people who clicked the "I don't want to convert my queue to the LHR model, and I'm aware EVGA expects all future production to be LHR so this queue probably will never be fulfilled" button.
While I expected about $1600 for 4090, for the other two, whose GPU sizes are 9.5/16 and 7.5/16 of the top model, I expected prices proportional to their sizes, i.e. about $1000 and $700.
However, NVIDIA added $200 for both smaller models making them $1200 and $900.
It is debatable whether 4090 is worth $1600, but in comparison with it the two 4080 models are grossly overpriced, taking into account their GPU sizes and their 2/3 and 1/2 memory sizes.
They will price the 4080 at $1200 to push people over the line for the 4090. After all, the performance difference for "just" $400 is quite significant.
they're setting prices high (and delaying the launch of the mainstream and lower-tier cards) because they have huge stockpiles of Ampere chips they need to burn through. Launch the stuff at the top to get the sales from the whales (VR, enthusiast gaming, etc) who are willing to pay for performance and delay the lower cards that would compete with your ampere inventory.
It's the Turing strategy all over again - when you have a stockpile of older cards, you don't make your new cards too attractive. And yes, they also have a big TSMC allocation too - but they gotta get rid of the Ampere stuff first, the longer it sits the more it will have to be marked down, launching new cards that obsolete the inventory they're trying to sell would just make things worse.
AMD is going to be doing the same thing - they pushed back the midrange Navi 33 and will be launching only the high-end Navi 31 until that miner inventory burns through a bit. Similarly to NVIDIA, that likely implies they'll be launching at a high price, they'll undercut NVIDIA by $100 or $200 or something and take the margins but they're not gonna be the heroes of the $700 market either.
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The EVGA thing is a tempest in a teapot though, the losses he's talking about are something that's happened in the last month (he supposedly decided to quit back at the start of the year) and not representative of the (large, 10x normal) margins that board partners have been making in recent years. I personally didn't see much evidence of "price caps" with partner's first-party storefronts selling 3080s at 2.50-3x FE MSRP either.
And yes, jensen is an asshole and being a partner is a low-margin business, everyone already knows that.
EVGA is losing money because of some of it's CEO's ridiculous prestige side-projects (custom motherboards, enthusiast monitors, video capture cards that turned out to be falsely advertised, pcie sound cards, etc) and generous warranty support (long and transferable with absurdly cheap extended warranties) coupled with a higher-than-average failure rate (because they contract out assembly) and a generally lower-than-industry margin (because they contract out assembly) and they're just being drama queens on the way out.
Yea this is insane. Screw Nvidia and wait for the second hand market to hit rock bottom (I would estimate this will start to happen in 1 to 3 months) and buy a used card for dirt cheap.
It seems like they're really emphasizing the difference in RT performance from the previous generation, but I think the gaming market at least will care more about the difference in raw frames and memory size from the previous generation and AMD's offerings.
Personally, I like using RT for some single player showpiece games with a 3080 Ti, RT was useless on my 2080, but the games that I play the most do not use RT at all. DLSS is always great on any title that offers it, but again the real issue is that most of the games that people put real time into are the types of games for which RT is irrelevant. Graphical showpiece stuff is just a lot less relevant to the contemporary gaming market than it used to be.
While RT is a single player gimmick I mostly turn off, it won't take many more increases like this to make it a very real feature. What will we see when developers start targeting these cards, or their successors?
“In /my opinion/, this doesn’t add enough to the game experience to justify the performance penalty. Also, my hardware isn’t strong enough to use it. Therefor it’s a gimmick! Herpa derpa!”
That may actually be giving too much credit. It’s probably more like “I don’t like it so it’s a gimmick that no one else should enjoy”
Divining people's real motivations is a skill wasted on HN news comments. If you're as good at it as you think you are, you should be brokering multi-billion dollar deals.
I interpret it to mean that the graphical enhancements that RT can give you are only really appreciable if you're playing a single-player game that allows you to stop and check out how beautiful it is, while in a competitive multiplayer game, you're moving around too fast to really appreciate (or even notice) the difference RT gives you over fake reflections.
The reason behind the 4:3 low resolution is outside of scope for ray tracing or performance overall: most of pro players found out that widened picture and thus player models are easier to target precisely in motion (AFAIK the phenomenon hasn't being studied properly) and you're limited by vertical resolution of the screen thus 960 is the upper bound for a common 16:9 1080p panel.
We're past Quake-level graphics, but competitive eSports games, by and large, have deliberately simple graphics optimised for readability over flare.
If you look at LoL, Fortnite, Valorant, Overwatch, they're all kind of the same — fairly flat light, bright colourful characters against a backdrop of pastels and otherwise muted background colours. Texture detailing is discrete and everything almost looks like block colours if you squint. Rainbow 6 Siege, CSGO, PUBG are the same, minus the colourful characters.
Even if those games didn't optimise their engines for performance over visual fidelity, their visual design would make them fairly light weight anyhow.
Another reason why those game graphics is like that is they want to support many devices, including very low-end Nintendo Switch and MediaTek smartphones. Toon style looks good in low quality.
> you're moving around too fast to really appreciate (or even notice) the difference RT gives you over fake reflections.
You're also at a disadvantage running the graphics on High.
In any game that I want to play at a "competitive" level, I always put the settings to the absolute lowest settings so the computer always gets 100+ FPS.
No reason to even try to optimize. The point is winning, not it looking good. In fact, in some games, the developers have had to go back and make it more fair for higher settings because of low settings hiding tall grass.
It's a spectrum, not an either-or. Many people play competitive multiplayer for the sake of overall enjoyment, not solely to compete. For that, you want the graphics to be as good as possible, to the limit of what you can notice while playing the game normally.
For PC, at least judging from Steam charts, single player gamers are a substantial minority, but still a minority in terms of what games are popular. CP2077 is the only single player game currently in the top 10, and there are only a couple other primarily SP games in the top 20.
At no point of history have multiplayer gamers outnumbered singleplayer gamers. Even for MP focused titles like StarCraft 2, the majority (iirc the number was around 54%) of customers never clicked on the multiplayer button once.
You're looking at number people logged into an online service and thinking it represents anything about gamers that by definition aren't online. A typical sampling bias.
> You're looking at number people logged into an online service and thinking it represents anything about gamers that by definition aren't online. A typical sampling bias.
steam, ubisoft connect, origin, blizzard launcher, and rockstar are all online today, even for single-player games. I'm not sure where a significant number of non-platform-delivered games would even exist in 2022, I haven't bought a single game that didn't use steam or another platform from a vendor in ages.
The exception being GOG I guess, and to be fair there's a decent number of new-ish titles on that (horizon zero dawn) and I always make an effort to buy titles there when possible, but even still GOG's marketshare is minuscule in comparison to steam.
so no, actually, I disagree that there's some large repository of single-player games that are not showing up on steam or another equivalent.
Sounds like you haven't paid attention to the gaming industry since eSports took off.
Overwatch and Valorant alone may have increased female participation in video games by double digit percentages. Also, the TV show for League, which was obviously aimed at women.
There are more single-player games than multi-player, but overall more hours have been spent (or are currently being spent) on multi-player games. For example, someone might play BioShock Infinite once and complete the story in under 15 hours and then never touch it again, but easily rack up hundreds of hours in Apex Legends.
As you've said though, there's a sampling bias. Going by the "current players online" metric might diminish how many players are playing single-player games without being online.
I don't think that is a good metric. There are far more single player games available on Steam than multiplayer.
A multiplayer lives and dies by its community, so it makes sense that multiplayer gamers would coalesce around a relatively smaller number of games.
Multiplayer games are also designed far more around player retention. The unpredictability of human opponents, combined with various design decisions meant to keep players engaged, means that a multiplayer gamer may primarily play the same game for years. A solo player reaches the end of their game, maybe they even exhaust all the side content and achievements, but then they move on to the next single player game.
> What does "single player gimmick" in your sentences here mean?
When I've seen this written it's often explained as to do with the fact that single-player is a much more curated experience, where the developers can stage-manage where you go and even where you look, and discard resources they know you won't see again.
That's why single-player often looks way better than multiplayer, where a) the experience isn't that curated and b) fps matters much more.
If it's actually another 2x performance improvement, we're really only another generation away at most. On my 3080 RT caused a performance drop but I was able to decide the trade-off for myself, often it was still playable, I just needed to decide whether I wanted high refresh rates or not. Another doubling or two and it'll barely be a thought at all. The caveat with this still is it requires DLSS for best effect, which is barely a trade off in my experience.
Gamers don't see it that way though because often, faked reflections are "good enough".
In some cases though, the faked reflections are noticeable and immersion breaking. I notice it in MS Flight Simulator. I'm flying over water and approaching a large city, and I can see the reflection of buildings in the water. But when I push the nose down, as the image of the buildings goes off the top of my screen, the reflections go away too. In reality, this wouldn't happen. But in the sim, it does because the reflections are generated by just inverting the rendered image of the buildings.
There's a map in Apex Legends where a section has a shiny floor. It fakes a reflection by rendering an environment-mapped texture. It does a decent job at making the floor look like it's reflective, but as you move around and compare what's being rendered to the actual geometry, you notice how it falls apart. But in a competitive FPS, you're not looking at the environment long and hard enough to notice.
Duke Nukem 3D had proper reflections, but it did it by actually mirroring all the geometry, a technique that only really works well if the geometry is simple.
I suspect they also highlight RT performance (and AI acceleration which is more-so focused on a different market than these gaming cards) because it is their key differentiator with competitors.
Most upper market cards can already run most games well at 1440p or 4k.
Eh, the current 3080 can already do 60FPS @ 4k HDR on every AAA title I've thrown at it, and that's with an mITX undervolt build (cliffing the voltage at a point). "60FPS @ 4k is readily achievable" has been sort of the gold standard we've been careening towards for years since displays outpaced GPUs, and we're just about there now. The raw frame difference and memory size is nice especially if you're doing compute on these cards, but these weren't holding the gaming market back, at least. So for those segments, you need some juice to go on top of things. I can see why they advertise it this way.
Personally, people say RT is a gimmick but I find it incredible on my 3080 for games that support it. In a game like Control the lighting is absolutely stunning, and even in a game like Minecraft RTX, the soft lighting and shadows are simply fantastic. (Minecraft IMO is a perfect example of how better soft shadows and realistic bounce lighting aren't just for "ultra realism" simulators.) It's already very convincing when implemented well. So I'm very happy to see continued interest here.
No, but not for lack of interest. I simply upgraded from 2k res + 2080 Super to 4k res + 3080 at one point in the last year or so, but I had already beat the game by then and haven't returned to it.
How about in the actual game? I have a 3090 at 1440p and swing 60 a lot at maxed everything and with dlss at quality, but more often than not it sits in the 45-50 range, that said I suspect I may be CPU bottlenecked atm.
The 3080 Ti and 3090 have the same framerate on that page. I updated with a comment to show the FPS at various settings- only see 60FPS with DLSS set to Ultra Performance (all the other settings are maxxed).
I went back to run some more benchmarks and it turns out with DLSS totally disabled, 4K is unplayable (3-6FPS). Didn't realize DLSS was contributing so much. Simply disabling raytracing at that point (so, DLSS disabled, 4K, everything else set to max but RT disabled) gets me back to 50-60FPS. So basically DLSS is compensating for RT. But disabling RT doesn't really seem to make a big difference- it still looks pretty damn nice. hard to tell.
Yeah RT is a killer in CP2077, CDPR did a bang up job with the raster graphics. With everything jacked I mostly noticed the RT in the puddles/water reflections vs. the screen space reflections but not enough to enable it. I'm sure it does other stuff lighting wise but I didn't notice it personally.
Op claimed to get 60 FPS at 4K with "pretty much" everything at max - I hope that wasn't implying "everything but raytracing". I got the card for raytracing, without raytracing even my 5 year old card worked ok and looked good enough.
I finally got a chance to check. DLSS is set to "auto".
General settings are: Ray Tracing Ultra, Texture Quality High, all advanced settings set to "high", ray tracing is set to "Ultra" not "Psycho".
Looks like I was wrong- the benchmark shows average FPS of 30, not 60. When I change DLSS to "Ultra Performance", then the FPS is 59.29 (I assume vsync) and I didn't see any visual differences in the benchmark. With DLSS at "Quality", average FPS is 27, with drops as low as 9, and obvious visual frame skips.
At the very least, seems like I should force DLSS to Ultra Performance, so I bring the average FPS during complex scenes up.
Try MSFS in VR on ultra settings. With mostly high and ultra I'm sometimes able to get 30fps on my quest 2. Nevermind something like the Pimax 8k or upcoming 12k.
Yeah that's fair, VR titles are still a place where GPUs need more performance. I personally have no interest in them but yes the compute needs are in general way higher. Not to mention Flight Sim is a particularly intense case...
I’d be interested in better RT performance for the purposes of VR gaming but, unfortunately, the high fidelity PCVR gaming market died with the Quest 2.
No, average people never play VR with wired headset and highend PC so the market can't grow. Quest2 is acceptable device, and it can be upgraded by wireless Oculus Link with highend PC.
> I'm not sure I understand why memory is important for gaming? For most games, with every settings maxed up, it'll be a stretch if it uses 6GB of VRAM.
Depends on what kind of gaming you do, not all games consume the same type of resources from the GPU. Simulation games will usually be limited by RAM size/speed, VRAM size/speed and CPU, rather than actual clock speed of GPUs. Action games would require better latency and not so much about VRAM/RAM size and so on.
For the majority of games, no it doesn't matter at all. For a small number of games, it's not hard to eat up all the VRAM with certain settings and especially with 4K gaming. I use a 1440p monitor so it doesn't really matter that much to me, but it does matter more to people who spend a lot on good 4K displays.
> DLSS is always great on any title that offers it
It is very subjective. DLSS for me is always a blurry mess. I'm turning it off in every game - I'll better will turn off some RTX features than suffer that blurriness torture.
Not everyone is a pro CS:Go player. I really like RTX shadow improvements and wish more games supported it. I've bought games for their "showpiece stuff".
I wish Valve would put a bit of investment into TF2, as it's still a very popular title with ~100k players on average[1], yet it's 32-bit ONLY and stuck on DirectX 9. The Mac version doesn't even work anymore because it was never updated to be 64-bit. The dedicated server, SRCDS, is also 32-bit only and struggles with 32 players and some fairly light admin mods. It's also mostly single-threaded, so it tends to run better on Intel CPUs with high clock speed.
I've yet to see a game that my laptop 2080 can't handle on max settings. The only games I've done that asked for raytracing I did was Control and Resident Evil 8.
The pool of games that ask for extremely high performance is very small and pretty easy to ignore by accident.
450 watt TDP? I feel like a crazy person every time a new generation of GPU comes out and raises the bar on power consumption and heat generation. How is this ok?
I'm not sure what else to expect? Is it so crazy that they make the card even faster and bigger than before, and it uses more power? What else is the next generation of cards supposed to do, have the same performance but make them more energy efficient? Not sure how many people would buy cards that have the same performance but less TDP.
Power is a non issue for most people buying these cards for gaming. I couldn't care less if my desktop draws 500W or 1000W while gaming. If I get 144 fps vs 100 fps, I'll gladly accept the extra power consumption.
I’m in southern Sweden, which is seeing stupid electricity prices at the moment. My current daily electricity price tops out at 6.62 SEK per kW/h, so a 450W card would cost me a US dollar for a four hour gaming session.
(although in this case I’m not blaming my government too much, beyond failing to anticipate Germany’s need for our excess energy, and for not setting a country-wide pricing model for electricity. With Putin’s current stupidity, a lot of the previous energy planning goes out of the window, and all we can do is hold on for the ride.)
Southern Norway crossed the 10NOK/kWh threshold earlier this year.
It is kind of mind boggling how this can happen for a country with almost infinite supply of hydro power, but here we are.
Of course, Norway being Norway, since the start of September we now get a 90% refund for everything above 0.7NOK (based on the average price of each 24 hours) so for most of us will survive.
Oh, and since most power plants are owned by the public this doesn't affect budgets as badly as it could have done.
(It is even more complicated but I don't have more time now. Someone please fill in if I got something really wrong. Also, yes, this is a wild tangent but thinking I know HN I guess it will the day a little less boring for someone : )
> The most expensive electricity is Germany at $0.40 / kwh
That’s not true, my contract is for 0.41 (EUR, but that’s kinda the same right now) and I’ve seen far higher prices. Unless you are talking wholesale, which might be true but is useless for a consumer comparison.
Even if power is expensive, it only uses that power when you are using it. The whole card is 450W, so maybe 3 hours of intense could be a dollar? The card isn’t going to be running 100% for any game I know. Compared to a slower 250W card, the premium is 1/2 that. With that it’s like you agree to pay an extra dollar for 6 hours of gaming. With expensive electricity. I feel like this is conservative and doesn’t seem to bad for people considering the most expensive consumer card on the market.
Not "just" energy prices (which is important!) but even things like your home. Pulling >1KW through a single power socket (or 1.5-2 KW once you account for CPU, monitor, etc.) is non-trivial for a lot of people.
At that level you're really in the territory where people will trip breakers in their home. This is "you have to hire an electrician and rewire part of your house" level of power consumption, which doesn't seem sustainable? Or at least "don't turn the stove on at the same time", which seems like an awfully disruptive way to ask people to live.
Heck, at that level for homes/cities with older electric service at lower amperages, the computer is now a significant fraction of the total service capacity of your connection to the city grid.
What's the response then? "Sorry you're not living in a new build home, forget about gaming"?
For me the wall-power isn't a huge issue but now you have to think about air conditioning. 1-2KW dissipating in a closed room heats the room up fast. This is already a problem with the RTX 2000-series that I'm running now and it seems like it'll be even worse.
"Glad you want to game, now please evaluate your home's electrical and HVAC systems to ensure they are compatible with a giant box pumping 2KW of power and converting it directly to heat"
Assuming you don't care about energy prices, climate change and fan noise, there is still thermal throttling that can lead to cycles of boost-throttle-boost-throttle that can result in uneven frame pacing.
Of course my assumption is that the system will be cooled adequately, avoiding any thermal throttling at sustained maximum load. That's true for the current hardware generation too.
I'm sure that for gaming, power is not an issue, but I will continue to lament that Intel and Nvidia do not give a shit about making power-efficient designs. They push the increased cost and headaches to consumers and OEMs who need to spend time and money cooling their computers.
Maybe that's the genius of their plan? The chip designers continue to put out better & hotter processors and expect someone else to figure out cooling. Thermal design failures are not attributed to Intel and Nvidia, instead to OEMs and consumers.
I don't understand. If you are unable to cool it properly, you can under-clock it, or run less intensive programs on it, or just get a last gen card.
Offering a more powerful GPU/CPU for people and use-cases that demand it is not a problem. Most games these days run well even on mid-tier cards of the 20 series, that's two generations ago. So people have all the choice in the world.
Just because a 1000 bhp LaFerrari exists in the market, doesn't mean you cannot buy a ~100 bhp Corolla. People who buy the Ferrari will need to take special care of their car to get the most out of it. That's a pleasure in itself for some.
Your car analogy is missing the fuel aspect. If I can get 1000HP with 50MPG, instead of 1000HP at 5MPG, I would buy a Ferrari.
At the high-end, Nvidia is making more powerful cards (HP) with the same fuel efficiency as before. Maybe they are making more efficient cards at the lower end but those don’t get attention on HN it seems.
> At the high-end, Nvidia is making more powerful cards (HP) with the same fuel efficiency as before.
No, perf/w is still climbing every generation. It'll climb hugely this generation too.
NVIDIA's marketing number is 2x perf at the same wattage as last gen, obviously needs to be validated by third party testing but they're shrinking two nodes at once here, it's a bigger node jump than Pascal was.
People have been primed to react negatively by a couple of twitter rumormongers like kopite7kimi. Yeah 4090 has a high TGP, but it's more like 400W TGP (450W TBP) and not the 800W TGP / 900W TBP that he was shouting from the rooftops about. There is still a huge gain in efficiency here, it's just also a very large (and expensive) chip on top of the higher efficiency.
But people don’t discard their incorrect mental frames when the information used to build them is falsified. Actually they just tend to retrench and dig deeper (“450W is still too much even if it is 2x perf/w!”). Ada is a power hog, “everybody knows it”.
People said they wanted a balls-out big chip on a competitive node, that's exactly what the 4090 is, it's highly efficient and very large, this is much closer to the cutting edge of what the tech can deliver than Samsung 8nm junk or little baby 450mm2 dies. Now people are complaining about the TDP and the cost, even if it's more efficient that's not good enough. Unfortunately the TDP is a matter of physics, thermal density is going up every generation and a big chip on a modern node pulls a lot of power.
There are lower models in the stack too and those will maintain that efficiency benefit. It's a larger-than-pascal node shrink, efficiency is going up a lot here.
> What else is the next generation of cards supposed to do, have the same performance but make them more energy efficient? Not sure how many people would buy cards that have the same performance but less TDP.
It is. I remember when I bought my GTX 260. It was crazy how much power hungry it was at the time for a mid market card. I had to buy a drumroll 450W PSU. Years later, I upgraded to a GTX 960. At first I thought "I probably need an even bigger PSU now...". I was shocked and then very happy to learn that the GTX 960 consumed less than my 7 generations older GPU. They can do it right when they care.
The GTX 260 was build on a 65 nm process, the 960 on a 28 nm process. This is one and a half full nodes apart, on similar planar processes with a full node really was a doubling of density. While the transistor count increased by more than that (1.4B to 5.2B), leading to a larger die size, it can't be overstated how much the improved process and decreased Vth helped power usage in this era. It would have been a challenge to use more power across those processes.
Believe me, chip designers care more about power now than they did then. Back in the larger process nodes when you moved to the next node the voltage scaled also, and as power is proportional to voltage squared, power went down. It was the ultimate free lunch, smaller, faster, lower power. That mostly ended around the 20nm node. Now designers work very hard to make things more power efficient, or stay within a thermal budget.
i mean, the option is there depending on what your requirements are. i recently went from a 980ti to a 3070, doubling performance while decreasing TDP... as someone who has the card for casual use (only really make use of it a few times a month), i actually did just look for the fastest card that ran less hot than my current one (i've come to value quiet a bit more)
I actually did same just couple months ago, 980ti->3070. Though TDP claimed to be 220 but depend on vendor it seem it can peak to 250. Also one thing i liked after upgrade that 3070 have fan off when you aren't have load on it like desktop apps.
In a generation or two we're going to start bumping up against regular US outlet limits. Gamers might start setting up their rigs in the kitchen to use the 20A outlets.
Would that inherently limits the customers/market though? The fps above all crowd would be happy but I would bet there's addressable people who would want 4080 performance in a small case that's relatively silent?
Except Apple doesn't really have their cake and eat it too. Their most powerful GPUs can be more than 10x slower than similarly priced Nvidia cards, particularly for ML and rendering workloads. At least in Nvidia's case, I think they've got their ducks in a row. Their 7nm GPUs get better performance-per-watt than Apple's 5nm ones. 'Nuff said.
Not NVidia, Intel. Intel has been unable to do a die shrink for years because they own their own fabs instead of using TSMC, GlobalFoundries, or Samsung to actually produce their chips. The new 4090s are supposed to be about 2x performance of a 3090 with the same power draw because of the smaller process (5nm TSMC vs 8nm Samsung).
> And nvida is just milking performance by power draw more current (less efficient)
You'll be hard pressed to find a generation where power efficiency actually decreased. That didn't happen with the RTX 30xx series, for example. Even though power skyrocketed, performance increased by more than power did. Meaning efficiency still increased. That's been true for every generation I can think of, certainly all the more recent ones anyway. Maybe AMD had a few like that where they just re-rev'd the same architecture multiple times in a row.
Running games that put my GPU (rtx 3080) usage at 90-100% doesn't even make my PC audible when having (open back) headphones on with ingame sound a normal levels. If you invest in good components and focus on quietness you can get great performance without much noise. In my case, without any watercooling.
With watercooling and a big rad, it can get even quieter.
yes, there are limits to how much heat can be removed by a dual-slot blower without making it extremely loud. open coolers can do a bit better, with the trade-off that they dump most of the heat inside your chassis rather than out the back.
I have bigger things to worry about personally as far as my energy consumption is concerned, but the main way this impacts me is that my wife and I probably need to get some electrical work done in order to support our devices being in the same room. Our two gaming computer towers theoretically have a maximum combined power draw of 1800 Watts, which is well above the 1450 W which I think is the maximum sustained (not burst) load for a 15 A residential circuit in the US. This is ignoring the few hundred extra watts for monitors, speakers, laptops, and a couple lamps.
My understanding is that the maximum should only be used for short periods of time, like for microwaves and hair dryers, rather than for sustained loads like a heater or computer. I think sustained loads are supposed to be 80% of the maximum load the breaker can handle.
What you describe is accurate, the 3090 Ti produces a tremendous amount of heat under load in my experience and I would expect the same with these new cards.
For what it's worth, you can power limit them and I'd highly recommend it if you plan on running a few of these. In the past we've power limited RTX 3090s to 250W (100W lower than original) while losing negligible amount of performance.
Do you just limit using something like MSI Afterburner?
I was undervolting and underclocking my Titan XP for a long time (with a separate curve for gaming) but lost the config and have been lazy to go back. I mainly did this because it has a mediocre cooler (blower design that is not nearly as good as the current ones but also not terrible) and even at low usage it was producing a lot of heat and making some noise (the rest of my system I specifically designed to have super low noise).
I just used `nvidia-smi -pl 250` on linux, it's built into the driver itself, I'm sure there's equivalent tools (or maybe even nvidia-smi itself) for Windows as well.
I'll also add that Nvidia's drivers are fairly good at keeping wattages relatively low, at least for desktop cards. My 3070 will idle ~10 watts when decoding video or just accelerating my desktop environment. You only see that 300-watt TDP take effect when doing consecutive renders or local ML like Stable Diffusion, and you'll definitely want the extra power.
The fan curves though kinda suck for the default nvidia drivers - especially on the blower it will run them super low to try to make it silent (which is not very efficient heat wise) and then not start spinning it up until it is really under load. Whereas there is a level that is barely an increase in perceptible noise that cools the GPU significantly more and for many mid range loads will not end up with with the GPU temp (and the fan) going through lots of highs and lows.
Interesting - going to look into this - do you set custom fan curves at all? Wondering basically if I can use a command like this to set a ceiling on wattage and then a second command to set an increased lower limit on fan speed.
Nope, I don't touch anything else. This is essentially telling the GPU, don't use more than this power at all, it'll automagically figure out the best configuration and all that. I've ran those power-limited rigs for 24/7 for many weeks, no issues at all and reduced heat is a nice side effect.
There's literally a power slider now. So yeah just fire up Afterburner, take the power slider, and lower it as much as you want until performance falls off too much for you. I think you can drop all the way to 50% or something somewhat asburdly low (at which point you should probably have just bought a cheaper, lower-power card in the first place)
They bought out exclusive access to the most efficient node, making it impossible for others rather than showing it is possible for them (though it presumably would have been possible if they outbid Apple at the time).
It's good to remember that you don't have to buy the most powerful GPU model just because you can afford it.
Some people are probably in the target audience for the 4090. Others may prefer the 4080 models, which have a slightly lower TDP than the 3080 models but still get a nice performance boost from much higher clock rates.
The 3090 Ti series was already pushing 450W so this isn't new.[1] And it's because they clock these things incredibly high, well beyond the efficiency curve where it makes sense. Because that's what gaming customers expect, basically. On the datacenter cards they quadruple or octuple the memory bus width, and they drop the clocks substantially and hit iso-perf with way, way better power. But those high-bandwidth memory interfaces are expensive and gaming workloads often can't saturate them, leaving the compute cores starved. So they instead ramp the hell out of the clocks and power delivery to make up for that and pump data into the cores as fast as possible on a narrow bus. That takes a lot of power and power usage isn't linear. It's just the nature of the market these things target. High compute needs, but low-ish memory/bus needs.
This isn't necessarily a bad or losing strategy, BTW, it just is what it is. Data paths are often very hot and don't scale linearly in many dimensions, just like power usage doesn't. Using smaller bus widths and improving bus clock in return is a very legitimate strategy to improve overall performance, it's just one of those tough tradeoffs.
Rule of thumb: take any flagship GPU and undervolt it by 30%, saving 30% power/heat dissipation, and you'll retain +90% of the performance in practice. My 3080 is nominally 320/350W but in practice I just cliff it to about 280W and it's perfectly OK in everything.
[1] Some people might even be positively surprised, since a lot of the "leaks" (bullshit rumors) were posting astronomically ridiculous numbers like 800W+ for the 4090 Ti, etc.
Yeah, I thought those leaks were pretty insane, like are we really going to all need 1KW+ PSUs to run flagship GPUs? I picked up an 850W Seasonic Prime a few upgrades ago and even running benchmarks on an OC 12900KS + 3090 with 8 case fans it's totally fine. I was hoping to not have to upgrade PSUs for another few years.
> The 3090 Ti series was already pushing 450W so this isn't new.[1]
Every time this comes up, people forget that:
1) Flagship cards like the 3090 Ti and 4090 consume significantly more power than typical cards. You should not buy a flagship card if power is a concern.
2) You don't have to buy the flagship card. Product lineups extend all the way down to tiny single-fan cards that fit inside of small cases and silent HTPCs. It's a range of products and they all have different power consumption.
3) You don't have to run any card at full power. It's trivial to turn the power limit down to a much lower number if you want. You can drop 1/3 of the power and lose only ~10-15% of the performance in many cases due to non-linear scaling.
4) The industry has already been shipping 450W TDP cards and it's fine.
If power is an issue, buy a lower power card. The high TDP cards are an option but that doesn't mean that every card consumes 450W
Dennard Scaling/MOSFET Scaling is over and it's starting to really bite. Power-per-transistor still goes down, but density is going up faster. Meaning an equal-sized chip on an old node vs a new node... the power goes up on the newer chip.
Physics is telling you that you need to let the chip "shrink" when you shrink. If you keep piling on more transistors (by keeping the chip the same size) then the power goes up. That's how it works now. If you make the chip even bigger... it goes up a lot. And NVIDIA is increasing transistor count by 2.6x here.
Efficiency (perf/w) is still going up significantly, but the chip also pulls more power on top of being more efficient. If that's not acceptable for your use-case, then you'll have to accept smaller chips and slower generational progress. The 4070 and 4060 will still exist if you absolutely don't want to go above 200W. Or you can buy the bigger chips and underclock them (setting a power limit is like two clicks) and run them in the efficiency sweet spot.
But, everyone always complains about "NVIDIA won't make big chips, why are they selling small chips at a big-chip price" and now they've finally gone and done a big chip on a modern node, and people are still finding reasons to complain about it. This is what a high-density 600mm2 chip on TSMC N5P running at competitive clockrates looks like, it's a property of the node and not anything in particular that NVIDIA has done here.
AMD's chips are on the same node and will be pretty spicy too - rumors are around 400W, for a slightly smaller chip. Again, TDP being more or less a property of the chip size and the node[0], that's what you'd expect. For a given library and frequency and assuming "average" transistor activity: transistor count determines die size, and die size determines TDP. You need to improve performance-per-transistor and that's no longer easy.
[0] an oversimplification ofc but still
That's the whole point of DLSS/XeSS/Streamline/potentially a DirectX API, get more performance-per-transistor by adding an accelerator unit which "punches above its weight" in some applicable task and pushes the perf/t curve upwards. But, people have whined nonstop about that since day 1 because using inference is a conspiracy from Big GPU to sell more tensor cores, or something, I guess. Surely there is some obvious solution to TAAU sample weighting that doesn't need inference, and it's just that every academic and programmer in the field has agreed not to talk about it for the last 20 years, right?
I wonder when Nvidia start selling lower powered model like Intel "T" CPU. It's just underclocked/undervolted and a bit binned chip, but some consumer like it. EnergyStar also will like it.
I've considered this, but I'm not sure. Is there any concern about cards used for mining being too "beat up"? They say you shouldn't buy a used car from someone you know was using it for racing. Does that apply to graphics cards used for mining?
Apparently mining cards are ok because they suffer a constant load, sometimes run at a capped peak performance (?), vs games which can be very spikey.
Whether this is just misdirection thrown around by crypto miners looking at a hole of sunk assets or not, I could not say. Personally I'd just buy new, but I have also probably never spent over 300usd on a card.
My previous card (Radeon 7970HD) was used for BTC mining in a gaming PC and lasted until about 2018 (So about 6 years). My current GPU is a 1080Ti that used to be in a mining rig and shows no signs of damage at about 4 years of age.
I'm looking forward to buying a used crypto mining card when the current one dies.
The major concerns would be the thermal paste degrading or the fan dying. Both are easy and cheap to remedy, and are probably worth preventively fixing when you buy the card.
Depending on how much you want to spend, a 1080ti, 2080ti and 3080ti are all good upgrades (roughly doubling in price with each step). All of them come with 11GB or more memory, making them very usable for not only gaming but also "average" ML (e.g. stable diffusion runs great on my 2080ti, and it's very usable for developing tensorflow models).
It is hard to tell since you don't provide exact numbers. I've seen SD generating 50 samples 512x512 image on 2080 Ti in 8 seconds, but it is almost certain that there is a faster version out there.
Stable Diffusion is but 1 project. M1 gonna be a huge bottleneck for anything that takes time. That "Ultra" for $4k is about 5 times slower than a single 3090. It will be nearly 10 times slower than 4090.
A used 2080TI goes for around $500, with the remaining $500 I can get a computer with a 6x3.6GHz Ryzen 5 and 16GB RAM. Which is something completely different than a Macbook Air, so that's kind of an apples to oranges comparison, but I don't see the big price advantage. And presumably GP already has the "supporting platform", since they are upgrading, making the 2080TI upgrade half the price of a switch to an m1?
It is VASTLY slower than 2080Ti. There is no competition at all. I don't know exact performance numbers, but I would estimate that M1 takes more than a minute to generate one image.
UPD: asked a friend to generate image on m1 with diffusion bee. It took 4 minutes 30 seconds to generate one 25 sample image. It is not even close and much worse than I thought.
Could you provide the exact settings you use for generating the image? Settings matter a lot in terms of it/s. Also please share the exact it/s you're getting :)
I just tried it, on my 2080ti I get a 50 sample 512x512 image in 7.0 to 7.5 seconds (using PLMS, DDIM or k_lms). Or at 256x256 with 8-image batches about 1.15 seconds per image.
I upgraded from a 970 to a 2080 a while back and have been very happy with it. Still plays modern games at good frame rates, though not with max settings.
Obviously your choice depends greatly on budget + availability of hardware, as well as your desired resolution, but I'd suggest the 2070 or 2080 (maybe 2080ti?) as a good starting point.
10-20% faster isn't a lot of future proofing. Certainly not worth paying double.
You certainly don't need a 3090 for gaming in 4K. nVidia's claim of the 3090 being a "4K" card is marketing bullshit. If a game can't be run in 4K on a 3080, then the 10-20% performance increase of a 3090 isn't likely to change that.
I have a 980, too, and it's great. It plays most stuff on Steam without any problems. I'm only considering an upgrade because I want to play Flight Simulator and Cyberpunk on max graphics. I'll be getting a 3080-- they're fairly mainstream and a great value. I love ultra-quiet hardware so I'll be getting the Asus 3080 Noctua, which is the quietest version by a huge margin.
I think you should wait until late November for dust to settle(budget segment won't change that much because of it if you don't consider buying used). By then both Nvidia and AMD will release their cards(it is likely that Intel too, but Alchemist is a joke), mining cards will hit the market in large quantities and pricing for everything will change drastically.
I think your local prices matter the most. Here in Hungary, right at the moment, looking at one specific large retailer, the 2060 makes the most sense, if we look at price/value. Compared to the 980, it offers <50% extra speed. It really depends on your circumstances, to judge whether that works for you or not.
I upgraded my wife's 2015 workstation from 980ti to 2080sc of some sorts. The limit is pci bandwidth of the MB, anything later made no sense. My kids use that as gaming PC and the happiness index on the latest titles (valorant, halo) went way up. It cand compare to the 3080 that I have in the latest gaming PC, but it does great. Bonus is that I sold the 980 to someone for 70 dollars, I was going to trash it but apparently it is still worth something
perhaps a 3080 , maybe 4080 12gb when the price drops a bit ? I'm envious I went form a 970 to 1660ti I'm not sure what my next move is Im usually more comfortable finance wise with 70s than 80s
Yeah, this was remarkably irritating for me here in Austria - if you're going to change the language based on location, please let the user override it.
Luckily 'en-gb' is less likely to be overridden than 'en-us'.
Intel has moved to DisplayPort 2.0, but their current product specifications, e.g. for NUC12SNK, say: "DisplayPort 2.0 (1.4 certified)".
But I assume that they will get a certification in the future.
For Thunderbolt, where it was Intel who did the certifications, many companies have sold motherboards or computers for months or years with non-certified Thunderbolt ports which worked OK, while waiting for the certification.
I’m on an 1070 right now and feels like it’s time for upgrading but then I need a new CPU too so a new mobo as well etc. Oh well but always exciting to get a new PC!
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[ 0.65 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadOn the other hand, these GPUs are very very good for gaming - with DLSS, most of modern games will run at high details at 4K and look like something that scifi shows dreamed of just 10 years back.
And yes moore's law notionally died a long time ago, but it's been able to be hidden in various ways... and things are getting past the point where it can be hidden anymore.
Node costs are way way up these days, TSMC is expensive as hell and everyone else is at least 1 node behind. Samsung 5nm is worse than TSMC N7 for instance, and TSMC N7 is 5+ years old at this point.
Samsung 8nm (a 10+ node) used for Ampere was cheap as hell, that's why they did it, same for Turing, 12FFN is a rebranded 16nm non-plus with a larger reticle. People booed the low-cost offering and wanted something on a competitive, performant, efficient node... and now NVIDIA hopped to a very advanced customized N5P node (4N - not to be confused with TSMC N4, it is not N4, it is N5P with a small additional optical shrink etc) and people are back to whining about the cost. If they keep cost and power down by making the die size smaller... people whine they're stonewalling progress / selling small chips at big chip prices.
Finally we get a big chip on a competitive node, this is much closer to the edge of what the tech can deliver, and... people whine about the TDP and the cost.
Sadly, you don't get the competitive node, giant chip, and low prices all at the same time, that's not how the world works. Pick any two.
AMD is making some progress at shuffling the memory controller off to separate dies, which helps, but generally they're probably going to be fairly expensive too... they're launching the top of the stack first which is a similar Turing-style "capture the whales while the inventory of last-gen cards and miner inventory sells through" strategy. That likely implies decently high prices too.
There's nothing that can really be done about TDP either - thermal density is creeping up on these newer nodes too, and when you make a big chip at reasonable clocks the power gets high these days. AMD is expected to come in at >400W TBP on their products too.
> Not so cheap if you're just using it for gaming
I am not even sure if there is any recent game that can utilize 24GB of a 3090.
Honestly everything VR takes up huge amounts of vram, it's not possible to run No Man's Sky at max settings with only 8gb vram, and you still might need to dial down some settings with 12gb vram.
This is with a Quest 2, I'm guessing headsets with higher resolution will be even more demanding.
It's not just double the memory, is faster memory as well. Although, less CUDA cores and also doesn't include latest NVENC encoder/decoder, nor AV1 encoder, so... Tradeoffs I guess :) For some people it will be worth it, for others no.
For what? AI shit? These are for games broski
the hardware for low-precision matrix multiplications in ML is mostly independent of the hardware that’s typically utilized for vertex and fragment shaders in computer graphics. It really only gets used for graphics if using DLSS. It’s not used at all for (integer) computations in cryptomining.
Are they for high-precision scientific simulations because it’s possible to multiply matrices on them? These cards are probably quite shit at double-precision matrix multiplications.
Yes and they make Quadros for those :)
I assume they will soon have a professional card announcement that includes 48GB+ cards. Assuming that the high ram cards have improvements similar to this generational leap in the gaming market, they will be in high demand.
Sure, but you dont buy a high end GPU and then buy the best one next generation... I mean some do sure but a high end GPU like this you keep for a few years...
To be fair the ability to easily purchase the cards didn't materialize either until recently. Why develop for what your consumer can't get?
I hope they come out with 4090TI with more memory though
But also doesn't account for poor programming. I remember a reddit post about God of War using 15gb of vram after a while of playing, probably a memory leak.
Having available vram just gives yourself headroom for newer games with higher quality textures, there was a game which name eludes me which shipped with 8k resolution textures for 4k gaming so it used like 10gb of vram? Or something along those lines.
But it can also be used for pre-caching stuff, like if you were playing WoW and the next zone was already precached so you don't need to load it from the disk.
I think that new tech Sony and MS were working on, direct storage access? Will play a bigger and better role than higher vram.
I only game at 1440p so I don't care for more than 8gb of vram.
horizon zero dawn, notably, was already VRAM-limited by 10gb cards several years ago and would run lower-quality assets on a 3080.
I'm completely bottlenecked on RAM, but for what I do, even a 3060 would be adequate performance.
For inference? You can’t generally shard an AI across multiple cards, but you can run multiple instances. Depends on what your trying to do.
In no case will it be a simple linear speedup, and you certainly can’t add the memory together.
Speed is generally not a serious issue:
- I'm not trying to scale to millions of users on inference; it's a dev machine
- Training is a bit of fine-tuning; I'm not building big models from scratch.
- Worst-case speed has gone into "annoying" territory, but never into prohibitive. Worst case, I can grab a coffee while things run.
- It's not a lot of coffee, since I'm trying to visualize some interesting things about some data. The majority of that is data cleaning, visualization, data engineering, UI/UX, meetings, and a million other things. My GPU is sitting idle >>95% of the time.
I am constrained by RAM. In the era of GPT2 -> GPT3, Stable Diffusion, etc., RAM becomes a major bottleneck. There are cloud workflows, but they aren't a great fit, both due to data security / regulatory issues, to how we plan to do dev ops / deployment, as well as just to time for integration.
Dropping $8k on 4x 24GB GPUs would be a no-brainer if it let me work with bigger models.
I'm sure people can describe Better Ways to Do Things, but changing workflows, system architecture, etc. to those workflows would be obviously out-of-scope for what I'm trying to do. At that point, I'm better off working with smaller models. They're good enough.
My 2070 Super is still getting me along pretty well, we'll see if an upgrade is worth it.
E: At those MSRP's posted by other commenters....not likely, goddamn.
EDIT: Ah, archive.org has it: http://web.archive.org/web/20220920152158/https://www.nvidia...
> Ab XXX,XX $ > Verfügbar ab Monat XX.
So I believe it'll get removed soon again.
It seems like they went from 384/320 bit width (on 3080) down to 256/190? Anyone know the story behind it?
The 30xx cards needs a wide bus to feed it, but with the L2 cache on the GPU, you can get away with a smaller bus width (and faster memory on top, things shifted in the last couple of years and DDR6(X) memory is even faster now than it was).
Some of this also has to do with what kind of memory configurations you want to offer, as they are tied to the bus width. So if you widen the bus, you are looking at using more memory chips and having more memory. This pushes the price point upward, and you want it to tier somewhere in the middle of it all.
One "mistake" on the 30xx (Ampere) series were that the 3080 was much too powerful for its price point, and you couldn't really cram too much more power out above it due to its memory config. With this change, you can introduce a 4080Ti in between the 4080 16Gb and the 4090 as a mid-seasonal upgrade, and widen the bus a bit to satisfy it.
4080 12GB: $900
4080 16GB: $1200
4090: $1600
Ampere specs: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/compare/
This looks like a smaller bump than Ampere. 3090 seems cheaper and better than 4080. As people have pointed out, what I'd really like is more / upgradeable RAM. NVidia is trying to not compete with their higher-end cards, but ML tools are increasingly consumer.
It kinda feels like cheating.
This is starting to look like a repeat of Geforce FX vs Radeon 9700 Pro all over again.
Why is this megacorp using this famous person's name for marketing? Does the 40XX series have anything to do with Ada Lovelace at all?
(Yes I know Ada Lovelace passed away a long time ago so the name is probably free to use without paying her estate.)
This does mark a departure from a convention of only single surnames, and one could surmise as to why that decision was made. Though one might also consult a Falsehoods list, since 'Ada Lovelace' was never $first_name $last_name to begin with, having been derived from something like /(Augusta Ada|Ada Augusta) King \(née Byron\), Countess of Lovelace/
Even whole companies are named after famous people that have nothing to do with the company (Tesla, Faraday Future, etc)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_(microarchitecture)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius_(microarchitecture)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin_(microarchitecture)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_(microarchitecture)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_(microarchitecture)
https://www.denverpost.com/2013/06/01/intels-newest-processo...
> Until the mid-1990s, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel internally named its processors after cartoons, dead musicians and other well-known monikers. Attorneys for the late rocker Frank Zappa helped put an end to that practice after reaching out to the company about a potential trademark violation, said Intel spokesman Bill Calder. The legal team for the world’s largest computer-chip maker subsequently ordered that any new product code names be based on “existing, non-trademarked places in North America that can be found on a map,” Calder said.
> After struggling to find a suitable or available name in Oregon, where much of the chip design team is based, he stumbled upon Haswell in his ZIP code database.
> “I didn’t know anything about Haswell other than that it’s a good name,” Hampsten said. “Another reason I liked it, it had a suffix — well — which I could use for various other names.”
Over the last couple weeks, it's been possible to get 3090's on sale for juuuust under $1k (I picked one up after watching the prices come down from like $3k over the last couple years). The 4090 is priced at $1500... (and for me at least would require a new power supply.)
You can buy a 3090 for $999 today at Best Buy. That's not a bad price per frame. $1700 for the 4090, if 1.9x speed for raster, is not a bad price per frame either.
Both are stupid. Anyone spending $2k for video games graphics cards is wasting money in a stupid way: they are big, hot, shipped from far away, and turn into toxic landfill garbage in a matter of years. They mark the worst form of destructive consumerism that late-stage capitalism has produced, on par with leasing a new vehicle every 2 years: both are bad as products that turn into needless waste and both consume energy and produce unnecessary heat.
I am definitely going to buy a 4090 on October 12.
Wait till you hear about disposable vapes with perfectly rechargeable lithium-ion batteries
It’s bad enough the comments are computer generated. When they are client-side computer generated we’ve truly crossed over.
Your comment is kinda weird.
What the hell Nvidia. Post EVGA breakup, this is a bad look. Seems like they're setting MSRP ridiculously high in order to undercut board partners down the line.
Not with even 50% of the FLOPS. The 4090 won't be the best perf/$, but considering how much perf/$ and perf/watt you can get these days, I think it's pretty hard to complain that these are available. If you don't play games, get a Ryzen 5 7600X for $300 with an iGPU more than capable of high-quality desktop computing.
You can also get a brand new laptop for $130 right now https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-14-0-laptop-intel-celeron-... , which is $57.37 in 1990 dollars. (according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ ). The high-end is more expensive than ever, and the low-end is cheaper than ever. The Apple Lisa was $10k in 1983, which is about $30k today. You can get a Boxx Apex with multiple $10k Quadro GV100 GPUs and 8TB SSDs for that money today, or roughly a dozen high-end (but not TOTL) gaming PCs.
correction: 120hz not 144hz.
0: https://www.xbox.com/en-CA/consoles/xbox-series-x?xr=shellna...
That certainly implies many games dont support it.
I'm not really sure what Microsoft is trying to say on your link but the Series X definitely cannot run everything at native 4K.
PC gaming at the high end has always been about spending a lot of money to get the best graphics possible. Consoles always have much better bang for the buck early in a new console generation.
PC components are definitely too expensive right now, for several reasons, including Nvidia's pricing choices
While developers are free to make 4K 120hz their target, few games attempt it, and the ones that do, often make significant graphical compromises or are graphically undemanding to begin with.
I don't know why OP's setup would age like milk. As long as you keep them clean, games haven't really advanced that much in the last few years, in terms of graphics requirements.
Also, if anyone has advice on building a new machine, I'm listening. I've been out of the game so long that I don't even know where to start, and have children that want towers built.
It really didn't last any less time than PS4 or any other console.
ps5 hardware is sold at a profit (they hit profitability within 6-9 months of launch) and while microsoft claimed to a court that their hardware was subsidized as a justification for refusing to open the platform to alternate stores (so, somewhat self-interested of course), if you believe the production costs are fundamentally similar to PS5 then this is most likely "hollywood accounting".
It's real easy to have the xbox division license their branding from a parent company and if we set that at $100 a console then oops, there went all the profit.
It's not the PS3 days anymore where sony is losing 30% of the value of the console on the initial sale (and actually that wasn't the case for the other vendors even back in the PS3 days). Consoles are sold at a slight profit these days.
That said, having a "big APU" where everything shares a single bank of RAM and a single cooler/etc is a massive cost advantage. There is a lot of redundant cooling and memory in an ATX/PCIe spec PC and it all adds up. A console is one product with one assembly/testing line and one cooling/fan system and one set of memory. Clearly there is a market for "console-style PCs" which apply similar cost-optimizations, with a similar model to Steam Deck. Just so far there's nobody who's been willing to do the up-front cost and yet will choose not to lock down the resulting platform - Valve is somewhat unique on that front.
I did try to do some CUDA based AI rendering stuff on my 2080S but 8GB didn't seem to be enough.
Its weird to comprehend the 'stretching' of technology advance over time as I age, especially on the value side. There hasn't ever been the same 'feel' for me from the first leap of moving from software rendered Quake to a 3D-card - despite the various advances since, although I remember bump-mapping as another massive leap.
It's totally unfair in some ways. As an example the control you have over lighting a scene (either in a game or something you're rendering) is way beyond what multi-million dollar studios were using in my younger years.
What happens to society/reality when technology capable of producing video content indistinguishable from reality is affordable to many? Its already happening. Its going to become more commonplace.
The problem of 'truth' becomes massive - is the thing presented to you something that actually happened or was it fabricated?
I assume you mean the Xbox One S, because the Series S doesn't have a disc drive.
Thanks for catching it. Unfortunately I missed the edit window for the post.
It does show you how poor naming conventions can screw you over. Then again naming things is one of the two* hardest problems in computing.
* (Zero based two).
Reminder that the 780ti was $700. The top spec SKU.
Nvidia has took the GPU shortage and now set that pricing as the norm. And people will eat it up like suckers.
Pricing can't be insane and causing huge demand at the same time...
Nvidia sets the bar and AMD follows. AMDs prices have slowly crept up as well. So no matter what, you're paying much more for a top spec GPU today than you ever have before.
It's in the best interests of both Nvidia and AMD to keep these prices high, and it's a detriment to the consumer.
AMD did it with their CPUs as well. They undercut Intel with some great price/performance deals. Grabbed their market share back and are now bumping those prices back up to parity with Intel. Now neither company has to cut their prices.
Nvidia will use artificial scarcity to push these prices. We know they can produce a shit tonne of GPUs, they did it for years.
Before the first Ryzen, only Intel Atom CPUs had a price around $50/core, while the better Intel Core CPUs had prices around $100/core. Then Intel had to also follow AMD and drop the prices for the top models to around $50/core (the "efficiency" cores in Alder Lake and Raptor Lake count as a half core).
So there is still hope that the RDNA 3 GPUs will have a more decent performance/price ratio, even if it is unlikely that they will be faster than the RTX 40 Series.
When it comes to certain luxury products, price increases actually do increase demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
It's why people pay thousands of dollars for a handbag cost maybe tens of dollars to produce. People like playing status games.
This effect is why third richest person on the planet is Bernard Arnault of Louis Vuitton, someone you've likely never heard of. He's currently wealthier than Bezos. He didn't actually improve our lives or revolutionize industry. He just latched into our primitive status seeking behavior.
It's likely he wouldn't be the third richest person with just Louis Vuitton and it's probably mostly because of LVMH.
For $2000 you could get better light beams in a game you're already playing, or if you're physically capable you could take a mountaineering course and get a helicopter to and from a remote climb
So if you're in the business of having almost anything else to do with the money, it's going to seem like a really tenous financial choice.
Specially 1600 for a component that need probably at least half that much more just to be fully utilized.
$30/mo doesn't hit as hard as $1100 up front. For some consumers, its a fundamentally different way of thinking.
$700 USD in 2013 is worth $900 USD in 2022. Almost a decade of inflation.
Also, the GTX Titan was $1000 USD msrp, which was essentially the 780Ti with double the memory.
It feels more like 700$ in 2013 would be worth now 1400$??
No. "Printing Money" is a shortcut term used for many of the measures used by the federal reserve recently, but it's not literally printing money in this case (significantly less than trillion has actually been printed since 2019). Going into the details of the economics of this is a mess, and inflation is absolutely high and causing problems right now, and very likely is higher than official CPI numbers but it's not anywhere near 100% in 3 years. Keep in mind lots of prices dropped in 2020 and were still recovering/suffering in 2021, so that paints a skewed picture vs comparing 2022 to 2019 before covid wrecked things.
> It feels more like 700$ in 2013 would be worth now 1400$??
USD$700 circa 2013 adjusted for inflation is USD$890 in 2022. Feel free to pay more if you feel like it should be more though.
3090 is still just fine and generates profits.
The price is right if you sell all you produce. Empty shelves means you charge too little.
Personally I think what they're doing is maximizing launch profit without totally crashing the 30x0 market which has a supply glut, something else board partners are worried about.
I'm really not sure why you think this is bad for board partners - you haven't really explained your reasoning and what you did say doesn't make much sense. This is all positive for board partners. It's the cheap founders edition cards that undercut board partners.
My understanding regarding the EVGA debacle is that Nvidia sets really high MSRP along with charging for the chips & giving themselves a headstart and the partners can't go above the MSRP then Nvidia comes in and slashes prices that only Nvidia can compete at (since they can give themselves discounts on the chips along with all of the other advantages they have).
What board partners likely want is either: Nvidia is time-limited to a few months with Founder Cards or Nvidia allows them to sell cards for more money and Nvidia can't make any card except Founder.
Mine was, something like 9 months later. But I got my queue email & had 24 hours to buy. Maybe dig through your emails to see if you just missed it? Or maybe the model you waitlisted on was basically cancelled.
However, NVIDIA added $200 for both smaller models making them $1200 and $900.
It is debatable whether 4090 is worth $1600, but in comparison with it the two 4080 models are grossly overpriced, taking into account their GPU sizes and their 2/3 and 1/2 memory sizes.
It's the Turing strategy all over again - when you have a stockpile of older cards, you don't make your new cards too attractive. And yes, they also have a big TSMC allocation too - but they gotta get rid of the Ampere stuff first, the longer it sits the more it will have to be marked down, launching new cards that obsolete the inventory they're trying to sell would just make things worse.
AMD is going to be doing the same thing - they pushed back the midrange Navi 33 and will be launching only the high-end Navi 31 until that miner inventory burns through a bit. Similarly to NVIDIA, that likely implies they'll be launching at a high price, they'll undercut NVIDIA by $100 or $200 or something and take the margins but they're not gonna be the heroes of the $700 market either.
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The EVGA thing is a tempest in a teapot though, the losses he's talking about are something that's happened in the last month (he supposedly decided to quit back at the start of the year) and not representative of the (large, 10x normal) margins that board partners have been making in recent years. I personally didn't see much evidence of "price caps" with partner's first-party storefronts selling 3080s at 2.50-3x FE MSRP either.
And yes, jensen is an asshole and being a partner is a low-margin business, everyone already knows that.
EVGA is losing money because of some of it's CEO's ridiculous prestige side-projects (custom motherboards, enthusiast monitors, video capture cards that turned out to be falsely advertised, pcie sound cards, etc) and generous warranty support (long and transferable with absurdly cheap extended warranties) coupled with a higher-than-average failure rate (because they contract out assembly) and a generally lower-than-industry margin (because they contract out assembly) and they're just being drama queens on the way out.
Someone else with a personal axe to grind (EVGA tried to blacklist him for a critical review), but relaying some commentary from the other board partners: https://www.igorslab.de/en/evga-pulls-the-plug-with-loud-ban...
Personally, I like using RT for some single player showpiece games with a 3080 Ti, RT was useless on my 2080, but the games that I play the most do not use RT at all. DLSS is always great on any title that offers it, but again the real issue is that most of the games that people put real time into are the types of games for which RT is irrelevant. Graphical showpiece stuff is just a lot less relevant to the contemporary gaming market than it used to be.
“In /my opinion/, this doesn’t add enough to the game experience to justify the performance penalty. Also, my hardware isn’t strong enough to use it. Therefor it’s a gimmick! Herpa derpa!”
That may actually be giving too much credit. It’s probably more like “I don’t like it so it’s a gimmick that no one else should enjoy”
(Best sources I could quickly find on my phone. Annoying ads warning)
https://www.prosettings.com/zywoo-csgo/
https://www.gamersdecide.com/articles/csgo-best-resolution-s...
As for lowest settings, the CS:GO don't have options to put the game into flat panel mess that is professional Q3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3ui0hz6sm0
If you look at LoL, Fortnite, Valorant, Overwatch, they're all kind of the same — fairly flat light, bright colourful characters against a backdrop of pastels and otherwise muted background colours. Texture detailing is discrete and everything almost looks like block colours if you squint. Rainbow 6 Siege, CSGO, PUBG are the same, minus the colourful characters.
Even if those games didn't optimise their engines for performance over visual fidelity, their visual design would make them fairly light weight anyhow.
You're also at a disadvantage running the graphics on High.
In any game that I want to play at a "competitive" level, I always put the settings to the absolute lowest settings so the computer always gets 100+ FPS.
No reason to even try to optimize. The point is winning, not it looking good. In fact, in some games, the developers have had to go back and make it more fair for higher settings because of low settings hiding tall grass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX31kZbAXsA
You're looking at number people logged into an online service and thinking it represents anything about gamers that by definition aren't online. A typical sampling bias.
steam, ubisoft connect, origin, blizzard launcher, and rockstar are all online today, even for single-player games. I'm not sure where a significant number of non-platform-delivered games would even exist in 2022, I haven't bought a single game that didn't use steam or another platform from a vendor in ages.
The exception being GOG I guess, and to be fair there's a decent number of new-ish titles on that (horizon zero dawn) and I always make an effort to buy titles there when possible, but even still GOG's marketshare is minuscule in comparison to steam.
so no, actually, I disagree that there's some large repository of single-player games that are not showing up on steam or another equivalent.
(do PSN/XBL keep public player count stats?)
Overwatch and Valorant alone may have increased female participation in video games by double digit percentages. Also, the TV show for League, which was obviously aimed at women.
All multiplayer only
There are more single-player games than multi-player, but overall more hours have been spent (or are currently being spent) on multi-player games. For example, someone might play BioShock Infinite once and complete the story in under 15 hours and then never touch it again, but easily rack up hundreds of hours in Apex Legends.
As you've said though, there's a sampling bias. Going by the "current players online" metric might diminish how many players are playing single-player games without being online.
A multiplayer lives and dies by its community, so it makes sense that multiplayer gamers would coalesce around a relatively smaller number of games.
Multiplayer games are also designed far more around player retention. The unpredictability of human opponents, combined with various design decisions meant to keep players engaged, means that a multiplayer gamer may primarily play the same game for years. A solo player reaches the end of their game, maybe they even exhaust all the side content and achievements, but then they move on to the next single player game.
When I've seen this written it's often explained as to do with the fact that single-player is a much more curated experience, where the developers can stage-manage where you go and even where you look, and discard resources they know you won't see again.
That's why single-player often looks way better than multiplayer, where a) the experience isn't that curated and b) fps matters much more.
Gamers don't see it that way though because often, faked reflections are "good enough".
In some cases though, the faked reflections are noticeable and immersion breaking. I notice it in MS Flight Simulator. I'm flying over water and approaching a large city, and I can see the reflection of buildings in the water. But when I push the nose down, as the image of the buildings goes off the top of my screen, the reflections go away too. In reality, this wouldn't happen. But in the sim, it does because the reflections are generated by just inverting the rendered image of the buildings.
There's a map in Apex Legends where a section has a shiny floor. It fakes a reflection by rendering an environment-mapped texture. It does a decent job at making the floor look like it's reflective, but as you move around and compare what's being rendered to the actual geometry, you notice how it falls apart. But in a competitive FPS, you're not looking at the environment long and hard enough to notice.
Duke Nukem 3D had proper reflections, but it did it by actually mirroring all the geometry, a technique that only really works well if the geometry is simple.
RT makes reflections Just Work and work properly.
Most upper market cards can already run most games well at 1440p or 4k.
Personally, people say RT is a gimmick but I find it incredible on my 3080 for games that support it. In a game like Control the lighting is absolutely stunning, and even in a game like Minecraft RTX, the soft lighting and shadows are simply fantastic. (Minecraft IMO is a perfect example of how better soft shadows and realistic bounce lighting aren't just for "ultra realism" simulators.) It's already very convincing when implemented well. So I'm very happy to see continued interest here.
Have you tried CyberPunk 2077?
https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/10049/cyberpunk-2077-benc...
CP2077 seems to be the modern Crysis.
Op claimed to get 60 FPS at 4K with "pretty much" everything at max - I hope that wasn't implying "everything but raytracing". I got the card for raytracing, without raytracing even my 5 year old card worked ok and looked good enough.
Looks like I was wrong- the benchmark shows average FPS of 30, not 60. When I change DLSS to "Ultra Performance", then the FPS is 59.29 (I assume vsync) and I didn't see any visual differences in the benchmark. With DLSS at "Quality", average FPS is 27, with drops as low as 9, and obvious visual frame skips.
At the very least, seems like I should force DLSS to Ultra Performance, so I bring the average FPS during complex scenes up.
That sim eats graphics cards for breakfast.
I'm not sure I understand why memory is important for gaming? For most games, with every settings maxed up, it'll be a stretch if it uses 6GB of VRAM.
For other applications than gaming, 100% agree, but for gaming I can't imagine it's important.
Depends on what kind of gaming you do, not all games consume the same type of resources from the GPU. Simulation games will usually be limited by RAM size/speed, VRAM size/speed and CPU, rather than actual clock speed of GPUs. Action games would require better latency and not so much about VRAM/RAM size and so on.
It is very subjective. DLSS for me is always a blurry mess. I'm turning it off in every game - I'll better will turn off some RTX features than suffer that blurriness torture.
1. https://steamcharts.com/app/440
The pool of games that ask for extremely high performance is very small and pretty easy to ignore by accident.
(although in this case I’m not blaming my government too much, beyond failing to anticipate Germany’s need for our excess energy, and for not setting a country-wide pricing model for electricity. With Putin’s current stupidity, a lot of the previous energy planning goes out of the window, and all we can do is hold on for the ride.)
It is kind of mind boggling how this can happen for a country with almost infinite supply of hydro power, but here we are.
Of course, Norway being Norway, since the start of September we now get a 90% refund for everything above 0.7NOK (based on the average price of each 24 hours) so for most of us will survive.
Oh, and since most power plants are owned by the public this doesn't affect budgets as badly as it could have done.
(It is even more complicated but I don't have more time now. Someone please fill in if I got something really wrong. Also, yes, this is a wild tangent but thinking I know HN I guess it will the day a little less boring for someone : )
That’s not true, my contract is for 0.41 (EUR, but that’s kinda the same right now) and I’ve seen far higher prices. Unless you are talking wholesale, which might be true but is useless for a consumer comparison.
In California with PGE we pay $0.49/Kwh on peak if you're using above "baseline"
https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra...
Our power bill for a <2000sqft single-family home is about $800 per month right now, and CA + PGE keep trying to do things like this to prevent solar from being worth it: https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2022/08/cpuc-proposed-...
At that level you're really in the territory where people will trip breakers in their home. This is "you have to hire an electrician and rewire part of your house" level of power consumption, which doesn't seem sustainable? Or at least "don't turn the stove on at the same time", which seems like an awfully disruptive way to ask people to live.
Heck, at that level for homes/cities with older electric service at lower amperages, the computer is now a significant fraction of the total service capacity of your connection to the city grid.
What's the response then? "Sorry you're not living in a new build home, forget about gaming"?
For me the wall-power isn't a huge issue but now you have to think about air conditioning. 1-2KW dissipating in a closed room heats the room up fast. This is already a problem with the RTX 2000-series that I'm running now and it seems like it'll be even worse.
"Glad you want to game, now please evaluate your home's electrical and HVAC systems to ensure they are compatible with a giant box pumping 2KW of power and converting it directly to heat"
While reading this I felt a tinge of nostalgia for back when I had to ask my mother to stay off of the phone while I was online.
Maybe that's the genius of their plan? The chip designers continue to put out better & hotter processors and expect someone else to figure out cooling. Thermal design failures are not attributed to Intel and Nvidia, instead to OEMs and consumers.
Offering a more powerful GPU/CPU for people and use-cases that demand it is not a problem. Most games these days run well even on mid-tier cards of the 20 series, that's two generations ago. So people have all the choice in the world.
Just because a 1000 bhp LaFerrari exists in the market, doesn't mean you cannot buy a ~100 bhp Corolla. People who buy the Ferrari will need to take special care of their car to get the most out of it. That's a pleasure in itself for some.
At the high-end, Nvidia is making more powerful cards (HP) with the same fuel efficiency as before. Maybe they are making more efficient cards at the lower end but those don’t get attention on HN it seems.
No, perf/w is still climbing every generation. It'll climb hugely this generation too.
NVIDIA's marketing number is 2x perf at the same wattage as last gen, obviously needs to be validated by third party testing but they're shrinking two nodes at once here, it's a bigger node jump than Pascal was.
People have been primed to react negatively by a couple of twitter rumormongers like kopite7kimi. Yeah 4090 has a high TGP, but it's more like 400W TGP (450W TBP) and not the 800W TGP / 900W TBP that he was shouting from the rooftops about. There is still a huge gain in efficiency here, it's just also a very large (and expensive) chip on top of the higher efficiency.
But people don’t discard their incorrect mental frames when the information used to build them is falsified. Actually they just tend to retrench and dig deeper (“450W is still too much even if it is 2x perf/w!”). Ada is a power hog, “everybody knows it”.
https://videocardz.com/newz/flagship-nvidia-ada-sku-might-fe...
People said they wanted a balls-out big chip on a competitive node, that's exactly what the 4090 is, it's highly efficient and very large, this is much closer to the cutting edge of what the tech can deliver than Samsung 8nm junk or little baby 450mm2 dies. Now people are complaining about the TDP and the cost, even if it's more efficient that's not good enough. Unfortunately the TDP is a matter of physics, thermal density is going up every generation and a big chip on a modern node pulls a lot of power.
There are lower models in the stack too and those will maintain that efficiency benefit. It's a larger-than-pascal node shrink, efficiency is going up a lot here.
This is what Intel did for a while with their "tick tock" strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model
You'll be hard pressed to find a generation where power efficiency actually decreased. That didn't happen with the RTX 30xx series, for example. Even though power skyrocketed, performance increased by more than power did. Meaning efficiency still increased. That's been true for every generation I can think of, certainly all the more recent ones anyway. Maybe AMD had a few like that where they just re-rev'd the same architecture multiple times in a row.
With watercooling and a big rad, it can get even quieter.
the bigger issue is where all that additional heat is going and how. I'll be paying close attention to the SPL metrics for this generation.
What you describe is accurate, the 3090 Ti produces a tremendous amount of heat under load in my experience and I would expect the same with these new cards.
I was undervolting and underclocking my Titan XP for a long time (with a separate curve for gaming) but lost the config and have been lazy to go back. I mainly did this because it has a mediocre cooler (blower design that is not nearly as good as the current ones but also not terrible) and even at low usage it was producing a lot of heat and making some noise (the rest of my system I specifically designed to have super low noise).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32899656
Some people are probably in the target audience for the 4090. Others may prefer the 4080 models, which have a slightly lower TDP than the 3080 models but still get a nice performance boost from much higher clock rates.
This isn't necessarily a bad or losing strategy, BTW, it just is what it is. Data paths are often very hot and don't scale linearly in many dimensions, just like power usage doesn't. Using smaller bus widths and improving bus clock in return is a very legitimate strategy to improve overall performance, it's just one of those tough tradeoffs.
Rule of thumb: take any flagship GPU and undervolt it by 30%, saving 30% power/heat dissipation, and you'll retain +90% of the performance in practice. My 3080 is nominally 320/350W but in practice I just cliff it to about 280W and it's perfectly OK in everything.
[1] Some people might even be positively surprised, since a lot of the "leaks" (bullshit rumors) were posting astronomically ridiculous numbers like 800W+ for the 4090 Ti, etc.
Every time this comes up, people forget that:
1) Flagship cards like the 3090 Ti and 4090 consume significantly more power than typical cards. You should not buy a flagship card if power is a concern.
2) You don't have to buy the flagship card. Product lineups extend all the way down to tiny single-fan cards that fit inside of small cases and silent HTPCs. It's a range of products and they all have different power consumption.
3) You don't have to run any card at full power. It's trivial to turn the power limit down to a much lower number if you want. You can drop 1/3 of the power and lose only ~10-15% of the performance in many cases due to non-linear scaling.
4) The industry has already been shipping 450W TDP cards and it's fine.
If power is an issue, buy a lower power card. The high TDP cards are an option but that doesn't mean that every card consumes 450W
Physics is telling you that you need to let the chip "shrink" when you shrink. If you keep piling on more transistors (by keeping the chip the same size) then the power goes up. That's how it works now. If you make the chip even bigger... it goes up a lot. And NVIDIA is increasing transistor count by 2.6x here.
Efficiency (perf/w) is still going up significantly, but the chip also pulls more power on top of being more efficient. If that's not acceptable for your use-case, then you'll have to accept smaller chips and slower generational progress. The 4070 and 4060 will still exist if you absolutely don't want to go above 200W. Or you can buy the bigger chips and underclock them (setting a power limit is like two clicks) and run them in the efficiency sweet spot.
But, everyone always complains about "NVIDIA won't make big chips, why are they selling small chips at a big-chip price" and now they've finally gone and done a big chip on a modern node, and people are still finding reasons to complain about it. This is what a high-density 600mm2 chip on TSMC N5P running at competitive clockrates looks like, it's a property of the node and not anything in particular that NVIDIA has done here.
AMD's chips are on the same node and will be pretty spicy too - rumors are around 400W, for a slightly smaller chip. Again, TDP being more or less a property of the chip size and the node[0], that's what you'd expect. For a given library and frequency and assuming "average" transistor activity: transistor count determines die size, and die size determines TDP. You need to improve performance-per-transistor and that's no longer easy.
[0] an oversimplification ofc but still
That's the whole point of DLSS/XeSS/Streamline/potentially a DirectX API, get more performance-per-transistor by adding an accelerator unit which "punches above its weight" in some applicable task and pushes the perf/t curve upwards. But, people have whined nonstop about that since day 1 because using inference is a conspiracy from Big GPU to sell more tensor cores, or something, I guess. Surely there is some obvious solution to TAAU sample weighting that doesn't need inference, and it's just that every academic and programmer in the field has agreed not to talk about it for the last 20 years, right?
You don't have permission to access "http://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/40-series..." on this server.
Reference #18.3df06e68.1663689222.96a3b41'
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html
You might be able to pick up a card that was used for mining super cheap.
Whether this is just misdirection thrown around by crypto miners looking at a hole of sunk assets or not, I could not say. Personally I'd just buy new, but I have also probably never spent over 300usd on a card.
I'm looking forward to buying a used crypto mining card when the current one dies.
UPD: asked a friend to generate image on m1 with diffusion bee. It took 4 minutes 30 seconds to generate one 25 sample image. It is not even close and much worse than I thought.
Obviously your choice depends greatly on budget + availability of hardware, as well as your desired resolution, but I'd suggest the 2070 or 2080 (maybe 2080ti?) as a good starting point.
Or even 3090
Even for gaming though wouldn’t 3090 be more future-proof? 4K is really the way to experience games in 2021 and beyond
You certainly don't need a 3090 for gaming in 4K. nVidia's claim of the 3090 being a "4K" card is marketing bullshit. If a game can't be run in 4K on a 3080, then the 10-20% performance increase of a 3090 isn't likely to change that.
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_value.html
Luckily 'en-gb' is less likely to be overridden than 'en-us'.
Intel has already moved to 2.0, and AMD is rumored to be supporting displayport 2.0
Would have liked to see this for 40 series, but I guess I will wait to build my first PC
But I assume that they will get a certification in the future.
For Thunderbolt, where it was Intel who did the certifications, many companies have sold motherboards or computers for months or years with non-certified Thunderbolt ports which worked OK, while waiting for the certification.
Strange since the new frame interpolation in DLSS 3 might bring us much closer to smooth motion on sample-and-hold displays.
Still works great at 1440p
Note that the 3070 had a launch MSRP of 500$.