LinkBack URL
About LinkBacksI totally agree with CAT-THE-FIFTH.
People lowered the bar for what should be expected. And are ready to pay way more.
AMD is not introducing cards in this class, so nVidia can do whatever they want with the prices.
Will wait December.
I totally agree with CAT-THE-FIFTH.
People lowered the bar for what should be expected. And are ready to pay way more.
AMD is not introducing cards in this class, so nVidia can do whatever they want with the prices.
Will wait December.
The more you live, less you die. More you play, more you die. Isn't it great.
CAT-THE-FIFTH (30-05-2016)
The Halo parts not only serve to expand brand advertising but by pushing cards now a few tiers up,it also serves another purpose of managing the performance increases at each generation,and basically also means you have even more product segmentation now.Originally Posted by kalniel
The GPUs under that were then pushed up one segment higher. An example with Fermi would be:
1.)£400 to £450 GTX580 - Titan F with £700+ price
2.)Sub £300 GTX570 - GTX580TI with £500+ price
3.)£200 GTX560TI - GTX580 with £400+ price
4.)Sub £200 GTX560 - GTX570 with £250 to £350 price
5.)GTX550TI - GTX560
AMD is doing the same with the Fury line.
The Fury line essentially rescued the price of the R9 290 series line which were in freefall.
It meant AMD could actually increase the MRSP of both the R9 285 and R9 290 rebrands.
If the Fury line had actually not been a misfire,and matched and exceeded the GTX980TI,the top AMD card would have been £500+ and this is my worry with Vega.
I expect if the top Vega matches or exceeds the equivalent Nvidia top end card,it will be well over £500 and push the rest of the range upwards.
The thing is Nvidia mostly makes money from GPUs and their margins have gone up by nearly double over the last 4 years or so,so the strategy is very sound financially and kudos on Nvidia managing people's expectations. From their perspective its done very well for them,and hats off that they managed to get it to work for them but it is not so good for consumers.
The thing is though,if you looked at it in a basic view,the 314mm2 GP104 is not doing that badly,but the pricing structure and product segmentation is just out of whack.
But the problem it is screwing over the sub £250 market in the process.
Look at the last JPR report:
https://jonpeddie.com/images/uploads...h-pr-2rev2.png
The Enthusiast market is above $300(or around £200 in our money),and according to reports a while back the market above $449(£310) is tiny. This means by its very pricing the GTX1070 is more niche.
Most cards sold are under $300 still,but more people are spending $300+ on cards.
This is because the sub $300 market has had such rubbish improvements people are forced to spend more and more on cards,by moving to the tier above.
I could even understand if these were the straight 20NM node cards we might have had last year,but Nvidia is using second generation TSMC 16NM and AMD second generation GF/Samsung 14NM. These are bascially third generation 20NM based processes.
I am now getting a bit worried what Polaris 10 and the GTX1060 will bring to the table. I expect they will be £250 and be around R9 390X/GTX980 level which will make them the same price/performance as the GTX1070.
Sadly it also means only a 10% to 20% improvement over their predecessors. This means instead of spending the same to get a performance improvement,people will now have to go to the segment ABOVE,AGAIN.
I think we will only get the decent improvements under £300 when we have the GTX1080TI and Vega 10 released.
Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 30-05-2016 at 10:20 AM.
Yet,the GTX670 beat the GTX580(which was the equivalent of the Titan X of its day) by 20% at a similar dollar price-point.
Years of price increases and stagnation on 28NM and the fact 20NM was not viable,have made people forget the kind of increases we used to be getting with new nodes.
The £250 GTX970 on the same 28NM node managed to match or beat a £500 to £600 GTX780TI with significantly lower power consumption. Yet with a 1.5 node shrink(standard shrink plus finfets),the GTX1070 can barely do the same with the GTX980TI.
Look at the massive performance difference between it and the GTX1080 - the latter is around 20% to 25% faster.
The GTX680 was not even 10% faster than a GTX670.
I have this bad feeling the £250 GTX1060/GTX1060TI and Polaris 10 will be not much faster than a GTX980 or R9 390X,as a GTX1070 will be probably 20% to 25% faster than them too.
Plus does the GTX1070 memory controller have full 256 bit memory access or is it a hybrid one like the GTX970,GTX660TI,GTX660 and GTS450?
I'm still not seeing where the 1070 is barely touching a 980Ti, you keep mentioning older gen cards and relative performance charts.Maybe it's the flu clouding my perception
Maybe you need to get over the flu and read what I said?!I'm still not seeing where the 1070 is barely touching a 980Ti, you keep mentioning older gen cards and relative performance charts.Maybe it's the flu clouding my perception
Thanks,you actually read what I said!
What i was trying to highlight is that there's been "improvements" just not in the metric that really counts, a little like we've had from Intel for a while now, IDK if that's down to the effect of going under a certain node size or if it's a choice to focus on things like power efficiencies and other things that are (arguably) less important.
The thing is the Kepler cards delivered in both metrics,with the GTX670 being 20% faster than the GTX580 at $400 and you could even argue the GTX970 traded blows and dropped power over the GTX780TI/Titan Black at $330(£250 over here IIRC) on the same node.
The problem is the GTX1070 is also trading blows with the GTX980TI/Titan X but on a third generation 20NM process node,and costs $379 to $449,and due to the worse exchange rates,is probably more like £320 to £400.
The GTX1070 is doing the same as the GTX970 did,but with relatively higher cost and also with a massively improved process node.
This is why I am underwhelmed.
Remember with reduced power,also comes cheaper PCB and cooler costs too.
I think the only real way to get better price/performance is once we the GTX1080TI and Vega cards released. This will force the GTX1080 down from £500 to £600 to closer to £400.
But my main worry is now where does that leave the sub £300 GTX1060/GTX1060TI and Polaris 10? Unless AMD can have much better performance/pound than a GTX1070,it is only going to be another bore inducing improvement again.
The thing is I will probably look at upgrading to a QHD resolution monitor like a Dell U2515H or an AOC Q2778Vqe for image editing and these can be had for £200 to £250 if you shop around. You can get 2560X1080 monitors for like £200.
But the problem is with these small improvements,it makes me wonder whether I can justify spending £300+ just so I play games reasonably well on a £200 to £250 screen and I fully expect over a period of like three to four years I would probably have to spend like £700 alone on the cards.
One of those monitors should easily last 5 to 6 years at least - that means if you upgrade every two years you will need to spend like £1000+ on cards just going for the second rate £350 ones.
That is 4 to 5 times the cost of the monitor alone.
Even then you are not guarenteed that even on your £200 to £250 monitor you can run the game at decent framerates and settings for the next two year period - there will be £500 to £700 cards which Nvidia and AMD need to justify at that price,which will be 30% faster.
This is why AMD and Nvidia do this - it forces people to upgrade quicker.
I think at the rate things are going I will just probably drop the resolution down on the monitor,and have to buy a cheaper card.
Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 30-05-2016 at 01:08 PM.
It's all fairly simple, if you have been looking to purchase a new 970 level card then you simply wait and buy a 1070, obviously you may want to wait for the competition.
I myself will be picking up one when I can, 660 is in dire need of a change.
I do laugh at the people with 970+ sli setups that comment\complain\moan that it's either too expensive or not good enough (Same goes for the 1080).
I'm not entirely sure why if you have that sort of setup you'd want to bother with the next generation.
I've always thought that most sensible people did the whole skip one gen, then buy the next.
Maybe i's just in the dark ages or simply not swimming in their levels of money.
I'd really like to get one, but not sure if it'll be enough for the ultra wide 1440p I'm looking at. It'll be enough for editing and stuff, but for games - I'll have to suffice with high settings instead of ultra I guess
I think they could partly get away with it because the CPU market has had far worse stagnation, so money that people would have budgeted on updating their CPU they have kept the old one and looked for somewhere else to spend it.
Agreed. I've noticed the bias nature as well. Hexus is the only site I've seen that actually shows the 980ti with a significant lead over the Fury X in Tomb Raider DX12....every other site has shown them being neck and neck at anywhere from 35-28 average FPS while here 980ti is able to acheive 40+...riiiiiiiiiight
In short they are holding very much back... looked over the tests.... and it is more about power efficiency than about speed and performance.
When you buy a a sports car you do not expect it to go as slow as a Prius, you expect the top end junk to create a new hole in the universe, so far NVIDIA has not impressed me by alot with actual raw power performance with the 10XX series, unless they make a GTX1090 ( Dual GPU 1080 ) with 16GB HBM2.... if one already has GTX970~980Ti, wait with buying anything untill they start releasing the next step.
I am still waiting on AMD's move in this case.... no matter what brand is showcased... I go with the one that has the most actual horsepower.
Quite a lot of interesting reading here with these comments.
Yes, Nvidia is holding very much back. Is this a surprise though? Of course not. Think about it from their perspective. This is capitalism - they charge for their product an amount they believe the market will bear. The market is bearing the price because the product is selling well.
I take their "billions of dollars of R&D investment" claim with a pinch of salt, but it is undoubtedly true that a lot of money will have been invested into development of Pascal. With their architectural roadmap Nvidia will be able to a good degree predict the kind of performance they are likely to leverage from an architecture over it's lifespan.
Now, put the two together. If you are a for profit company what you don't do is release a class leading product with groundbreaking performance levels and sell it cheaply because you want to make consumers happy. You temper your product line so that the products you release provide a widely acceptable performance uplift from your prior product line balanced with a pricing uplift that you believe the market will bear. Nvidia probably already have working silicon of a 1080Ti etc, but there is no reason for them to release that yet because there is no competition for them at the high end to drive them into doing this.
People, particularly tech enthusiasts and gamers whom I count myself amongst, seem to have this concept of entitlement. Don't get me wrong I don't like being ripped off, I consider myself quite savvy and I long as much as anyone to see progress. But ultimately you have to accept that this is a business driven by profit. It is an industry that progresses because of profit. It's not to make you happy - that's just a byproduct.
The above comment about sports cars is a poor analogy. You don't buy a sports car and expect it to go as slow as Prius, true. But if you buy a Bugatti or you buy a Lambo, you pay a lot of money and both of those cars are going to be fast. When it comes time to buy a new sports car you're going to be paying a lot of money again and is the new car going to be generationally faster than the old one? No. Because that industry HAS stagnated. Combustion engine automobile technology has fundamentally plateaued. Whether you buy a Fiat Panda or a Bugatti Veyron you're getting a car with a combustion engine and 4 wheels. It is not a good comparison because the GPU and technology markets have massively shorter lifecycles and, as is evident, much higher consumer expectations.
kalniel (31-05-2016)
That's a really good point - the generational (~yearly) leaps in performance from GPUs are something not even seen in formula 1. Process tech evolution has given us a (possibly irresponsible) level of expectation.
Nice 1070, best graphic card ever!
No it hasn't and it is a poor analogy - we are seeing other devices which rely on silicon manufacturing decrease in price and give us greater performance. The people making excuses for high prices are just talking nonsense.
Remember all the excuses making Rollo made during the HD5000/Fermi launch months - you need to pay more for luxury,people are having a sense of entitlement since its XYZ, etc stuff which came straight out of the PR book he was being bribed with. Don't believe me?? Go back over his some of his posts.
Cars have also gotten far more efficient too - trying to look at sports cars is a stupid analogy. You only have to look at how cars with smaller and smaller engines are consuming less and less fuel,are getting bigger as they are producing even more BHP/Litre with less emissions.
Even cheap cars are higher performing and faster than they have ever been.
Nvidia has doubled gross margins in the last 4 years meaning the costs are not going up proportional to the actual price - people making excuses are gullible to the PR rebranding and it almost like some weird kind of Stockholm syndrome. They are making record profits.
Things like monitors,phones,etc all have gone down in price.
Graphics cards are not some special case.
FFS,whole consoles are being made for £250 with 300MM2+ chips,8GB of RAM,HDDs,PSUs and not at a loss.
So the excuse making that cards using die salvaged 250mm2 to 300mm2 GPUs all of a sudden now HAVE to be £300+ has to come across as some weird fetish.
It is also destroyed by the fact,that AMD can offer close to R9 390X level performance at well under £200 which means price/performance seems much higher.
Weak consumers are the best type of consumer for a company - they make excuses for high pricing. If people make excuses for high pricing they get ripped off.
People have this view they are subservient to companies and must accept what they give them - ultimately it is consumers which dictate what a company does and their pricing.
Computer enthusiasts are some of the weirdest bunch of people - they seem to have a Stockholm level of attachment for companies and want to be actively ripped off.
If you set your expectations at zero,then you deserve to get nothing and be ripped off by companies.
This is what a "for-profit" company wants.
Down-managing people's expectations,then making them psychologically accept it is as important as the products they launch. It maximises profits. It also means they are more like to upgrade quicker for smaller improvements which increases repeat business and cheapens sunken costs
Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 01-06-2016 at 10:04 AM.
No-one is (or at least, I'm not) making excuses for high prices, only saying that expecting doubling of performance every year is unreasonable if you're comparing it to cars. Cars are getting better tech wise, sure, but they're not doubling their efficiency each year.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
