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But really, I don't buy that Nvidia can't regularly release improved GPUs for consumers. Consumer hardware is reaching a peak but there's still a lot more that can be done in terms of efficiency. Just look at how great modern flagship phone chips are. The M5 Max macbook pro for example is sooooooooo much more efficient than a typical gaming laptops, and it's in a slim chassis.

Nvidia just stopped caring because they make too much money selling to data centers now, and they are releasing regular improvements for their high end server hardware. Consumer GPUs are just pocket money to them now, and there's practically no competition so why would they bother releasing something new?

Unrelated to the topic of the article, looking at the graph made me realize that GPUs didn’t use to be so expensive, and the change is not so recent.
I have been gaming on PCs since I was a kid, first on a 286 in DOS. I don’t remember what were the first games, but I think it was ASCII graphics. Sprites were of course even better.

https://cdn.mobygames.com/screenshots/2255336-prehistorik-dos-level-1-begins.png

I have been building my own computers for decades. I never wanted to spend more than necessary, so I only updated things every now and then, and I always picked a good value GPU from the budget to mid tier. I always understood that PC gaming has a niche where people build monster configurations with powerful GPUs to run games at max settings with unnecessary high resolution and frame rates. It makes sense for a hobby, it’s cool. But you don’t actually need that much power to enjoy games, right?

What I just realized is that the slice of people who look for high performance GPUs for games is likely much bigger than I thought. At some point the industry made consumers believe that you need 4k and 120 fps (or maybe more). That the point of PC gaming is to beat the specs of consoles. But that’s so not true. A PC is great because it’s a general purpose open platform to run whatever software you want. If a game is not fun at mid setting full HD 30 fps, it’s not fun. How many of the people dishing out north of $300 on a GPU are competitive e sports players or popular streamers? Probably most of them are not. 90% of the progress in GPU hardware is likely spent on generating frames that are not perceived at resolutions that are not seen.

I was momentarily confused that this article is pretty much the script of a YT video by Hardware Unboxed I saw recently, but then I noticed that he is literally the author.

While all these developments point in a very worrying direction, I think there are some positives to this: Fewer performance gains means longer upgrade cycles, longer support windows and less pressure on consumers to keep soending money on upgrades (although the eventual upgrade is now way more expensive).

The actual reason is executive bonus structures.

250W and $1000 is plenty for a GPU and I am willing to die on this hill, apparently with an AMD card in my hand.

I think its really funny that the RTX brand name still reflects Nvidia's previous endeavor to pump money.

Remember they made a big deal about real time ray tracing because they already knew that GTX series had hit a powerful standard that would cause GPUs to become cheaper in the long run. The only "improvements" left for gaming was raw performance and 4k content, which Moore's law would solve in only a handful of years.

So they artificially created a new graphics standard requiring new hardware that no one actually needed to ensure that future generations of GPUs would remain highly profitable.

Which is why the 30 series had such a massive leap over the 20 series for ray trace performance. They wanted everyone to buy the next product, so they simply added more ray tracing cores that really should have been in the 20 series.

But then the big AI moneymaker hit and they focused all their attention to the tensor cores instead, and now the RTX name and ray tracing cores are an artifact of the past.

The real reason ~~NVIDIA~~ big tech has abandoned ~~gamers~~ all personal computing

How can you know why that is? Looks like technological limitations and diminishing gains to me.

Companies chase the money. Nvidia was never for gamers, it was for investors and gaming just happened to be where the money was. Now it's not and people are realizing the truth of it all. To corporations we are nothing other than disposable profit margins. If the corporations can find a better profit elsewhere they will gladly do so. It's been that way for a while.

Checks out. Having 680ti and going to 1080ti is like day and night. 1080ti to 5090ti - room is just bit hotter.

Edit: went to look how much was 680ti at release and found this gem

The analysis comparing GPU flagships and price/wattage is somewhat shallow because it hides another thing that has been going on, the reduction of fundamental specs of the various classes of card. It used to be the case that a x80 chip meant it had a 512 bit memory bus, that it was ~500mm^2 die and hence a fully maxed out GPU and you got all that for ~$400-500 or so. Then the 680 came out and its specs were more like an x70 card from the prior generations, its only 294mm^2 and a 256bit bus, it was a rename of the lower class card, they never produced a flagship for that particular generation and some of that degradation in specs carried over to the 780 ti as well which now only had a 384 bit bus but its die size was ~561mm^2.

An RTX580 is now 378mm^2, which is about an x70 in pre 2012 terms and 256bit bus which is also x60-x70 class.

That process has resulted in the titans and the x90 and the x80 ti all slipping above the x80 as its specs gradually decline and its price is still going up compared to the historical picture, enormously more than inflation. During the same period CPUs on the other hand have stayed fairly similar in price with a steady increase in performance at a price point. That 680 oddity in the historical area was the moment things changed and AMD had a big part to play in the reason why with their 7970 being priced so much higher. This process started then in 2012 and its been getting worse as time goes on.

1080 was a beast, ep #91928.

"For the first time, the price increase was larger than the performance uplift.

Nvidia tried to sweep this issue under the rug with promised technologies such as ray tracing and upscaling. We all know how well that played out for the GeForce 20 series."

Is there somebody here that know's what they're talking about because I very much do not know "how well that played out?"

Looks like there's a limit on how much disposable income people are willing to pay for technology... 🤔 Well what if we didn't have games anymore! Instead maybe we should put AI on everything and try to get their money? Nah... equal amount of disposable income regardless.

Wow, the last discrete GPU I bought was the GTX 570… 16 years ago!