Question 4070/4060Ti/4060 Thoughts

[Ar558]

Given the disaster that is the 4070Ti, I was thinking the lower down the stack cards are surely going to be as bad in terms of spec and value. If we remember the 4070Ti was meant to be a 80 class card surely the 60Ti/60 at least will have only a 128 bit bus and 8GB RAM. I'm sure nVidia will ensure the clocks are enough to marginally beat their predecessors overall but given the MSRP's are likely to be a 20% minimum more than the 30 series equivalents, any gains will be below the 1% of performance for 1% price increase level making them woefully bad value? Hopefully AMD will actually punish them but as it stands nVidia are single handedly trying to kill PC gaming.

 

[Eximo]

They are doing it...

News - Nvidia's RTX 40-Series Laptops Hint at Future RTX 4060 and 4050 Desktop Specs

Nvidia has revealed the full lineup of RTX 40-series mobile GPUs, ranging from the top RTX 4090 down to an anemic looking RTX 4050. 8GB or less VRAM on "mainstream" GPUs in 2023? Thanks but no thanks. Nvidia's RTX 40-Series Laptops Hint at Future RTX 4060 and 4050 Desktop Specs : Read more

forums.tomshardware.com

128 bit and 96 bit bus...okay

 

[hotaru.hino]

More games are produced without it than with it, and no one has launched a game where ray tracing is a minimum requirement.

"More games" in what scope? If I include the entire gameosphere, I could argue more 2D games are being made than 3D games, so shall we write off 3D games now?

And there's a game that requires ray tracing hardware: Metro Last Exodus Enhanced. Yes you could say "but that's just an update to an existing, not a game built from the ground up," but I'd say that still qualifies. And the original supported ray tracing as well. Besides, go back in time and ask "no one launched a game where X hardware feature is a minimum requirement." Should we have written off assymetric compute? Hardware accelerated tessellation? Programmable Shaders? Hardware T&L? (remember when 3dfx said hardware T&L was pointless?)

No game studio who wants to try to make a profit on the game they sell will limit themselves to a target audience who only has the bleeding edge.

We are already at 4 years old for ray tracing. Current gen consoles are 2 years old, in another 4 or 5 years, I would expect the GPUs in the consoles to support ray tracing properly. And then, yes, mainstream.

What's "properly"?

Of course people want games to look good. For PC gamers, that is usually secondary to FPS.

I thought PC gamers want to have their cake and eat it too, so they can bag on the "console peasants." i.e., their games look better and perform better.

In any case, all I'm seeing here is your observation of the chicken and egg problem. You can't expect a new hardware feature to magically become mainstream nor for software developers to be ace at it and have 100 apps ready overnight. History continues to show that it takes forever in computer terms to finally make something a requirement that was whizzbang in the past. And I'm seeing you don't see an application that you think is good enough to continue to put a spotlight on this hardware feature. And that's fine. But that doesn't mean someone else isn't seeing it in the same light. I mean heck, I don't need AVX so why should Intel keep continue pushing it?

They are doing it...

News - Nvidia's RTX 40-Series Laptops Hint at Future RTX 4060 and 4050 Desktop Specs

Nvidia has revealed the full lineup of RTX 40-series mobile GPUs, ranging from the top RTX 4090 down to an anemic looking RTX 4050. 8GB or less VRAM on "mainstream" GPUs in 2023? Thanks but no thanks. Nvidia's RTX 40-Series Laptops Hint at Future RTX 4060 and 4050 Desktop Specs : Read more

forums.tomshardware.com

128 bit and 96 bit bus...okay

Tell me, why is the bus size a concern?

 

[Ar558]

I wouldn't say that the whole line up is a disaster. According to several very qualified reviewers the 4000 series is actually very good when it comes to performance, features, efficiency, power, design, and (FE) build quality. BUT, it is expensive and Nvidia went kind nuts with the pricing. But, you can just say the cards are bad because of the price. The cards are not bad, the price is. Especially, Steve from Gamers Nexus is on some kind of "only price and value matters, so I don't even say anythng good about those cards anymore whatever how good they actually are" trip. At least other reviewers (Igor, PCgaminghardware, Jay, Hardware Unboxed and others) acknowledge actually quality, features and performance, even so they all complained about the insane pricing. And pretty much all said "very good product, but we don't recommend to buy it at this price". Also, AMD is not much better. Their new cards even so they lacking a lot of the features and are basically similar performance than 4080 and 4070ti are priced also incredible high. If they want to be the savior of PC gaming they should have launched those cards for at least $200 less. But they are as money hungry as Nvidia and went as high as they could. good for them, because the probably need all that cash to replace the thousands of 7900XTX cards with faulty coolers....

Back to Nvidias high pricing (and AMDs following along), yeah, its nuts. If the GPU shortage of the few years and the pandemic taught them one thing, it is that gamers are willing to pay ridiculous prices for GPUs. But the problem was that a big portion of those profits went into the pockets of scalpers. My feeling is that they Nvidia and AMD expected very high street prices with the 4000 and 7000 series cards and just don't want to give up any of the profit margin to scalpers. So they just increased the MSRP to scalper price level and keep the cash. It kinda worked out for them with the 4090, not so much for the 4080. I think prices will eventually go down over the next few months a bit. But never back to the pre pandemic prices. They probably also noticed that they went to far with pushing prices that high, but probably won't admit to their mistake. I think we will see more "price reductions" on new models down the product stack this year and they might rethink all this with next gen 2 years from now. But I don't think they will change MSRP on already released products.

Yes, those high prices have quite a bit of extra profit for Nvidia and AMD, but not all is only profit. Don't forget that 2021 TSMC increased their prices by 30% and eliminated volume pricing to large customers altogether. So, even if AMD or Nvidia using smaller dies, they might not actually get cheaper to make.

One last thought: what good would have lower MSRPs done? The RTX 3080 launched two year with an MSRP of $699. I tried to buy one 2 years ago and tried for 2 month until I gave up. I haven't seen one even close to MSRP until recently. I don't think normal gamers would have been able to buy one at MSRP, if the 4080 would have launched with a $799 or $899 price tag. Would have been scalpers paradise again. For gamers buying cards actually nothing changed. We still pay high prices. The only thing that changed is who gets most of the profits from the high prices. And being actually able to buy a card directly from a retailer, and not from a scalper, and actually finding one right away without refreshing browser for weeks on end, is actually a win for me.....

Well I agree with GN Steve, this isn't a theoretical exercise about making great tech that isn't affordable to anyone outside the top 1%, they have to be reasonable priced to have any real value to the consumer.

nVidia have taken the wrong lesson from the pandemic GPU demand and scalper pricing. That was all situational, Millions of people needing new PC's as they literally couldn't leave their houses combined with a crypto boom. Now we have the opposite, Crypto Slump, people free to do other activities and high inflation meaning the biggest squeeze on most peoples disposable incomes for 40 years. They might think they can charge those prices but they won't get much business outside the 1% and a few gamers who prioritise gaming above everything else and are still pretty well paid. The prices wont go back to pre pandemic but they will have to go back to that + 20% which is roughly the same including inflation if they want to reverse the slump in GPU sales.

Reasonably prices cards will work as long as demand and supply are matched and that is much more realistic now with all the reasons I give above. $700 for a 4080 is still alot of money for most people so while demand would be high it wouldn't be unreasonable to meet.

 

[Phaaze88]

Actually, developers really want Raytracing to take off as quick as possible, because this will make their work so much easier. For a developer it is much less time intensive to implement raytracing the traditional lighting. They save a lot of time by faking light and shadow effects, don't have to spend rendering time to prebake shadows just to see how it looks and then to re-render many times to make adjustments and see how it looks. With raytracing you see your changes during development in real time and you don't have to spend too much time on find how to fake and optimize the lighting.....

In contrary: it is taking off. Pretty much every AAA game coming out recently or in the near future has raytracing or is getting raytracing. Even older games now getting next gen raytracing support.

They really want to? Devs can only do so much when management has the final say.
The publishers don't seem to give a crap; giving so much focus to how much money they can milk out of folks that they're slowing down the adoption of RT.
Making their devs recycle the same ol' crap; sometimes taking features out and putting them back in later, like it's an innovation or something.
Rushing game launch knowing darn well it isn't ready. They 'apologize', get away with it, and the devs have to work harder fixing the issues when the bad PR could've been avoided.
Making devs design games around macrotransactions. They just drool at the mouth at how much money the subscription based model can bring in. RT isn't necessary to rake in the cash.
There could be a lot more good RT titles out there, but the publishers are full of it.

 

[Why_Me]

Given the disaster that is the 4070Ti, I was thinking the lower down the stack cards are surely going to be as bad in terms of spec and value. If we remember the 4070Ti was meant to be a 80 class card surely the 60Ti/60 at least will have only a 128 bit bus and 8GB RAM. I'm sure nVidia will ensure the clocks are enough to marginally beat their predecessors overall but given the MSRP's are likely to be a 20% minimum more than the 30 series equivalents, any gains will be below the 1% of performance for 1% price increase level making them woefully bad value? Hopefully AMD will actually punish them but as it stands nVidia are single handedly trying to kill PC gaming.

RTX 3090 MSRP: $1,499
RTX 3090 Ti MSRP: $1,999
RTX 4070 Ti MSRP: $799

 

[Eximo]

"More games" in what scope? If I include the entire gameosphere, I could argue more 2D games are being made than 3D games, so shall we write off 3D games now?

And there's a game that requires ray tracing hardware: Metro Last Exodus Enhanced. Yes you could say "but that's just an update to an existing, not a game built from the ground up," but I'd say that still qualifies. And the original supported ray tracing as well. Besides, go back in time and ask "no one launched a game where X hardware feature is a minimum requirement." Should we have written off assymetric compute? Hardware accelerated tessellation? Programmable Shaders? Hardware T&L? (remember when 3dfx said hardware T&L was pointless?)

No game studio who wants to try to make a profit on the game they sell will limit themselves to a target audience who only has the bleeding edge.


What's "properly"?


I thought PC gamers want to have their cake and eat it too, so they can bag on the "console peasants." i.e., their games look better and perform better.

In any case, all I'm seeing here is your observation of the chicken and egg problem. You can't expect a new hardware feature to magically become mainstream nor for software developers to be ace at it and have 100 apps ready overnight. History continues to show that it takes forever in computer terms to finally make something a requirement that was whizzbang in the past. And I'm seeing you don't see an application that you think is good enough to continue to put a spotlight on this hardware feature. And that's fine. But that doesn't mean someone else isn't seeing it in the same light. I mean heck, I don't need AVX so why should Intel keep continue pushing it?


Tell me, why is the bus size a concern?

I can't say more 2D games are made or not, but these are likely using 3D game engines anyway. I did consider mentioning things like Minecraft RTX, but as you pointed out already, the alternative is the base game which to me means that it isn't a minimum requirement to play that game.

As pointed out, ray tracing actually makes developer's lives easier. Lighting isn't designed to achieve an effect, it is calculated. All the art director has to do is place the lighting and set the intensity.

I'm not saying these things are to be written off. Just they aren't in the hands of most gamers and that Nvidia spent a lot of resources on that in lieu of something else. Ray tracing is cool, just not super relevant to the gaming scene. Lop off the ray tracing and you have cheap GPUs like the 16 series, which Nvidia seems disinclined to make now.

I would point out CryTek as a good example of making games for only the bleeding edge. Been a meme for a decade.

Bus size is not so much a concern as that these are CHEAPER GPUs now being priced as premium high end GPUs. The value proposition is still terrible.

As noted in the article it also means a shrinking of memory capacity, or increased prices to pay for double memory chips. Or we will end up with another situation where the lesser GPU has more VRAM. See 3060 Ti/3070/3070Ti 8GB vs the 12GB 3060.

I think my point got sidetracked down a different path, and I am not sure how to re-explain my position. You are saying mostly things I agree with or facts that are already part of my thought process.

In the context of my position on what the 4070, 4060ti and 4060 will be like, I am basically saying it will be more of the same. Cheaper hardware sold at an expensive price, making the previous generation the better deal.

 

[mjbn1977]

In the context of my position on what the 4070, 4060ti and 4060 will be like, I am basically saying it will be more of the same. Cheaper hardware sold at an expensive price, making the previous generation the better deal.

Yeah.....sure, but they stopped making previous generation. As long as you can get still previous generation, go for it. Soon you have to go to the used market, as long as you ok with and not worried about getting a heavily mined card (don't trust ebay sellers telling you it was not overclocked and not used for mining). But as Jay from Jays2Cents just showed in one of his most recent videos, even the in stock new previous gen cards still being sold for up to $1900 (3090Ti). Come on.....in that case a 4080 and 4070 ti will be better value.....

 

[John Chesterfield]

The 3080 FE I got for MSRP (£649) 15 months ago has never seemed more like a bargain than it does now, especially when you consider I sold my 2080 for £490 just after I got the 3080.

I could buy a 4000 series card, but no way am I giving them my money at these prices. They can do one.

 

[Ar558]

RTX 3090 MSRP: $1,499
RTX 3090 Ti MSRP: $1,999
RTX 4070 Ti MSRP: $799

😆😆 Comparing a bad value GPU to 2 even worse value GPU's doesn't make it good!

 

[mjbn1977]

😆😆 Comparing a bad value GPU to 2 even worse value GPU's doesn't make it good!

well, value is relative. As long nobody offers a product with the same performance for significantly less money, the 4070 Ti is the best value for that performance. 4070Ti is basically offering performance between 3090 and 3090 Ti, for half the price while being significantly more power efficient. It should be at least $100 cheaper but overall it could be worse. You would think that competition would make it better, but Intel Arc is not there yet and AMD turned out to be as money hungry as Nvidia and is not going to be the savior to PC gaming as many wished. Their marketing is as pathetic as Nvidia’s. And their cooler vapor chamber issue is actually a bigger deal than nvidias melting 12 pin cables. You will hear quite a bit about this over next few weeks…..Lots of replacement warranty coming their way. Supposedly thousands of cards are affected and AMD knew about this for at least three weeks…..

 

[Ar558]

well, value is relative. As long nobody offers a product with the same performance for significantly less money, the 4070 Ti is the best value for that performance. 4070Ti is basically offering performance between 3090 and 3090 Ti, for half the price while being significantly more power efficient. It should be at least $100 cheaper but overall it could be worse. You would think that competition would make it better, but Intel Arc is not there yet and AMD turned out to be as money hungry as Nvidia and is not going to be the savior to PC gaming as many wished. Their marketing is as pathetic as Nvidia’s. And their cooler vapor chamber issue is actually a bigger deal than nvidias melting 12 pin cables. You will hear quite a bit about this over next few weeks…..Lots of replacement warranty coming their way. Supposedly thousands of cards are affected and AMD knew about this for at least three weeks…..

Thats like say if three apples were on sale for $1m, $2m and $3m, the one for $1m is "good value". Value isn't relative it's absolute. They are bad value. It's your choice if you buy the product at bad value but trying to kid yourself that because they are "relatively" the best value against two other even worse value products is just lying to yourself. People doing that and then buying the products are justifying the terrible behaviour of nVidia, the only way they will actually make reasonable products at reasonable prices is if people don't fall for this and force them to lower the prices.

 

[sonofjesse]

who knows when we will even see the new cards, then the prices, then how will the stock be?

Video cards have been a huge issue for several years now. Miners will pay 1500 for a card, most gamers will NOT.

These prices are very crazy.

Maybe they made it so high, so people will continue to buy the 3000 series cards, until their 100% gone, then these prices will go down.

 

[mjbn1977]

Thats like say if three apples were on sale for $1m, $2m and $3m, the one for $1m is "good value". Value isn't relative it's absolute. They are bad value. It's your choice if you buy the product at bad value but trying to kid yourself that because they are "relatively" the best value against two other even worse value products is just lying to yourself. People doing that and then buying the products are justifying the terrible behaviour of nVidia, the only way they will actually make reasonable products at reasonable prices is if people don't fall for this and force them to lower the prices.

It’s not like I don’t agree with you on that the video card priced ridiculous high. But I prefer to buy a 4080 at overpriced MSRP at MSRP from a retailer that has it in stock then buying a $699 MSRP card from a scalper for that same overpriced price after I can’t find one for three months. Sorry, but I really got disillusioned two years ago when I really wanted to buy a 3080 at or at least close at MSRP.

 

[Ar558]

It’s not like I don’t agree with you on that the video card priced ridiculous high. But I prefer to buy a 4080 at overpriced MSRP at MSRP from a retailer that has it in stock then buying a $699 MSRP card from a scalper for that same overpriced price after I can’t find one for three months. Sorry, but I really got disillusioned two years ago when I really wanted to buy a 3080 at or at least close at MSRP.

I understand your point I'm just saying if you buy any overpriced card you are encouraging the manufacturer to make that overpriced cost the permanent standard.

 

[mjbn1977]

I understand your point I'm just saying if you buy any overpriced card you are encouraging the manufacturer to make that overpriced cost the permanent standard.

I only bought mine because I was sick of waiting, really wanted to play quite a few games this winter which I was holding off on for a long time waiting for a new card with uncompromised raytracing performance. I want to set everything on ultra with raytracing on ultra and get between 60 and 144 fps on 1440p. Not interested in last gen, so 4080 was obvious choice. They even had my preferred custom model in stock and I didn’t have to use a scalper. Yeah, I guess? I am lucky enough to be able to afford it. But the high price still sucked. On this note:

View: https://youtu.be/kIaf6o4kFYM

 

[YouFilthyHippo]

I have a GPU in my Desktop PC