>To be clear, gaming GPUs enjoy extremely high margins compared to basically any other consumer electronics
Yes, I was speaking in relative terms vs AI wares. I'm not privvy to what gaming GPUs' margins are, but I'd imagine being in a duopoly has its advantages.
OTOH, there's the matter of volume. Again, I don't have empirical numbers, but I don't see the retail market for DIY desktop PC GPUs to be significant in number of units moved, and we know that that market, along with PC market as a whole, is shrinking.
[I'm excluding GPUs for mobile/laptop for above, as I don't follow that. But as with PCs in general, it's a mature market, not prone to growth.]
In any case, we've already seen AMD's response, and it's very much the same as Nvidia's, ie ramping up efforts for AI, while doing the minimum needed for gaming gfx.
One thing of note is how AMD also emulates Nvidia's pricing strategy of flattening the value curve. In previous gens, the midrange has higher price/perf ratio than the high- and low-end, and tend to be the sweet spot for value buyers. This gen's price/perf for both AMD & Nvidia are largely the same throughout their line-ups. There is no more sweet spot. I think this is what riled people up the most, that their favored buying choice is no longer viable.
>Or those are the margins for Nvidia at least, because their GPU compute is a real monopoly with zero competitors. AMD isn't even trying to win that space.
It's precisely those crazy margins that motivate competition. Yes, Nvidia is in the catbird seat for now. But nobody like paying crazy prices, and competition will cut into its share. It's not a matter of if, but how soon and how much. Nvidia's moat (CUDA) is not insurmountable.
>Personally I would look at the RX 6700 XT and the 6750 XT, which are selling respectively for as low as $330 and $350 on newegg atm. The pricing of the RX 7000 series is probably influenced directly by the remaining stock of RX 6000 GPUs that they still haven't managed to sell.
I don't think existing 6000 stocks will last that long to fill the gaps in the 7000 line. Back-to-school is almost over, so the next buying wave is for BF/Xmas. We'll see if the above cards (along with 6600) will still be available by then.