News GeForce RTX 3050 Pricing Skyrockets Ahead of Release

[Admin]

Two retailers are preselling Nvidia's "budget" friendly GeForce RTX 3050 8GB for two to three times over MSRP.

GeForce RTX 3050 Pricing Skyrockets Ahead of Release : Read more

 

[btmedic04]

After 16 months of this crap, are any of us pc enthusiasts really surprised by this? Its a shame because at $250, the RTX 3050 was looking like a solid part at that price

 

[jacob249358]

pls i just want to upgrade

 

[Phaaze88]

After 16 months of this crap, are any of us pc enthusiasts really surprised by this?

No, but its exhausting having to keep seeing this. 'Wake me up when its over' sort of thing.

If this really is the new normal where people are mining crypto to make back some of their money spent...
Many will see themselves getting priced out, or 'tiered down', if not doing the above to offset costs of more mining favorable cards - compromises will have to be made.

 

[spongiemaster]

No, but its exhausting having to keep seeing this. 'Wake me up when its over' sort of thing.

If this really is the new normal where people are mining crypto to make back some of their money spent...
Many will see themselves getting priced out, or 'tiered down', if not doing the above to offset costs - compromises will have to be made.

Early reports have shown this card is total garbage for mining. Around 13Mh/s. Even if miners managed to remove the LHR completely, it would only top out around 20Mh/s. At the $250 MSRP, you're looking at a year and half to break even. Any price above the MSRP is not going to be miners driving the price up. So there is hope this card could settle down to less absurd prices than the cards above it.

 

[Phaaze88]

@spongiemaster
Edited previous post.

 

[spongiemaster]

@spongiemaster
Edited previous post.

Understood. Anyone who does their homework on this one, should not be mining with this. After power costs, you'd be lucky to make a quarter a day mining 24-7. Every $50 over MSRP you spend is 7 months of mining to break even. The return on this card is so low, that mining should just be ignored. It isn't worth it.

 

[InvalidError]

Early reports have shown this card is total garbage for mining.

Yup, so there is a chance crypto-miners will leave those alone and without miners sucking the distribution channels dry, there is a chance there will be too many available for scalpers to dictate market prices after a while.

It would be nice if the last month's steady crypto-coin decline caused some large miners to start ditching GPUs while the going prices are good ahead of ETH 2.0-merge1 which could see the market flooded with used GPUs, then scalpers still holding onto stock they overpaid for would have to eat their losses on remaining stock.

 

[spongiemaster]

Why do all Ampere RTX GPU's appear to have Taiwan stamped on them when they are supposed to be made by Samsung with no fabs in Taiwan?

 

[InvalidError]

Why do all Ampere RTX GPU's appear to have Taiwan stamped on them when they are supposed to be made by Samsung with no fabs in Taiwan?

Likely because Samsung sends the wafers to Taiwan for packaging since that is where most manufacturers who ultimately put the chips on boards. A million chips occupy a lot less space as wafers than they do as trays of BGAs.

 

[bigdragon]

It would be nice if the last month's steady crypto-coin decline caused some large miners to start ditching GPUs while the going prices are good ahead of ETH 2.0-merge1 which could see the market flooded with used GPUs, then scalpers still holding onto stock they overpaid for would have to eat their losses on remaining stock.

I don't think miners are going to dump GPUs because of ETH's planned/delayed changes. Likewise, I don't see volatility in the crypto market deterring them either. We've learned from the NFT market that people are more than willing to make stupid bets with their money. There are so many cryptocurrencies to gamble on now. Hardware can easily be repurposed to mine something else. HODL is a thing. No GPU flood is coming -- the situation is significantly different from the last crypto crash.

Gamers are going to have to get used to PC graphics stagnating or falling behind consoles. Things are not likely to get better until GPU production increases dramatically -- that's the only way to beat a supply problem that AIBs and retailers have failed to manage. The 3050 will suffer the same supply, scalping, and pricing issues as every other GPU until production meets the new normal.

 

[artk2219]

I don't think miners are going to dump GPUs because of ETH's planned/delayed changes. Likewise, I don't see volatility in the crypto market deterring them either. We've learned from the NFT market that people are more than willing to make stupid bets with their money. There are so many cryptocurrencies to gamble on now. Hardware can easily be repurposed to mine something else. HODL is a thing. No GPU flood is coming -- the situation is significantly different from the last crypto crash.

Gamers are going to have to get used to PC graphics stagnating or falling behind consoles. Things are not likely to get better until GPU production increases dramatically -- that's the only way to beat a supply problem that AIBs and retailers have failed to manage. The 3050 will suffer the same supply, scalping, and pricing issues as every other GPU until production meets the new normal.

Honestly it's a "problem" the manufacturers may not be in a hurry to solve. Sure they're selling less total stock, but the margins are currently insane on what they are selling, meaning we all have to put up or shut up, which sucks for us.

 

[VforV]

6500 XT is not a good GPU for it's price, but a 3050 at $500+ being double the price of 6500 XT offering 20-30% more performance is even worse.

 

[cryoburner]

Even at its $250 MSRP the 3050 doesn't look like a particularly great value compared to what last-generation cards launched for. Performance-wise, it will likely be comparable to a 1660 SUPER in most games, but the 1660 SUPER launched at a lower $230 MSRP back in 2019. It does add some amount of RT capability and a bit more VRAM for its higher MSRP, but it's questionable how usable RT will be on a card that has less graphics-processing power than the 3+ year old 2060. There are a few examples of games that can choke on the 2060's 6GB of VRAM, but raytracing on the 2060 was barely useable at low resolutions even when the VRAM limitations weren't a concern, and that's only likely to get worse as games become more demanding.

I suppose the 3050 does have DLSS going for it, which should at least give it an edge at upscaling compared to the 1660 SUPER, but it would have been a more attractive package had it at least matched the 2060 in terms of overall performance. I suppose mediocre value should be expected given what crypto has done to the graphics card market though. And of course, it will likely be difficult to get these cards even at their somewhat mediocre suggested price for a while.

And while Nvidia likes to shift around product names to attempt to make generational performance gains appear larger than they really are, this card should absolutely not be directly compared against their prior "x50" cards. In terms of power draw and price point, this is absolutely a successor to the 1660-series, even if its more of a side-grade outside of the addition of RT and DLSS, much like what we saw a few years back with the launch of the 20-series at the higher-end.

 

[spongiemaster]

Even at its $250 MSRP the 3050 doesn't look like a particularly great value compared to what last-generation cards launched for. Performance-wise, it will likely be comparable to a 1660 SUPER in most games, but the 1660 SUPER launched at a lower $230 MSRP back in 2019. It does add some amount of RT capability and a bit more VRAM for its higher MSRP, but it's questionable how usable RT will be on a card that has less graphics-processing power than the 3+ year old 2060. There are a few examples of games that can choke on the 2060's 6GB of VRAM, but raytracing on the 2060 was barely useable at low resolutions even when the VRAM limitations weren't a concern, and that's only likely to get worse as games become more demanding.

I suppose the 3050 does have DLSS going for it, which should at least give it an edge at upscaling compared to the 1660 SUPER, but it would have been a more attractive package had it at least matched the 2060 in terms of overall performance. I suppose mediocre value should be expected given what crypto has done to the graphics card market though. And of course, it will likely be difficult to get these cards even at their somewhat mediocre suggested price for a while.

And while Nvidia likes to shift around product names to attempt to make generational performance gains appear larger than they really are, this card should absolutely not be directly compared against their prior "x50" cards. In terms of power draw and price point, this is absolutely a successor to the 1660-series, even if its more of a side-grade outside of the addition of RT and DLSS, much like what we saw a few years back with the launch of the 20-series at the higher-end.

Thanks to inflation, $230 in 2019 is $250 in 2022. So price hasn't really increased, it just stagnated. As you said, the 3050 is the Turing generation for lower end cards. The 2000 series added RTX and tensor cores and rasterized performance didn't really improve much at any price point. That's what the 3050 is doing. Stagnant rasterized performance at the price point, adding RTX and tensor cores over the 1660 Super. The RTX cores have questionable usefulness at this level, but the tensor cores and DLSS should really help this card push past the 16xx cards as time goes on.

 

[InvalidError]

Thanks to inflation, $230 in 2019 is $250 in 2022. So price hasn't really increased, it just stagnated.

Inflation doesn't really explain the cost of GPUs since making chips is still getting cheaper faster than inflation: although the cost of wafers may have doubled over the last four years between inflation, process upgrades and price gouging, you can cram more than 3X as much stuff on a wafer today so the amount of performance you get per wafer dollar is still up by 50+%.

 

[jacob249358]

Inflation doesn't really explain the cost of GPUs since making chips is still getting cheaper faster than inflation: although the cost of wafers may have doubled over the last four years between inflation, process upgrades and price gouging, you can cram more than 3X as much stuff on a wafer today so the amount of performance you get per wafer dollar is still up by 50+%.

wait so when people say GPUs are not only expensive cause of crypto but also because chips are more expensive that's a lie?

 

[InvalidError]

wait so when people say GPUs are not only expensive cause of crypto but also because chips are more expensive that's a lie?

No. What I wrote means that for a given amount of complexity/performance, things should still be trending cheaper at least for stuff that scales with newer fab processes.

However, today's GPUs usually have more stuff crammed into them than the previous generations so the dies end up about the same size despite process shrinks, there is also a lot more stuff on a GPU card than the GPU die and most support components like SMD caps and VRM don't really have scaling with fab processes so there are no mitigations for higher-end boards requiring more of them and higher-performance variants of at that - a 10uF capacitor in 0603 form factor is a lot more expensive than a 1610 one due to much tighter manufacturing tolerances and stricter QC required to achieve similar reliability.