COVID + component shortages + crypto gave AMD and Nvidia funny ideas about how much people are willing to pay for GPUs. We'll see whether that stick now that all three conditions have mostly gone away. I'm wishing abysmal sales to any manufacturer attempting to repeat peak COVID pricing.
Yeah. I've said elsewhere that this whole RTX 40-series launch reminds me in so many ways of the RTX 20-series launch.
We just finished with a crypto bubble in late 2017/early 2018, everyone had paid exorbitant prices for otherwise midrange graphics cards. Then Nvidia comes out hyping up ray tracing and DLSS, and generational prices shot up. This is 10-series vs. 20-series launch pricing:
| New Card | New Launch Price | Old Card | Old Launch Price | Generational Increase |
| RTX 2080 Ti | $1,199 | GTX 1080 Ti | $699 | 72% |
| RTX 2080 | $799 | GTX 1080 | $699 | 14% |
| RTX 2070 | $599 | GTX 1070 | $449 | 33% |
| RTX 2060 | $349 | GTX 1060 6GB | $299 | 17% |
The thing is, people forget that the RTX 2080 Founders Edition launched at $799, and that the GTX 1080 Founders Edition launched at $699. GTX 1080 later dropped to $499 MSRP, but the 2080 never officially dropped below $699. RTX 30-series at launch represented a correction and a return to "sanity" on GPU prices, except then scalpers, the pandemic, and cryptocurrency totally burned Nvidia. It made lots of money but it
could have made even more. It's not going to make that same mistake if it can help it.
So the result is extreme prices at launch. If AMD RDNA 3 launches at competitive performance and substantially lower prices,
that's when you can expect Nvidia to respond. Decreasing prices (to your partners) is super easy. Increasing it is practically impossible. Nvidia claims (I have no way of proving it one way or another) that it never raised the contract pricing that its AIB partners were paying for RTX 30-series parts. Which means the AIBs and distributors and retail places all pocketed massive profits while Nvidia made do with slightly less extreme profits. Now it's making sure that if anyone wants to pay $900+ for a graphics card, Nvidia will get a big share of the profits.
Scalpers are probably not going to have much to do on this launch, since they would need to mark cards up another 25% to make it a viable endeavor. That's the good news. The bad news is that Nvidia effectively became at least a short-term scalper of sorts. Here's the same sort of table, only now let's look at Ada Lovelace:
| New Card | New Launch Price | Old Card | Old Launch Price | Generational Increase |
| RTX 4090 | $1,599 | RTX 3090 | $1,499 | 7% |
| RTX 4080 16GB | $1,199 | RTX 3080 Ti | $1,199 | 0% |
| RTX 4080 12GB | $899 | RTX 3080 10GB | $699 | 29% |
| RTX 4080 12GB | $899 | RTX 3070 | $499 | 80% |
Like it or not,
that's how Nvidia is choosing to position these cards. The 4090 isn't really that much worse than a 3090 at launch. 4080 16GB vs. 3080 Ti keeps pricing the same. It's that 4080 12GB vs. 3080 10GB that's painful, but it's not quite as bad as the price hike with the 20-series. Unless you want to call the RTX 4080 12GB an RTX 3070 replacement, which it really is if we're being honest. And then it's worse than even the 2080 Ti vs. 1080 Ti price increase. And of course the 3080 Ti was priced that high because it came later and Nvidia could adjust pricing upward a lot.
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