I laid out very concrete reasons for the pricing. To recap:
1) 3090 brand. We didn't have 2090, 1090, 990, or even 790. Bringing back a 90 model suggest Nvidia will increase pricing relative to the 2080 and 2080 Ti.
2) I think Micron absolutely did unintentionally leak the specs of GDDR6X and RTX 3090. Possibly Nvidia was supposed to have launched the card months ago, before COVID delays. Regardless:
a) 3090 will not have less VRAM than 2080 Ti.
b) 12GB in a 3090 still leaves space for a 24GB Titan RTX 3000
c) Could RTX 3090 just be a 'gaming' Titan with 24GB? Yes. Even more reason for it to cost $2,000+.
3) When was the last time Nvidia walked back pricing on a particular model? This one deserves some extra work, via a table. (Prices in parentheses are either the reduced price after higher end models came out, and/or the non-FE price.)
| Kepler 1
(600-series) | Kepler 2
(700-series) | Maxwell
(900-series) | Pascal
(10-series) | Turing
(20-series) | *Ampere (est.)
(30-series) |
*60 | $230 ($180) | $250 ($220) | $200 | $300 ($250) | $350 ($300) | $400 |
*70 | $400 | $400 ($330) | $330 | $450 ($380) | $600 ($500) | $600-$700 |
*80 | $500 | $650 ($500) | $550 | $700 ($550) | $800 ($700) | $1,000 |
*80 Ti | N/A | $700 | $650 | $700 | $1,200 ($1,000) | N/A (at launch) |
*90 | $1,000 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | $1,500-$2,000 |
Titan | N/A | $1,000 | $1,000 | $1,200 | $2,500 | $3,000? |
Basically, Maxwell was the exception, and that was six years ago. Pascal was a generational increase in pricing at every level, and Turing took that to a whole new level. My best guess right now is that Nvidia will not release Ampere at lower generational pricing -- it's why the 3090 exists -- but it will stay somewhat close to the launch Turing prices.
A lot will also depend on how competitive AMD is with Navi 2x. If Navi 21 is 80 CUs as rumored, and clocks at 2GHz, that would end up being 20.5 TFLOPS of compute. That's ambitious but not out of the question. However, I'd also expect such a chip to be priced closer to $1,000 as well. Double the RX 5700 XT, double the price basically.
Traditionally, AMD gets less real-world performance per TFLOP relative to Nvidia, but Navi 2x may also improve the architecture to remove that deficit. Plenty of unknowns and assumptions are still in play, but that's where I sit in terms of what I expect right now. RX 5700 XT at launch was basically an RTX 2070 competitor, and AMD followed right along with Nvidia's new higher pricing tiers -- even without ray tracing support.
It would be surprising (and refreshing!) to see a true price war that dropped things back to 2015 levels. But it's 2020, not 2015, so I really don't expect that to happen. AMD will sell lots of PS5 and XBSX chips to Sony and MS at very low margins, but for PC we'll continue to see very high prices.