Why Are Nvidia's GeForce RTX GPUs So Expensive?

[xrodney]

There is no freaking way GDDR6, additional fan, and 12nm process based chip is worth 500$ more.

 

[Phaaze88]

Kudos to everyone who already acquired a 1080ti, as you can pretty much pass on this generation.
And you can be sure the ray tracing feature will take some time to fully implement into games. Ray tracing aside, I see this as a Pascal Refresh.
I feel that early adopters of these cards will get the short end of the stick, ESPECIALLY those 'upgrading' from 10-series cards... RTX 2080 costing as much as, or even more than GTX 1080ti did at launch, and is likely still weaker than said previous flagship...
*SMH*

 

[Stukes]

The thing that probably annoys me the most is that there is nothing for the midrange yet. Maybe the 2060 will be midrange? But it's probably going to be 1070ti prices.
I've been hanging on to my old gpu for *way* too long & I'm still gaming on 1920x1080. I just want an affordable, midrange gfx card that wasn't released 2 years ago.

 

[ern88]

Simple. Hit Nvidia in the pocket by not buying them. Just saw that you can now buy GTX 1080 ti for $549 USD. I can't wait to see real world benches of these new 2000 cards. I hope they stink. But what we really need is AMD RTG to get competitive again. Nvidia has a monopoly right now.

 

[Tanyac]

Another problem with the high prices of these new cards is that it empowers retailers to hold prices up for the existing cards.
There has been some news that GPU prices have been falling. I can tell you that is not true here. Cards remain stuck at the maximum prices they were at the peak of the crypto bubble.
Selling the 2080 Ti for $2000 AUD means the retailers can easily argue that $1300 for the 1080 Ti is a good price, even though before the bubble they were selling here for under $900.

I have several systems that really should be upgraded. There is no end in sight for inflated prices of GPUs (or RAM, CPUs, Monitors or storage for that matter), that they are killing their own market. I like so many others, just can't afford the prices.

A couple of terms come to mind.. "Exploitation", "Price Gouging", "Rip off"

 

[SR TEE]

That's easy to answer. With nothing that can compete on the high end they unfortunately can charge whatever they want. I pray AMD releases something that can compete.

 

[zthomas]

I recently got a titan xp.. no word on titans as yet.. the 2080 ti is what paid for the titan xp.. ahh was little more I guess.. still haven't heard anything offered as yet.

 

[mlee 2500]

$150 is the top price I will pay for a card, I own a GTX 750 Ti, that games and works with 4K. I went to Utube to look at gaming card ideas and saw that one and bought it and I am very satisfied. With ID software back in gaming (Quake, Doom, and Wolfstein), $150 cards have all the power I need to play them.

That's right...at the end of the day the only thing that matters is "Are you having fun playing games" and "Do you still have enough left to eat". Sounds like you got it all figured out.

 

[mlee 2500]

Just gotta wait for those gaming benchmarks to see if the performance increase justifies the cost.

That's right...you can't really asses the value proposition until then.

 

[mlee 2500]

There is no freaking way GDDR6, additional fan, and 12nm process based chip is worth 500$ more.

How can you say that without knowing the performance increase per $?

All you're really saying is "That's allot of money to me". And that's all you can say until benchmarks come out and you can finally characterize the real value proposition of the new product.

 

[Kenneth Barker]

All I am getting from all these posts are that people are upset that they cannot afford them. Not being able to afford new shiny tech is not really a reason to hate on it.

The cost price IS justified if you know anything about electronics and chip manufacturing, and what it takes to do that. The die size is increasing by 65%, which means that the chip alone is that much more expensive to produce. They have put GDDR6 memory in the cards (not cheap) and have built out what is turning out to be a pretty rock solid VRM with an impressive 13 phases (not cheap). On top of that the FE shroud is made from machined aluminum (including the wrap around the the back plate) and is looking rather nice and high quality right along with the AIB partners. Its not your normal cheap plastic reference cards of old.

Its pretty simple though. If you cannot afford it, get something you can afford. Complaining about a product existing because you yourself are broke does not fix your money problem. The cards are selling more than ok. 2 days in and the things are sold out of back ordered for the rest of the year already (2080ti). We still have a whole month to go of people scrambling to pick up these cards too.

IMHO those who want the card, but have decided to not preorder like its some "protest" will regret the move. After what the PC market has been through the last year I expected people to have learned some lessons here... I fully expect those people who refused to get their orders in early enough to get one in the first 5-6 months to be complaining about that too. You can always pre-order and return the darn things unopened if they completely fall flat. That easy.

Those who don't want the cards, or refuse to buy anything from any given company because of some odd bias. These are not for you, and Nvidia doesn't really care about people who wouldn't be their customers no matter what anyway. Opinions of those folks are not worth a whole lot considering their position.

P.S. - "waiting for Navi" will likely work out about as good as "waiting for vega". Raja ran AMD GPUs into the ground, and he will do the same for Intel.

 

[Phaaze88]

Something that just came to mind about the increased die size: What are they doing about card sag? I think it was only really an issue with the 3 slot models, so I guess AIBs won't be able to push out those massive cards this time around...

 

[radiatedkilla]

No performance justify that high price. So what after 5 years their regular gpu will cost 10,000 $ to justify their new tehnology and performance increase? Its just ridiculous. Electronics evolves all the time.They just want milk people like cows because they can want and will

 

[phobicsq]

I always love when analysts call cost increases due to making the products. The same is said that things can't be made in the USA due to costs and that outsourcing to other cheaper countries will lower prices however what it always omitted is that consumers still pay high costs and that the companies keep the savings. While I understand some costs went up at the same time the bulk costs for nvidia would mitigate them especially with the units and third party licenses. Bottom line is nvidia wants a bigger cut.

 

[shrikecurse]

This article is silly, it begins not admitting that the reason for a price is ultimately the amount of money the seller wants to make! No, instead it gets presented here as a 'real' cost of the technology and materials - which is not true. In fact if you were to see the cost of one of these gpus for Nvidia it would show that materials and production of these barely comes up to 1/5 of their retail price! Similarly an Iphone X costs 1100 in my country while the actual cost of the phone is maybe 100 - the other 1000 is profit for people who did not conceive of it, did not design it and did not manufacture it, they simply move it from market to market. The article passively admits this when it says that partners will sell the product for less than the manufacturer. That gives an inkling of the actual price. If Nvidia sells the 2080 for 699, and partners for less lets say 600, so at 600 they have covered the card, their boxing packaging, advertizing, design of special cooling etc etc etc and they are making a profit!!! So they probably buy at half price - at that price Nvidia is making profit normally so their cost is likely half that. Long story short - the cost is 99 the price is 699 and trying to convince us that it is because of the super high tech is a deliberate misrepresentation of reality.

 

[shrikecurse]

Btw who said that a company charges for a product based on its performance and not based on its cost. So if Nvidia finds a super new technology that gives us 5xperformance and cost 1/5 of the current prices - this product will sell for x5 cause thats its performance regardless of the fact that it cost them a fifth to manufacture. So automation, modern factory lines, the increased efficiency of production as years go by will ultimately lead to simply higher prices forever since the performance of products always increases! So we created automation and production lines to lower manufacturing costs BUT turns out the consumer does not get the reduced cost passen on because he got better performance! Ridiculous!

 

[Zaporro]

Why are they expensive? Because fanboys gonna fanboy and pre-order everything even before actual benchmarks are out.
Apparently NVIDIA can make up new type of benchmark tailored specifically to make Turing good.
Not to mention all that pathetic hype that happens before every launch. Customers are themselves to blame, if they piss themselves over every fart that NVIDIA produces no wonder that for the launch they decide to swap a "TITAN" grade GPU with a "xx80ti" grade GPU and move pricing ladder one step backwards.

 

[bit_user]

To avoid cross-posting this (again), here's some brief analysis of the value proposition:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3769689/nvidia-current-list-rtx-2080-optimized-games-pretty-short.html#21253559

 

[giovanni86]

Intel and Nvidia have always gone up. No competition, they price gouge. Although not a complete victory AMD is battling intel in the CPU space. I'm just praying they can answer with something in the GPU space soon. Though im betting against myself and probably will pick up 1 or 2 FTW3's from EVGA when those release or the latter. No rush with two 1080ti's and my future build looking into summer 2019.

 

[vaughn2k]

My R9 295X2 is still kicking the ass of the 1080, so I will hold on to this..

 

[chibiwings]

Guess we wouldn't expecting much from the RED team since they are more focusing their resources on APU type products for the next gent consoles instead of dedicated GPU.

 

[0InVader0]

If you guys are worried about the performance, they showcased the Unreal Engine Infiltrator demo running at 4K 60fps (supposedly it runs at 78 with vsync off). The 1080TI can manage little over 30fps at 4K.

 

[bicycle_repair_man]

Considering that the RX 480 provided a GTX 970 level of performance for almost half the price, I'm not convinced that manufacturing costs are the sole contributor here.

Nvidia know that consumers will be excited for these cards and will price them accordingly. It happens every time.

 

[pepar0]

The pricing may "justify" the increase in cost, but is it needed? Personally, I think $1150, or anywhere near $900 is insane. I hope the gaming market passes on this generation of nosebleed cards.

nVidia has been the darling of Wall Street; maybe they've forgotten who got them there?

 

[redgarl]

We all know it is an agglomeration of technical realities and business realities.

The main issue forcing a die such big... for raytracing algorithm on chip, for Cuda cores (ML and AI) and other decision not related to gaming... pushed inside the throat of gamers.

They did the same mistake than AMD with Vega trying to create a solution for all their models. Unfortunately, they need to provide custom solution or their plans will just fail.