> NVidia may have focused on the high end too much.
seems to me like they're making products available at all sorts of price points. i'm not an mba, but that strikes me as a good idea.
not making quite enough mid-level products is unfortunate, but since that was temporary, it wouldn't have made sense for them to invest in increased production.
(they should've abandoned the MSRP and just reverse auctioned inventory to the retailers, so that they could capture the value of their products, instead of letting folks selling on ebay get it.)
> They have a card for the machine learning crowd that costs $16,000
> Is a “broken business model” one that requires you to pay for extra additional features?
Yes. Who actually likes being segmented into markets? We want to pay a fair price for products instead of being exploited.
> If Nvidia enabled all their professional features on all gaming SKUs, the only reason to buy a professional SKU would be additional memory.
So what? A GPU is a GPU. It's all more or less the same thing. They would not have to lock down hardware features otherwise.
> Today, they make almost $1B per year in the professional non-datacenter business alone. There is no way they’d be able to compensate that revenue with volume (and gross margins would obviously tank as well, which makes Wall Street very unhappy.)
Who cares really. Pursuit of profit does not excuse bad behavior. They should lose money every time they do it.
>Nvidia has a monopoly and for that reason has lost interest in giving value to customers. It’s busy with AI and no longer seems interested in gaming.
I look at Nvidia Reflex and DLSS improvement from what I thought was fancy to something I found more like magic. I dont see how they have lost interested in gaming.
If anything, their AI business revenue has been partly subsidising their Gaming market where they are now the first player after Apple to get leading edge node capacity.
> Perhaps my only criticism would be of their artificial hampering of some of their products, which they do in order to appease certain PC gamers by excluding the gaming market from usual supply/demand effects
Can you elaborate what you mean by this? I thought Nvidia is outpricing their PC gamer customers because of their focus on AI?
I’m curious how they have hampered their products in your opinion.
>There are some great cards, like the RTX 4090, but it's priced out of reach of most gamers.
Well this is it isn't it. Nvidia is not a company that sells GPUs for gaming. It's a company that sells GPUs for machine learning in the data centre now. That's driving basically its entire business. So quite naturally the gaming side is being left behind. There are two ways of looking at that. Disappointment that gaming is no longer the focus, or excitement, that your gaming GPUs are going to get a load of cool hardware for free because Nvidia had to build it for ML. Sure, those ML workloads are kind of weird, but software engineers are smart and just wait until they get Crysis running on it.
> By that perspective NVIDIA can't really afford to sell cards to individual gamers
They can't afford to continue profitable line of business that took them from nothing to multi-billion dollar corporation?
This is not a new problem - why does Intel sell CPUs to gamers for $100 when theu can sell same CPU for servers for $1000?
Narket segmentation, and you try to make sure these markets buy diffetent products that are priced differently. You artifically create differences in priducts. For example Intel withholds ECC memory from consumer products. Whether its rihht or wrong is debatable.
But please let's not use language like 'we can't afford', It implies they are losing money and subsidising gamers.
Whereas in reality they are very profitable and you are saying they could nickel and dime their customers even harder.
> Nvidia, as #1, no longer needs to compete and has stopped winning via low cost, high performance GPUs. This opened a giant opportunity for AMD GPUs to give those things to consumers and start winning against Nvidia.
> But instead AMD has just followed Nvidia into making slow, uncompetitive GPUs at high prices.
I am not really sure they could do that. If nvidia cards are cheaper to produce, then for AMD just ordering more cards can end in massive losses short term, and much less profit long term, as customers demand cheaper cards. Nvidia always could lower their prices as the updog, and hurting AMD really bad.
But yes, in retrospective, knowing that the demand for GPUs would remain ridiculously high for years, the best move for AMD was ordering and producing much much more cards. As the best move for us customers were jumping into crypto. (Not necessarily the best strategy.)
> This just seems like a feeble gesture at appeasing gamers.
Color me cynical, but this seems like a strong gesture at increasing margins on GPU computing by upselling using cryptocurrency and gamers as PR pawns/scapegoats
if Nvidia is selling more cards than they can produce/distribute at desired target prices they should produce more cards and improve their distribution networks..
> While I wholeheartedly agree that nvidia should do this, but bothers me is that they take functionality away without adding anything in or lowering the price.
Vendors are selling cards at 10-50% above MSRP and scalpers are selling them at 200-300% of MSRP precisely because they're usable for mining.
By breaking the mining incentive, they are dropping prices for consumers. Considerably.
> No, Nvidia just found themselves in a lucky situation.
Well yes and no. They were certainly lucky to be at right place in the right time. But they were also consistently investing into CUDA and the AI/ML ecosystem while their competitor(s) ignored it to such an extent that NVDIA became the only real option (and deservedly so).
This is why they can effectively behave like a monopoly these days and just almost inconceivably high margins.
> Look at the GTX960, which launched at $150 in 2014, against the 3060 which launched at an MSRP of $330.
Looks like I'll be hanging on to my 960 for the foreseeable future, then. I'm not interested in mining, but I've started thinking a bit about playing with CUDA, and I'm suddenly a lot less interested if Nvidia might decided to gimp my work because I inadvertently did $FOO that is commonly done by miners.
I already mentioned why that wasn't feasible. I'm pretty much stuck paying $100 extra on each card in exchange for my predecessors' "free" CUDA lessons.
My point isn't that the economic tradeoff mentioned by the sales rep doesn't exist, my point is that the tradeoff can't be responsible for a price grade as steep as the one we see NVIDIA use. The real answer as to why they price-grade so heavily is "because they can" -- not that I would expect a sales rep to be honest about it.
> NVidia may have focused on the high end too much. They have a card for the machine learning crowd that costs $16,000.
Here's the thing about gaming vs content creation vs ml pricing -- they're fundamentally different activities from a financial standpoint.
Gaming (for the VAST majority) is a cost center. How much are you willing to spend on it?
Content creation, and now ml, are profit centers. How much do you make from it?
The latter question is directly related to your business. If you're running financial trading models and the card makes you 5% faster, that 5% may be worth USD$1M. If you're running a 1 acre farm, maybe it's worth $3.
But by hardening and popularizing CUDA and GPGPU, Nvidia upscaled their most wealthy buyer from sfx studio to any company that makes predictions.
It's a heck of a lot easier to deliver 1% improvement to a $100M company, than to deliver a 200% improvement to a $500k company.
> And yet it takes a lazy, uncompetitive position against Nvidia, happily delivering overpriced and garbage new GPUs such as the 7600 RX with only 8GB RAM and a 128 bit memory bus.
The AMD RX 7600 competes with NVidia RTX 4060. The suggested MSRP of the RX 7600 is $270, the suggested MSRP of the RTX 4060 is $300. Both have 8GB of GDDR6 RAM on a 128 bit memory bus.
I don't necessarily disagree that AMD's current GPU lineup is overpriced, but so is NVidia's. It's probably because NVidia's current GPU lineup is so vastly, hilarious overpriced that AMD is getting away with it right now.
> I am pretty sure my next GPU is going to be AMD due to this behavior by Nvidia.
I was thinking about buying NVIDIA for the next GPU based on performance numbers alone.
However, against it there's:
1) Terrible Linux support(and history). This is specially important now that most of Steam's library runs on Linux without issues. It was eye-opening to see Cyberpunk running almost perfectly on DAY ONE with the same performance as Windows. In the case of AMD, with open source drivers.
2)Control freak shenanigans (see also: this thread). This is doing nothing to address the GPU shortage. It's just dishonest market segmentation.
3)Their completely unacceptable behavior regarding reviews. They were punishing reviewers that didn't place enough emphasis in ray tracing. They would be blacklisted just by saying it's not important (which I happen to agree with). They handled the situation horribly.
> Most people in the world can't afford 600$ Nvidia GPUs.
Ok? I'm not what your point is here - most people can't afford a $600 amd gpu either. If you can't get a $600 gpu, buy a cheaper gpu - gtx 1060 is $250 or gtx 960 is $50.
Performance costs a premium, and that is just how is is. It would be great if we lived in a world where you could buy a Titan v for $1, but in the real world valuable things cost more money, and that unfortunately means not everyone can buy them.
> Aren't the Tesla class like the P100 mostly super overpriced for deep learning
Yes. Nvidia has real competition from AMD in consumer graphics but no competition in enterprise. Their consumer cards are sold at a competitive price while their enterprise cards are marked way up.
If cloud providers were really smart, they'd release cheaper/just-as-fast instances with consumer cards, but Nvidia probably doesn't want to do that deal; they'd prefer to push teslas as the standard for GPGPU, even if they have to mark them down for cloud providers.
seems to me like they're making products available at all sorts of price points. i'm not an mba, but that strikes me as a good idea.
not making quite enough mid-level products is unfortunate, but since that was temporary, it wouldn't have made sense for them to invest in increased production.
(they should've abandoned the MSRP and just reverse auctioned inventory to the retailers, so that they could capture the value of their products, instead of letting folks selling on ebay get it.)
> They have a card for the machine learning crowd that costs $16,000
they have hardware that costs way more than that.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-systems/
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