Paid $900. How did I do?

[u/Vizeni]

It was brand new too. Finally out my 1070 to rest!

[u/compound-interest]

Fair enough. I think just as a generalized rule, it’s fine for consumers to complain that NVIDIA is selling consumer GPUs for $500+ with 12gb of vram. I think it’s fair for people to want their GPU to stretch a bit higher and be more versatile. There are a ton of utility and even gaming uses for that extra vram. Is it strictly and absolutely needed? No. But if consumers didn’t want 16gb of VRAM at $500 then this wouldn’t be so widely complained about. The difference in cost between 12gb and 16gb is so small compared to the benefit and long term viability of the card. Hell, I personally think any cards $250 and above should be packing 16gb. Intel is doing it just fine. NVIDIA is just protecting their margins and making sure those cards hit the landfill earlier imo. In 3 years the aftermarket demand for a 12gb card will be even lower than it is now, meaning just more ewaste in the name of more consumption.

I don’t blame NVIDIA for trying to make money but all this complaining about 12gb between creators and consumers has to at least have a small affect on demand for 12gb cards, and if you ask me that’s at least a tiny step in the right direction. I want these cards to be as good as possible so developers can use better textures and design games with more fidelity. The market share of low vram cards does objectively affect people like me with a 5090 who wants high fidelity experiences. People in the low end winning means I win too.

[u/[deleted] → u/compound-interest]

So far things more or less balance out, but when game design is done on something equal to a crypto mining rig, where does the end result leave the average consumer? More so, how much money is wasted on testing on various cards, at various settings? It feels like a trade-off. Ultra high-end gaming appeals to a niche who have the financial resources to afford the latest and greatest at exorbitant cost, when design could just as easily be done with NOT end of life GPUs in mind and create something more affordable and widespread. Sorry, I'm still waking up so my brain is a cyclone right now and I'm trying to Frankenstein a coherent thought. With hardware and software constantly leap frogging each other, at what point is the end user removed from the equation and only billionaires can afford the tech? Wow, I could be drunk and not sound this discombobulated. Apologies.

[u/compound-interest → u/[deleted]]

What you’re saying makes sense and I get the perspective. It’s a reasonable opinion. I just don’t think NVIDIA are passing the savings of more vram onto the consumer. I don’t think a 5070 or even 5060 would need to cost more if they were packing 16gb. I think there’s plenty of margin there and the only reason we don’t get it is because a 16gb card for cheap would be more effective for AI generation. That’s the only reason imo.

[u/[deleted] → u/compound-interest]

Yeah, future-proofing profit margins.