> The ideal for a gamer is that every year the GPU maker pulls another rabbit out of their hat, and doubles the performance from the previous year,

I think this is an oversimplification, or a particular perspective. Why is your hardware becoming obsolete every 2-3 years forcing an upgrade if you want to keep playing newer titles an ideal for gamers?

in a backhanded way, the stagnation of the jaguar consoles/quad-core desktop worked out great for consumers, as long as you didn't buy at the very tail end of it. You could spend $200-250 on a CPU and 5 years later the best consumer processor available at the same price point would only be like 20-30% better, meaning you weren't locked out of anything you wanted to play.

Contrast that to the early-mid 2000s in the GPU market where the GPU API specs (DX versions, OpenGL shader model, etc) were moving so fast that 2-3 years later your crappy old GPU might not even be able to launch the game, or would require some hack that allowed you to launch but completely ruined the graphics etc. I remember when hardware T&L became a hard requirement and a bunch of stuff pretty much just stopped working, and there were similar cliffs a couple times with various shader models.

In a technology sense yeah, stagnation is bad and we want it to move forward, but at a consumer level? It's actually kind of good if I don't have to buy a whole new PC every couple years just to keep where I started, the PC market of the 2000s was a massive Red Queen's Race.

That is also why I fundamentally don't buy into the "NVIDIA and AMD don't want to sell you an upgrade" thing. They do, it would be great for them if they could put out a card that was so great that you couldn't even keep your 3080 anymore. That's not the world we live in anymore, moore's law died a long time ago and GPUs fundamentally relied on having more transistors at less cost every product cycle, and we've gotten to the place where all the easy gains have been squeezed. A lot of the more difficult gains were completely shat-upon at first by the public (DLSS and other non-raster tricks were extremely unpopular when the idea was first raised, especially the idea of throwing 5% or so die space at it!) and now they've been largely squeezed too.

Consumers simply just don't want to accept this reality. The entire Turing and Ampere generations were focused on keeping costs down by using cheaper nodes instead of expensive TSMC N7 - that's why AMD (who used TSMC N7) wasn't enthusiastic about competing on price, it's not that "AMD is joining NVIDIA in gouging", it's that those are the actual costs of operating in this market and consumers are still living in 1992 (when they're not making up outright fantasy prices). The x70 segment has always bounced between $349 and $399 even 10+ years ago, with the sole exception of the GTX 970. The "true" 680 was the GTX titan, which launched at $999 (in 2012 dollars!) for a cutdown GK110, a cutdown. Ampere was below the cost curve and a 3070 still cost $499 MSRP, a TSMC GPU would have been even more expensive, and now that NVIDIA is back on TSMC we are seeing prices snap back to the actual cost curve rather than Uncle Jensen's Discount Ampere/Turing Emporium pricing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces...

The idea that "NVIDIA just wants to sell enterprise GPUs" is completely insane, both these families share architectures and general architectural work and the economics doesn't work without both of them. Look at the revenue over the last few quarters for what happens without consumer sales. NVIDIA would love if consumers had to buy a new GPU every 2 years to stay in the game. And margins have stayed pretty constant, apart from a secular trend towards more datacenter gpus (and the resulting higher margins). When you consider that NVIDIA is selling 3-4x more datacenter cards than even 5 years ago, there is no evidence of some ballooning margin in consumer GPUs, this is just what they cost now.

(In contrast though AMD is in a very real decision-point between enterprise CPUs and everything else... right now they are trying to cement their gains in the datacenter market before sapphire rapids and other competition finally re-enter the market. So they actually are pushing for datacenter CPU in favor of, say, consumer GPU, along with everything else. Their shipments are massively down and that's why their sales share is under 10% now. NVIDIA though? No, their revenue is in the tank because of consumer GPUs and they very much wish they could sell you something twice as good at the same price as last year.)

But like, people just dive into these bizarre conspiracy theories. It's a margin pump that doesn't show up in corporate margins. It's slow-walking the technology at inflated prices because NVIDIA doesn't like selling you a new card every year. These are consumer goods. NVIDIA makes money by selling them to you as often as possible and by delivering gains that make you want to buy as often as possible. This is just the reality of post-moore's-law technology and spiraling costs from R&D, from TSMC, and on everything else during the pandemic. Yes, volume is way down but they can't sell them to you at a loss either, they'll cut shipments instead.

The good news is prices may finally be breaking. Flash and DRAM are way down and those are the canaries in the coal mine for overall consumer demand. TSMC is reportedly looking to cut prices to try and keep customers from cutting orders. VRAM and power ICs are coming down and stabilizing. All of this will take a long time to trickle through (NVIDIA has been producing Ada for over a year now, a lot of stuff was produced with high-cost components/inputs), and the long-term trend is still upwards (until MCM GPUs really get solved - and by MCM everyone means multi-GCD and not just pulling out memory controllers like AMD did). But there will be some near-term relief over the next 2-3 years until consumer demand starts picking back up again.

Long term though? The first 28nm generation was the GTX 670, launched for $399 in 2012 dollars, for a cutdown 300mm2 die. A 1070 was the next leading-node launch at basically $450 street price until prices finally settled, again for a ~300mm cutdown. A 3070 at $500 was under the average cost-trend because it was a trailing node. Fair price according to cost-trends for a 4070/4070 Ti/whatever you want to call it is probably $649 right now - $799 is still a little inflated but not all that much. Consumers really don't like that fact, they want to go back to imaginary $300 prices (which no x70 card ever launched at). You can't make a ferrari for $20k and you can't even make a yugo for $5k, there are simply some consumers that can't be satisfied and companies have to focus on the ones who can be. "sell at a loss and make it up in volume" is a meme not a business strategy.

In some senses the GTX 970 and the Turing/Ampere (particularly Ampere) generations were a colossal mis-step in strategy from NVIDIA, because they mis-calibrated people's pricing expectations. People aren't gonna remember the generation when you saved them from a 15% price increase, they're not even gonna know that, but they're definitely gonna remember it when prices snap upwards 30% in a single generation and eat up all the perf/$ gains. From a market-psychology perspective a steady 10-15% increase every gen is better than 0% and 30% in subsequent generations.

And for as reviled as Turing was - the 2080 Ti at $999 (EVGA sold them as cheap as $949 remember!) is less than the first GK110 cutdowns (GTX titan, the true 680) which launched at $999 in 2012 dollars. Consumers just have no overall perspective on the price trends in the industry, they latch onto the one time you launched at a cheap price and you'll never live it down. Y'all aren't giving NVIDIA any reasons to try and give you a good low-cost generation in the future if it means more generations of mis-calibrated expectations afterwards.