It's kinda amazing how year after year reviewers release the "new products are crap, buy the thing we told you was crap last year" and people don't catch on.

The low-end is crawling along due to fixed cost overheads from PHY area that doesn't shrink. 4N is ~3x the price per area as Samsung, and PHY area becomes relatively much larger. The incentive is to cut every cost in PHY area - fewer memory channels to reclaim PHY area and using cache instead, cutting PCIe width to reclaim that PHY area, even cannibalizing the media engine/encoders to claw back that last little bit of space. AMD has actively been engaged in this battle with 6600XT (x8 PCIe, 128b memory bus) and 6500XT (x4 PCIe, 64b memory bus, no encoder) and RDNA2 generally shrinking memory bus and replacing it with cache in this same way (and 6600/6600XT and 5700/5700XT also regressed performance vs their predecessors in some situations just like 4060/4060 Ti). On top of that you have big fixed increases in manufacturing, shipping, etc, and the rest of the BOM is ballooning over time too (forget VRAM spot prices, ask automakers if their BOM is higher or lower than 2019... and it's not a small difference, it's probably 2x!)

In this world of organically-low performance increase within the low-end product segment, the impact of clearance sales exceeds the impact of new product generations. And this means we end up in this situation where reviewers do the "the new products suck, buy the ones we told you sucked last year" rubber-chicken routine year after year after year. But if everything is constantly bad, kinda nothing is, really. That's just how this product segment is now.

And when you look at things like the 3060 Ti being $275 on clearance, or the 6700XT being $300-320... the market consensus is that the old products are Good Enough. And the new products in fact may be worse in some ways, unless you are willing to step up in price to maintain the same product segment rather than the same price segment. Because TSMC is cranking the prices 25-50% every generation and Samsung was abnormally cheap to begin with, so there is a definite price step happening.

Hard to see how people don't understand that the $200-300 product segment is dying in the same way the $100-150 product segment already died. 6 months after launch you could buy a 7850 2GB for $150, or a 7750 for $100. What does $100 buy you in the new/retail GPU market these days? Does anybody actually seriously think the inability to deliver new $100-150 GPUs with enthusiast-tier performance is due to "greed" or "agreeing not to compete" as opposed to market realities? But people will defend it to the death that the privilege of selling them a $200 GPU is some massive profit opportunity that AMD and NVIDIA are just choosing to ignore and sandbag.

We are in the end of silicon in some ways. Post-Moore's Law the costs have been spiraling, and now we are to the point where consumers are deciding that no, it's not worth the cost increases. And companies aren't going to cut their throats and run zero margin or sell at a loss either. They will make the products they can make, and if the demand is low enough that it's not economical to continue developing products for that segment, they'll stop and continue in the segments that are still profitable. And that eventually flows through to TSMC and ASML, and node research will slow (hyper-NA is already effectively canceled due to excessive costs) and silicon research becomes incremental and iterative and slower rather than continuing to make even N7->N5->N3 sized progress. Yes, it can get slower.

And again, this doesn't mean "NVIDIA is leaving gaming", any more than they left gaming after the $100-150 market died. You can still make something in the 4070-class product very profitably at $600 and slimmer margins at $500, and the market access the gaming products provide is foundational for capturing the innovation happening in the other segments (it's why NVIDIA keeps being showered in money with stuff like AI while AMD is left out of the rain, you don't get to be in the segments like AI or OptiX without doing the work in gaming). But they can’t do the 4070 at $329 like it’s 2014 on a mature 28nm anymore. And the $200 market is as toast as the $100 market before it, if that's your budget then buy a console and benefit from the cost-reductions of integration and reduced modularity and fixed/stable hardware specs.

But gamers are “”emotionally unprepared”” for living in a world where there isn’t automatic progress at each price point. People do think of it as the privilege of AMD and nvidia getting to sell you an upgrade… the vendors see it as the “”privilege”” of selling you the lowest-margin product in their lowest-margin product family (all of that 6nm wafer is 10x as profitable for AMD doing literally anything else already). If it sucks oh well, and if you don’t buy it then they’ll stop making it, and it’s not malicious or conspiratorial, it’s just not where the tech is going in that price segment. People want cost-inefficient Lego-style modular product design even in the lowest-end product segments, and then get mad when it’s expensive, and start spewing conspiracies about collusion etc. That’s easier for people emotionally than just admit they’re wrong and being irrational.

Also there’s really no segment where any product here regressed. The predecessor to the 4060 isn’t the 3060 ti, a card that was a $400 MSRP / $450 street price even after mining. It’s the 3060, and the 4060 is way faster in all scenarios. The predecessor to the 7600 is the 6600, the 6700XT is a $480 MSRP card. People love to do this “it’s actually 2% slower (at a res nobody plays on those cards) than a card that’s only 20% faster” bit - and again this includes reviewers too. Nothing is actively regressing, it’s just not advancing as fast as people want, but they’re so emotionally immature they have to turn that into “2% slower than a card that’s 20% faster / 50% higher msrp” to express their frustration. It’s not slower than anything other than your expectations, but people emotionally love the framing of it somehow being a regression.

After 5 years of these reviews and discourse (everything post Pascal and even Pascal itself tbh) I’m just kinda tired with it. If you apple Moores law era standard then everything is going to suck going forward, period, with rare “this one is ok” for truly great ones. If everything is awful nothing is.