I don't even know what people are really asking for anymore. 4070, 7800XT, 4060, and 7600 were all incredibly high-value launches, and in January we're incredibly likely to get price drops on 12GB cards as well as 16GB cards at the old 4070 Ti price point. The value is there, just a fairly large faction of people have an emotional investment in pretending like it's perpetual doom-and-gloom.

Consider the reaction when Microcenter started putting a $100 steam gift card on the already-attractive 4070 price. People still flipped a shit even though a de-facto $500 price was obviously about as good as any 4070-tier product would get for this gen (apart from the firesales at the end).

https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/12v790e/100_s...

https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/12ug1ql/it_ap...

https://old.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/12ucq6b/gpu_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/12ucljb/micro_cente...

This is pretty much what super refresh is going to accomplish next month (a year later!) - 4070 will probably move down to $499-549, 4070 Super will be 95% of a 4070 Ti for $599-629, and 4070 Ti Super will offer 16GB at the same $749 price point. But people want a return to 2000s-level pricing (despite soaring wafer costs etc) and nothing short of that is going to satisfy some people.

(and a fair number of people (including reviewers!) actively propagandize about these cards, like complaining the 4060 or 4060 Ti is actually slower than its predecessor - they're absolutely not, even at 4K (tough for a 6600XT tier card!) the 4060 Ti is still faster on average. And as a general statement, AMD made the same switch to 128b memory bus last gen already without catastrophic issues, like the aforementioned 6600XT. A card can still be a mediocre step without making shit up about it, and the 3060 Ti was the absolute peak of the 30-series value so it's understandable the 40-series struggles to drastically outpace it. But it's not slower, either.)

https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/14phuh8/geforce_r...

https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/13vm5ti/geforce_r...

Since the RTX launch there has been the rise of what I'd call the "socially gamer, fiscally conservative" faction, the group of people that likes to think they'd be gaming, or likes to think they would upgrade, but this spending is too gosh-darn wasteful! However good the deals get, it's much more fun to just post dismissively on the internet about it, and it costs nothing to do so, but you get all the social clout of aligning yourself with the thing your in-group is excited about and signaling your social virtue (thrift), etc.

Others are elder gamers who have lives and families now and are just drifting away in general and can't justify the money on a hobby they really no longer do, but they can't just let go of that identity/touchstone from their youth. And they're subconsciously looking for a deal that's so out-of-band good that they won't feel bad about not using it.

But again, like the 4060 and 4070, there are plenty of deals at all times and in all price brackets, including older cards if that's your jam. 3080 and 3090 are good, 6800XT/7800XT is good, 4060 and 4070 are good, 7900XT has fallen as low as $700, etc. If you need to upgrade, then upgrade, but the slowing of moore's law has hit GPUs hardest. They are asymptotic perf-per-area machines that thrive on scaling out on cheap transistors (jensen has explicitly talked about this more than a decade ago) and now that cost increases are eating up most of the density gains it's understandable that gpus are the first and most affected by slowing gains/rising costs.

https://youtu.be/Xn1EsFe7snQ?t=1075

At some point if people don't want to bite on deals like the microcenter thing, you will just see companies pivot to the products that are actually moving. 4090 did great, AI is doing great. Midrange and high-end will continue to sell and the "culturally gamer, fiscally conservative" folks will continue to seethe about the lack of a true Radeon 7850 successor or whatever. Everyone understands why the $150 price point is dead, but people don't want to accept that the cancer is going to continue to progress upwards, because fab tech isn't getting healthier either. And the perf/$ progress that AMD/NVIDIA can make is fundamentally determined by the transistors/$ that the fabs give them. Going above that rate of trx/$ gain is long-term unsustainable for them.

If you can't be brought over by reasonable deals, like 4070 for $500 or Super Series refresh, are you really addressable market, from the perspective of NVIDIA and AMD? and in AMD's case, they benefit if you buy a PS5 anyway, that's still an AMD product, but doesn't carry the baggage of having to argue with the tech community (and big tech reviewers who increasingly view themselves as activists/participants rather than simply "calling balls and strikes") about the merits of cache vs bus width, or whether DLSS or RT or framegen is a good idea, or whatever. Sony will make a decision and you will take it or leave it, and seemingly that is more palatable than what AMD and NVIDIA are doing.

Unified APUs are great, and have huge cost advantages, but it does involve many of the same compromises that gamers already hate. You're not going to be upgrading the memory of your Steam Console, and Series X/S both have GTX 970-style "3.5GB" slow-memory partitions, and there is a huge focus on upscaling (which will probably include AI upscaling in the PS5 Pro), etc. Those things are simply ground-truths in the console world. A huge part of the "console experience" is simply removing the option to even argue about these compromises, so that people don't feel bad about not being able to use ultra settings or having to turn on upscaling to do so, or for using a CPU with less cache/slightly lower IPC, etc. "Compromise pain" is quite similar to "choice paralysis" in practice, and by taking the choice away you relieve the pain.