idk about miners being primarily the ones who complain about prices, but honestly they might be a large number of the people who complain about memory bus reductions.

RDNA2 was a relatively poor miner (worse than RDNA1) precisely because RDNA2 already did the same thing as Ada, replaced real bandwidth with cache. And generally that's fine and it performs well, because games are a pretty normal workload. But mining is deliberately completely random and uncacheable (otherwise you could cache the parts of the DAG that you need) and benefits more from the raw bandwidth, because the cache does ~nothing.

Miners have always been fucking great at astroturfing, like in 2021-2022 they had a ton of people convinced that it was just some giant production shortage and NVIDIA just wasn't making any cards etc. Or the arguments about how the mining LHR limiter was "bad for gamers" because you wouldn't be able to mine as profitably in your spare time (of course ignoring that paying double MSRP in the first place kinda offsets that and in fact necessitates mining to even make the purchase make sense). Miners are fundamentally just nerds who post on tech forums and gaming forums and know what arguments are convincing and catch traction etc.

Can I see those guys making a particular stink about the last source of super-wide memory bus cards drying up? Yes. They already bought up all the 5700XTs etc, Ampere was the last hurrah of the Big Memory Bus, and actually it would make sense if a ton of the outright agitators had some history in mining subs/etc.

It shouldn't really matter to gamers where the bandwidth comes from. Yes, cache hit rates decline at higher resolutions, but in reasonable configurations (eg not 4060 at 4K) the cache systems on RDNA2 and Ada are basically seamless/transparent to gamers. Games are cacheable workloads. It's fine. Things like the yuzu dev running 16K downscaled to 4K and complaining he had some performance loss on a 4060 is the extreme exception. They're not transparent to miners though.

In accordance with hanlon's law, however, I will admit that gamers are some extremely dumb motherfuckers (ahem, "often lack understanding of relevant technical details and frequently tend to bandwagon even when it doesn't make sense" etc) and it could just be people getting riled up about stuff they don't fully understand from semi-trusted tech-media figures telling them to be upset. We went through this same "it shouldn't matter how the bandwidth gets there" thing with texture delta compression, there were people insisting for ages that it was bad and hurt image quality despite it being lossless, and that AMD's image quality was better despite them implementing the same lossless delta compression approaches in GCN3 (Tonga/Fiji). It's more bits delivered per bit, without even a real power usage hit (unlike GDDR6X which was an incredibly mixed bag). Or with Fiji's HBM and Vega's HBM2/HBCC supposedly being some magic thing that let you swap across a 16 GB/s pcie bus without any sort of framebuffer size limitation etc... the gaming community is real bad at critical understanding and thinking about some of this deeper tech stuff.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-r...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/8460/amd-radeon-r9-285-review...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ8YlXh-jbI&t=280s

(Reviewers, on the other hand, there's really no excuse, and a lot of them are playing silly buggers largely at the expense of their viewers. People getting surprised by Alan Wake 2 that DX12U/DX12.2 is a thing that matters and is being adopted, people getting surprised that upscalers are a thing that matters and will matter more as UE5/6 and other intensive games come to rely on them, people getting surprised that mesh shaders reduce VRAM utilization, etc. They have basically done nothing to inform their viewers about any of the broader developments in the field other than whining about VRAM. It really does feel like a lot of the last 5 years has been a bunch of the reviewers being activists about the graphics field not going the way they want it to: they don't want upscaling, they want a return to moore's law and real raster gains etc, even though that's not possible and they understand perfectly well why. The trajectory of, eg, Steve Gamersnexus has really been something else, contrast his take on DX12 with his take on the RTX launch and DX12U/DX12.2. And pretty much everyone, too, continues to drag their feet on admitting DLSS is real framerate improvement etc that actually matters to card performance and efficiency etc. Reviewers discussed visual quality/pipeline quirks as part of GPU reviews for ages and it is increasingly going to be necessary again as more of this stuff is shunted into brand-specific platform libraries like DLSS, Metal, XeSS, and FSR. Doesn't matter if they don't wanna, it's necessary. It's very aggravating, for someone who wants to see the tech discussed and move forward.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qiQH29KAXg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=176s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=268 (just buy it!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu7pxJXBBn8&t=273s