Dunno what people expected, but yes, this isn’t unexpected. nVidia used to be gaming company first. Now they aren’t. Now they are datacenter and AI company first. Because they get bigger profit margins from datacenter where entry level stuff costs above 40000USD, that isn’t typo, where even 2000USD 4090 is change in comparison. Gaming is now their sidebusiness. Sort of backup to return to if datacenter ever fails or has lower demand. Right now, less gaming stuff they make and more of supply they direct to datacenter, more profits they make. So yeah, they don’t have to care. Plus AMD isn’t going to compete on performance, but on price, so 5090 and very likely 5080 will basically have no competition. It is you either buy nVidia or you don’t buy that level of performance. Enabled by gamers starving competition, by hoping that AMD will make good cards, so they can buy cheaper nVidia cards. Some of us were telling you how badly this will screw you, but you were calling us idiots when RTX2080Ti started what would be end of PC gaming renaissance. Funny how things turned around. And overall, nVidia is more than ready to let AMD take 10% of market share in gaming, all they will make sure is to have top end, which is winning them mindshare. Beyond that those 10% will be easy to get back if they have to. I mean with like 60-70% profit margins you got quite a lot of wiggle room. Our best hope is that Intel selling 250USD B580, which is sold at loss and will likely forever just have small trickles of supply to not bankrupt Intel, will scare AMD into being very price aggressive in price segments where they will compete. If this doesn’t happen, next generation will be basically “you pay more to get more” in terms of value.
I guess we will see in January, I think AMD is on 6th and nVidia on 7th at CES, where they will announce new stuff. So I guess we will see how bad or good it will be then.
Oh and to USA friends, Trump tariffs will also be quite problematic, so welcome to how rest of the world gets screwed with pricing, I guess. I guess that guy on gallows saying “first time?” meme is appropriate. Hopefully that vote was wroth it. 😀