No worries! I have to correct myself sometimes as well, and Michael is correct - The swap to the word ‘consumer’ vs ‘customer’ is really all about psychology to change how people view those who pay for products and services. Thinking of someone as a ‘consumer’ makes it easier to value them less, which leads to companies being able to get away with abusing their customers more and not worry about it.
‘Customers’ are people, they are valued. Hence the term ‘valued customer’ that some companies use.
‘Consumers’ are more like cattle, to be herded to and fro as they mindlessly consume whatever is placed in front of them.
We are customers, (I would like to add, ‘discerning’ to that title whenever possible) - be a Discerning Customer, not just a ‘consumer’.
I believe there was some study done that supports this idea as well - something I remember about company staff being more willing to use underhanded tactics when they started referring to their customers as ‘consumers’.
So it’s not just about the word, because it has actual effects on how companies operate. Big companies know this - So they pushed the idea of ‘consumer’ on people specifically to take advantage of the psychological effects that word has.
A simple sentence with the word swapped can help get the point across. Tell me which sounds better from your point of view…
“This customer is unhappy with our product.”
vs
“This consumer is unhappy with our product.”
See what I mean? just that small change of 1 word being swapped out, affects how the sentence is interpreted and viewed. Then expand that out into an entire company, swap the words in every conversation, and suddenly people have a much easier time abusing a ‘consumer’ than they ever would with a ‘customer’.
I generally agree with your statements. But also the prices on 40 series cards are somewhat driven by the over supply of 30 series cards, which are still sitting on shelves, scalping prices and availability of cheap money in the past. Over a year ago people spent 2x or more over msrp to even get a card. So they likely tought what’s gonna happen when we add a few Benjamins on top of the MSRP
And unfortunatley IMO, and it pains me to say this, as a big conglomerate Nvidia likely treats it’s customers as consumers. At the end of the day they are publicly listed company and what matters most to a plc, is not the happiness of it’s customers, but it’s investors and shareholders.
@Michael Overall this 40 series release seems to be developing into a debacle
Absolutely it is. There will be a correction at some point, but whether that’s with the eventual release of the 4090 Ti & 4080 Ti to go along with the legitimate lower end cards, or we are stuck with this until the 5000 series I’ve no clue. But the market isn’t going to bear this indefinitely.
From a business stand point, Nvidia is doing everything perfectly correctly.
Because the average consumer is, as the word implies, a dumb idiot who does not understand the “vote with your wallet” concept.
Nvidia managed, in just 3 product generations, to turn the 250 to 350$/€ mid-range into 600 to 800$/€, and by a mere name-change on the box, managed to turn the Titan cards (which were content creator focused when introduced), into the xx90 and sell it to the more money-than-brains consumers.
Absolute ace move, I hope someone gets a raise and bonus for coming up with it!
What Nvidia began doing when dropping the M-designator at the end of Laptop GPUs (=hugely cut down compared to desktop, for power and heat reasons), is to mislead consumers. And since they got away with that, the obvious next step was done with the 1030 GDDR and 1030 DDR variants. One is EXTREMELY gimped in performance, same bold GTX 1030 label on the box. Time to learn your SKU numbers!
This is the really impressive feat. Granted, they had some help from all of the market craziness that was a result of the pandemic, but still…gotta hand it to them, they know how to turn a profit.
Did they though? The Titan cards were supposed to be more work oriented, but they still got the same drivers as the GeForce cards, and plenty of people bought them just for gaming.
Yeah nowadays nearly not imaginable that I got a 1080 used for 235€ in January 2020
If that insanity goes on it will take quite a while before I’ll upgrade my GPU cause AMD and Intel don’t really make things better, although with different problems
But first I’ll have to pickup a new Mobo and CPU because 4 cores without ht lately shows it’s age
You want to teach a greedy manufacturer a lesson? DON’T BUY IT. Let the product rot on the shelf. They’ll come around real quick. But there are too many richie-riches out there and other obsessed people that will overextend themselves and spend the money because they don’t care about anyone or anything else except themselves. So, nothing ever gets done. As long as there is no reason for them to change… they won’t.
Oh I think Nvidia will probably suffer at least a little bit. People who want the latest and the greatest will always pay top dollar for what they want, that’s why 4090 has been selling but other SKUs are stagnant. I think we will see the results of their price hikes and the general mess on February 15th
Another part of the problem with the 40 series is that TSMC raised the prices of their chips almost 30%…Jay (Jays2cents) stated this in one of his videos…I would have to look to see which one it is…Nvidia used primarily Samsung chips for the 30 series and went back to TSMC for the 40 series…The way he made it sound in that video is that TSMC isn’t cutting Nvidia any breaks on prices for the chips…
The titan cards were running something closer to the Quadro drivers.
Additionally, FP64 performance was left mostly uncut compared to the regular GTX cards.
TSMC do no price cuts to anyone, even Apple. At best some companies have better allocation if they “invested” early on the node, while the foundry/production line was still one development.
One thing I suspect made Nvidia be that much greedy is because of the profits from last cycle mining run. For share holders, it doesn’t matter if it was artificial or not, if your profits are smaller than last year, your company isn’t as profitable anymore, period. Sum this to the already ridiculous price of some GPUs, like most of the TIs (except maybe the 3060TI), and you have a problem for Nvidia. They either increase the price to increase the margin in each card, or they have to sell more with the same margin as before. Since the demand will never be the same as during the mining period, they choose the first.
To be clear, I’m not defending Nvidia. These prices sucks, both for them and AMD, and it worries me about the future of the PC gaming. My beliefs is price will creep down a little, but this will take some time, maybe one generation or two. And probably not the levels of Pascal or older, more around Ampere MSRP at best.
Intels first entry into the dGPU realm looks promising. The Drivers are being improved on, the hardware acceleration is good compared to other GPUs on the market.
In the sub 400€ range, I would certainly consider the A770.
I wouldn’t buy a Intel dGPU right now, but yeah it’s promising. It’s a massive company with money to burn in the costly development process for the design, and having it’s own Fabs can prove a huge benefits in the long run.
That being said, Intel is not known for offering low prices, so I doubt they will undercut Nvidia and AMD that much. Time will tell.
They don’t have a choice at the moment. To gain any market traction at all, they have to sell at at a lower price than the two entrenched players in the market. Until they can prove an ability to provide a quality product that competes with both NVIDIA and AMD, both spec-wise and driver-wise, they can’t demand the same prices.
One could argue that gaming is already in an abysmal state, with most of the latest games very dumb and graphics-focused, and tied umbilically to the latest and greatest GPUs. We should be going one step higher upstream and boycotting all the stupid games demanding all these stupid video cards. What’s all the expense for anyway? I can have the same shooter fun as always playing CS 1.6, and the same MMO fun playing 2000s-era Shaiya. I don’t need to touch Forza Horizon Zero Dawn 2077 to have fun gaming, and I certainly don’t need to spend what used to be the cost of a whole PC for just the video card, with the added privilege of ramping up my electricity consumption at the worst time in history for energy prices.
I agree that Intel needs to do this to stay competitive in the Gaming market. Problem is, from business standpoint, that’s not what they’re after. Anyone going to the GPU market want the HPC market for servers, were the margins are obscene. And if they can’t get traction there, Intel may back down from the plan and give up GPU market. But this is all speculation, so let’s leave at that and see.
I will say graphics isn’t my main criticism on current state of games by far. While games like Cyberpunk 2077 have optimization problems and require insane GPU horse power, you do have better optimized games that still look good. I played Horizon Zero Dawn in a GTX970 at 45 FPS in high quality, 1080p. That for me is quite the feat. Granted, I’m not one to want 100+ fps in everything, so maybe this is why I think like this.
Let’s also remember most non-mobile games usually follow the graphics that can run on the Consoles, which are on last gen graphics.
I’m much more worried about micro-transactions and with the fragmenting of games so you need to buy 20+ DLCs to play the game.
cause AMD and Intel don’t really make things better, although with different problems
