The Playstation 4 all over again…
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How much is a kidney worth today? 
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Okay - since nothing exists in a vacuum, thought I’d throw out the numbers that are being bandied about by nVidia, experts, and pros. The expected gain of an equivalent 20-series card over it’s 10-series little brother under traditional rasterized algorithmic loads is 33-50%. This means if your current 1070 can handle certain settings at 100fps, expect a 2070 to be in the 133-150fps range.
However, traditional cards have never been hardware optimized for ray tracing. This means supposedly we are going to see a sixfold to eightfold (+500-700%) increase in raw capabilities for games that take advantage of ray tracing algorithms. If your blizzard cutscene was ray traced in real-time and your old 10-series card barely survived at 10fps, the expected new 20-series should be able to hit 60fps.
Now, will it hold up to inspection? It might be a slightly rosy picture with results being more modest, but based on the raw hardware they are cramming in (number of CUDA cores, new gate sizes, memory bandwidth, etc.) it’s not unrealistic. Of course the nVidia marketing team is going to put their best foot forward, but they aren’t mistepping. But yes, all indications are that this is an iterative yet generational gap up in performance.
Is it “worth” to upgrade considering the wallet-emptying debut prices? That’s a better question because they are demanding commiserately higher prices over any debut. However, considering the price curve of the 10-series cards (debut price → price explosion and shortage → used cards selling for 150% or 200% debut price on eBay 6 months later → return to debut pricing 2 years after launch) it is not unreasonable for nVidia to see the demand is high for the best cards so they will adjust the price accordingly to match the market. According to the laws of economics, the last generation of 10-series cards was actually priced inefficiently and nVidia missed out on a rather large chunk of profits because they poorly gauged demand. With a higher launch price this time on the 20-series, it allows a temporary cooling of the market and a return to the standard cycle of LAUNCH → DISCOUNT → STEEP DISCOUNTS → NEW MODEL, something economists, scientists, investors, and businessmen all understand and prefer because it is an easier to predict model versus the chaos of the last 2 years and cryptocurrency mining throwing the entire GPU market pricing into pandemonium.
Hope that helps clear things up for the next 3 months. TL;DR I think it’s smart pricing, solid hardware, and highly likely it will become the de facto standard we will compare all other cards to for at least the next generation.
Also these higher prices will only effect the top 1% - remember the entire point of these higher prices is so they can resume a standard discount cycle, so just wait 6 months or until 2019 Black Friday to buy a RTX card.
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Is there anything about these new cards that suggests they would not be as useful for crypto-currency mining? Or are we just plain hoping that the boom is over and they wont hoover up this generation of cards as well?
As for standard discount cycle, even if they were to do that these launch prices are 4-5 times what they were last time I was interested in buying anything, good few years ago now but still. While I’ve before been able to get hold of a '70 or even an '80 after a year or so. If these follow the same pattern they’ll stay out of my affordability range for a very long time.
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My guess is you weren’t buying launch-day GPUs last time, or you’re purposely conflating the lowest end of last-gen with the most expensive RTX. To say
previous generations is either misleading or deliberately false, even when taking into account your region (Northern Europe).
1070 to 2070: $379 → $599 (+58%)
1080 to 2080: $549 → $799 (+45%)
1080 Ti to 2080 Ti: $699 → $1199 (+71%)
The only other shift has been a (roughly) 5% strengthening of the Euro vs USD in the past 2 years (comparing early Sept 2016 vs now) so maybe nVidia currency pricing policy changed to accommodate the bigger picture shift over the last decade - you used to be able to nail 1€ to $1.30 +/- 10% for decades and that’s what businesses assumed for their European sales predictions, but for 5 years it’s weakened to $1.15 +/- $0.10. This may not seem like much but to accountants and analysts the new median $1.15 is much more accurate, requiring a reevaluation of all European prices.
No, to everything.
You’re not really responding to what I said at all. I said launch prices many years ago, not last generation. I’m talking the 8000 - 500 series, the 8800GTS launched at about $300 which I would say is to be compared with the 2080 in terms of intra-generation relation. After this prices started to rise and the 500 series launched a with the 580 at $499 forcing me to step down a point and go for the 570 instead, which was a lot more value for money at $349, but still a pretty high end card. The prices I actually paid for them in the end was far lower, as I said, I was reliant on the normal price cycle which has not happened for the recent 1000 series.
Something is possibly also wonky with the currencies as well because these cards are coming out here costing 10-15k SEK right now and that’s the highest prices I’ve ever seen. You’d normally see AND balk at top end launch prices of 5-7k SEK. But it isn’t the SEK-USD that’s the problem as the SEK is stronger against the USD than it used to be. But the SEK is also weaker towards the euro so maybe there’s some shit going on where we’re forced to import at euro prices.
$800 USD should be about 7300 SEK but for some reason we’re paying almost 11000 kr for the 2080.
Though on overview my 4-5x was an overstatement, 2-3x is probably closer to the truth.
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I just assumed the boom was over simply because the crypto-currency (whatever it may be) were no longer super high so miners weren’t very tempted to buy a ton of cards anymore.
(so, I guess basically it is hope)
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