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Is the $550-$700 gaming PC dead?
Not that long ago a midrange gaming PC build would pretty much always come in under $700 and and often be around the $600 range. It looks like the new pricing that we see from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia have all but killed that market. It is looking like the very low end gaming PC will be $700+ and the top end will be around 2k.
I don't see this is a good thing at all with especially when you consider the amount of money that is being thrown into streaming gaming.
For people who have knowledge of fabrication costs, is this price gouging or has cost to produce these products moved up rapidly. I know RAM was really pricey, but that has normalized recently and I would assume a move to a smaller die would reduce some cost too (AMD).
Unless I missed something, I don't see a ~$200 GPU on the market that was released in the last few months or is releasing in the next few. This seems really bad for the midrange gaming market and for people who don't have a 1k to throw a just a PC, never mind the cost of or peripherals.
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
--John Ruskin
--John Ruskin
Comments
@Quizzical and @Ridelynn would be able to give you a better response.
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The 2060 is around 50% faster than the 1060.. you can't expect it be around the same price point. The cards are getting waaaay faster each generation leap now, it's going to cost more but isn't necessarily needed. Other than ray tracing and having a faster card in general, there's no reason to get RTX over GTX in terms of features and a budget card wouldn't handle ray tracing well anyway so what's the point in having it?
Is the $550-$700 gaming PC dead?
I think its called a console these days.
--John Ruskin
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
yes, a budget gaming PC today costs more than it has historically, even accounting for inflation.
i think there are three effects at play.
the first was the mining boom. Prices on GPUs may never entirely recover from that.
The second would be stagnation in advancement. Until just recently there has been very little competition in the CPU or GPU space: no external stimulus there to drive down prices or drive up performance
the third would be Rock’s Law: as silicon processes shrink and get faster and more efficient (Moore’s Law), the price goes up exponentially.
i have a skeptic fourth reason in that I think a lot of these vendors price fix as well... but can’t prove that.
you can still put together a decent 1080 gaming rig for around $500 (with an APU), but I would also agree with gervaise1 - at that level you may as well consider a console.
That, combined with the fact that recently each generation is not leaping in performance like we saw through the ‘00s.
Leaves me sitting on old tech with no real desire to spend a lot of cash to upgrade for a minimal performance bump.
--John Ruskin
What GPU do you, or the OP's friends if that's what we're talking about, have now? I mean you say the jump is minimal each gen now but if you went from something like a 960 to a 1060 it's around a 75% improvement. It's a huge difference.
GTX 1060 6GB launch price $279 and being about 10% faster than GTX 970
GTX 1660 6GB launch price $219 and being about 15% faster than GTX 1060 6GB
Same pattern as usual - $60 off for 10-15% better performance, evil greedy Nvidia and sky is falling...again...
--John Ruskin
GTX 1660 is new architecture - Turing, same as 20xx .
High end has always been $4K plus most of my life, now it's even higher, especially in the laptops I buy.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
--John Ruskin
I am. No point arguing that.
How have those card prices trended?
I've been holding off on buying a new laptop waiting for the price to drop, but last I checked they really hadn't come down much.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
--John Ruskin
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There are two major effects that have caused video card prices to seem to rise:
1) Increasingly powerful integrated GPUs make successors to the cheap, low end GPUs that they used to launch pointless, so they don't exist.
2) New process nodes arriving far less frequently allows designing GPUs against far more mature process nodes without them being obsolete. This makes it possible to build larger, more expensive dies with good yields.
Formerly, a lineup may have had something like a $50 GPU, a $100 GPU, a $200 GPU, a $300 GPU, and a $500 GPU. Today, they don't bother building the $50 GPU anymore because it would be slower than the integrated GPU that you get for "free", and they don't necessarily bother with the $100 GPU every generation. But now because the process nodes last so long, they can build a huge $700 GPU and maybe even a $1000 GPU.
But that doesn't mean that today's $1000 GPU is a successor to yesterday's $500 GPU, or that today's $500 GPU is a successor to yesterday's $200 GPU. Today's $500 GPU is a successor to yesterday's $500 GPU, and today's $200 GPU is a successor to yesterday's $200 GPU. Today's $1000 GPU had no true predecessor, and yesterday's $50 GPU has no successor.
For example, let's compare AMD's GPUs from the Radeon HD 5000 series to their Global Foundries 14/12 nm lineup of the Radeon RX 400/500 series, plus the Vega cards.
AMD had four GPUs in the Radeon HD 5000 series:
Cypress: 334 mm^2, $380
Juniper: 170 mm^2, $160
Redwood: 104 mm^2, $100
Cedar: 59 mm^2, $50
In something roughly like their current lineup, they had four GPUs, at least if we ignore the refreshes of Polaris 10 becoming 20 becoming 30 and so forth:
Vega 10: 486 mm^2, $500
Polaris 10: 232 mm^2, $240
Polaris 11: 123 mm^2, $140
Polaris 12: 101 mm^2, $80
Now let's take the names off of the parts and just sort by die size:
486 mm^2, $500
334 mm^2, $380
232 mm^2, $240
170 mm^2, $160
123 mm^2, $140
104 mm^2, $100
101 mm^2, $80
59 mm^2, $50
No obvious outliers there, are there? Whatever you get, you're paying right around $1 per mm^2. We're comparing AMD's latest at launch MSRP (the cards can be had for much cheaper today) to a series in which they were renowned for having dropped prices sharply. And we're also ignoring about seven years worth of inflation.
But it's not AMD's pricing that makes people think the world has gone mad. It's Nvidia's. So let's do a similar comparison with Nvidia. Let's ignore Titan cards across the board, as prices on those are more than a little crazy.
Let's look at their GeForce 600 series cards, interpreted loosely as their lineup from 2012. They effectively had four GPUs:
GK110: 561 mm^2, $700
GK104: 294 mm^2, $500
GK106: 221 mm^2, $230
GK107: 118 mm^2, $110
Now let's look at their latest lineup with their Turing cards. This time, they have five GPU chips:
TU102: 754 mm^2, $1000
TU104: 545 mm^2, $700
TU106: 445 mm^2, $500
TU116: 284 mm^2, $280
TU117: 200 mm^2, $150
If you look only at the list of prices, it looks like prices have gone way up. But let's again remove the names and sort by die size:
754 mm^2, $1000
561 mm^2, $700
545 mm^2, $700
445 mm^2, $500
294 mm^2, $500
284 mm^2, $280
221 mm^2, $230
200 mm^2, $150
118 mm^2, $110
Again, there aren't really that severe of outliers. From that list, perhaps the 294 mm^2 GPU for $500 looks pretty steep. And the 200 mm^2 GPU for $150 looks like the best deal from either list. Surely that's some evidence of movement, right?
Well, that $500 card where Nvidia is gouging you is a GeForce GTX 680, and that best deal is a GeForce GTX 1650. If you look only at prices and die sizes, Turing tends to be cheaper than Kepler. And we're completely ignoring the inflation that happened over the course of several years, too.
I often claim that price tags at retail are inextricably linked to the cost of producing the parts. Sometimes people scoff at that, wanting instead to compare various series based on model number or whatever. But cost of production is a big deal, and it has a huge impact on prices.
If you don't want to pay a fortune, they still produce the 200 mm^2 GPU and the 300 mm^2 GPU or whatever. And they're still faster than the comparably sized GPUs from previous generations. They might even be cheaper. Just because they also make some huge dies doesn't mean that the cheaper ones are gone.
The exception is the low end, which really is gone. We'll never again see another 59 mm^2 discrete GPU die like Cedar. Then again, the integrated GPU in AMD's Raven Ridge APU probably takes more die space than that. That's why there's no point in building such a low end discrete GPU anymore.