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Who's REALLY buying these overpriced 40 series cards from Nvidia?

Arnox

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I think people keep forgetting that scalpers are a thing and I'm pretty damn sure they're trying desperately to make 2020 happen all over again, but it's just not gonna happen. I think we WILL see a spike in sales when December finally rolls around, but beyond that, come January, sales will hit a major slump. And we haven't even truly seen AMD's offerings yet.

Consider this graph of price for one of the most common modern GPUs. The 3060 Ti.


If we scroll down to the pricing history, we see that the 3060 Ti hit a clear peak in Sept. 2021 all the way to January 2022, but after that, it's been dropping hard and fast all year. Right now, you can go on Ebay and find a very nice condition used one for about $320.

But you know what? That's just one card. Let's see Paul Allen's card.


Hmmm... 3080 plummeted off a cliff to $700 and it's been holding steady there ever since. And you can get one for much lower too on Ebay. I saw one listing for an EVGA 3080. $580 dollars. Oof. So... Are these 40 series cards ACTUALLY selling? Technically yes, but probably only to scalpers. And is the great graphics card apocalypse of 2020 gonna happen again? Hahaha... No. We may see a bit of it during the usual Christmas rush though so be prepared for that.
 

Battousai

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So... Are these 40 series cards ACTUALLY selling?
Yes, to people with some actual money to throw away, also known as gaming streamers that constantly get donations of money from the people following them and use those to upgrade their rigs. All the streamers I follow have a 40 series card that was paid for by their viewers, these cards are really not made for the average gamer not to mention that you need a completely upgraded system with a relatively powerful power source and enough space inside your box to actually fit the card since they are gigantic.
 

Arnox

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Yes, to people with some actual money to throw away, also known as gaming streamers that constantly get donations of money from the people following them and use those to upgrade their rigs. All the streamers I follow have a 40 series card that was paid for by their viewers, these cards are really not made for the average gamer not to mention that you need a completely upgraded system with a relatively powerful power source and enough space inside your box to actually fit the card since they are gigantic.
Yeah but the amount of streamers that actually make it big can't fund even a tenth of the sales Nvidia is currently getting.
 

Phiwise_

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I dunno. There's other products better suited for this purpose, but vectorish programming is still in demand and silicon is silicon. Bitcoin really opened pandora's box in this respect; it proved the tech necessary for a lot of previously-essentially-theoretical CS methods was finally mature, and now every business in the world with its head on straight and an intern that knows how to import python libraries is neural-netting its way to 50 to 80 percent solutions to the problems they didn't think they could spare the resources to hire real programmers for. Businesses with their head on straight being such an oxymoron, that number is currently small, but is growing steadily. Now graphics cards, or as we video game geeks will have to start calling them once we're no longer the primary buyers, vector cards, are slowly becoming as useful to today's businesses as the IBM PC was to yesteryear's. I don't think we're headed to anything like another 2020, when fabs just weren't running, but demand is only going to rise from here on out. Nvidia just already knows this and is pricing accordingly.
 

Arnox

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I dunno. There's other products better suited for this purpose, but vectorish programming is still in demand and silicon is silicon. Bitcoin really opened pandora's box in this respect; it proved the tech necessary for a lot of previously-essentially-theoretical CS methods was finally mature, and now every business in the world with its head on straight and an intern that knows how to import python libraries is neural-netting its way to 50 to 80 percent solutions to the problems they didn't think they could spare the resources to hire real programmers for. Businesses with their head on straight being such an oxymoron, that number is currently small, but is growing steadily. Now graphics cards, or as we video game geeks will have to start calling them once we're no longer the primary buyers, vector cards, are slowly becoming as useful to today's businesses as the IBM PC was to yesteryear's. I don't think we're headed to anything like another 2020, when fabs just weren't running, but demand is only going to rise from here on out. Nvidia just already knows this and is pricing accordingly.
Ultimately, it just really depends on what will be the "next big thing." Yesterday, it was cryptocurrency mining. Now it's nothing. Tomorrow, who knows. Without that big thing, we can clearly see that demand for GPUs, even with enterprises leveraging them more and more these days, is just not enough in any way to make GPU Apocalypse 2: Electric Boogaloo happen. The cheap RTX 3080 launch combined with the pandemic massively halting production combined with the incredible ease of scalping nowadays combined with the cryptocurrency craze made an absolute perfect storm. But that was almost a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the big GPU manufacturers. It is VERY unlikely that events will culminate in such a way again anytime soon. Even further, enterprises are, right now, bulk-buying Teslas and Quadros. They don't give a shit about the consumer GPUs, or at very least, they don't care about them right now. Again, maybe that next big thing is gonna hit and we'll see demand for even consumer GPUs skyrocket again, but we'll see.
 

Battousai

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Turns out I was kinda right. Maybe mostly right, depending on how you look at it. 4090 will sell, maybe throughout the year, but after that, crickets.
Well yeah, like I said those things are mostly bought by people with actual money like streamers, and scalpers sell them even higher than regular. There is no market for those things outside streamers or people who are straight up wealthy, and they are not willing to pay fucking scalpers either. The scalpers played themselves really and now they got a stockpile that they will probably have to sell at very low cost if they even want to get rid of it.
 
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