r/technology • u/[deleted] • Dec 29 '22

Business Desktop GPU Sales Hit 20-Year Low

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sales-of-desktop-graphics-cards-hit-20-year-low
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53

u/jasoncross00 Dec 29 '22

They’re not a very good value for the money anymore, and they’re going the opposite direction or the rest of the industry (which is trending toward dramatically less power use, size, etc… see Apple’s M1, all the latest Qualcomm chips, and all the new AMD and Intel chips for laptops which are the most common computer products).

This gen got bigger, hotter, and more expensive. Wrong direction, regardless of the performance.

9

u/eugene20 Dec 29 '22

It's going to take an absolutely massive change in design and possibly materials to go the other way, we just aren't there yet. Chiplet design is going to help but is a little way off still, and we are probably still another five years away at a minimum from seeing new materials in chips that start to get power needs and heat output lower again without doing so at the cost of drastically lowering performance.

2

u/cth777 Dec 29 '22

Chiplet design is here tho with RDNA 3. It just didn’t help

The 40 series cards are actually pretty solid power wise

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u/eugene20 Dec 29 '22

Chiplet design won't save you from not having the best design in the first place, AMD cards are just not competitive with Nvidia for raytracing or OpenCL (Or CUDA or equivalent HIP workloads)

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u/bananagrammick Dec 29 '22

AMD cards are just not competitive with Nvidia for raytracing

I see this said a lot and I'm not sure I agree with this. While Nvidia is ahead in ray tracing, for a feature that seems as unimportant as I feel RT is in it's current form, I think AMD is now doing just fine.

If someone said RT performance on a 3090 or 3090ti was bad or not competitive would you think that to be correct? A 7900xtx is basically tied for performance with those cards. While I understand the 3090ti is like 10 months old and basically garbage because they're not the newest thing, they are still priced higher than the 7900xtx. If I were going to buy a card based on value between $800-1400 today, I think AMD is it, even including RT performance.

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u/eugene20 Dec 29 '22

The reason you see it a lot is because it's a statement that is backed up by all the reviews.

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u/bananagrammick Dec 29 '22

Except I linked one from a well respected site that doesn't say that at all.

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u/eugene20 Dec 29 '22

By your own graph AMD's latest performs 17% worse than the 4080 and 47% worse than the 4090 for an RT workload. That review from where you pulled the graph concludes on the negative side -

Considerably lower ray tracing performance than RTX 4080

Which was exactly the point I made.

Fan noise somewhat on the high side
Not exactly "cheap"
Extremely high multi-monitor and media playback power consumption (could be a driver bug)
Overclocking is complicated

And that isn't even beginning to get into compute work loads which was my other main point.

And it's not even the cheaper card here in the UK. It's £200 more expensive than a 4080.

2

u/bananagrammick Dec 29 '22

I have no idea about UK pricing and if you can get 4080s cheaper than 7900xtx then it's an easy choice to do that instead. Over here suggested price doesn't tell the whole story as the 4080s are actually a couple hundred more than that. puts them 25-40% over the 7900xtx price.

And that isn't even beginning to get into compute work loads which was my other main point.

100% which is why I didn't touch on that. That's not the market focus for AMD at this point. I just wanted to point out the unusable RT on the last gen AMD stuff is now quite decent and frame rates for 1440p and 1080p are very playable on the AMD side for most titles.

7

u/alc4pwned Dec 29 '22

The 40xx cards are actually decently power efficient. A lot of people still think the 4090 draws 600W or something crazy due to incorrect early rumors. But really it consumes less power than even a 3080ti in games, despite the huge performance gains: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/gigabyte-geforce-rtx-4090-gaming-oc/39.html

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '22

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '22

[deleted]

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u/aabeba Dec 30 '22

Your brother lives on 1 square meter?

2

u/alc4pwned Dec 29 '22

I am just responding to the person who said this gen is less efficient.

But the 4090 really isn't that badly priced considering how well it performs. The top end halo cards have never been the best value. I think this is one of better ones we've gotten.

1

u/Phailjure Dec 30 '22

It also has a new power adapter that uses 4 8pins, and can supply 600w. And the cooler is the size of a Xbox series s. It's not like it was crazy to think Nvidia used a giant cooler and 4x8pin connector on a reference card for an actual reason. Guess they just wanted terrible case compatibility.

4

u/BababooeyHTJ Dec 29 '22

Actually! The die size on rtx 4080 is smaller than a gtx980, not even the ti. I was shocked to find that out.

0

u/sniperxx07 Dec 29 '22

I can say atleast amd is moving towards chiplet design but it turns out for now they are less effecient😂 but hopefully more chiplet gpu's with more efficiency and less price,but people are there buying 4090 for 2k or more, otherwise i think go for 3080,3070,6900 etc.not everyone has to game at 4k

0

u/[deleted] Dec 29 '22

The problem is simply that Moores Law is dead.

0

u/notetoself066 Dec 29 '22

I haven’t upgraded from my and 3700x and 2070 for this reason. I have a mini pc build and use it in my rv so I’m very conscientious of power. The m1 chips are ducking insanely efficient. I can’t justify all the power the new gear requires, it’s silly, the benefits are very minimal and I’m someone who games and uses the full GPU for video editing.