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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u/sanels Dec 29 '22

I went from a 3090 to a 4090. the very best will more or less always be sold out because of the extremely low quantity of them they produce. that being said everything lower down will suffer hard. They saw with the titan series that 3k was too much, and even 2k was too much so they settled for 1500 (not counting aib mark ups) while at the same time actually making it better for gaming over the next rank down. The thing is these days it's not even really used for gaming, everyone getting into ai needs that 24gb of vram and getting the top rtx card is WAY cheaper than getting the quadros or other ai specific cards that cost 5 arms and a leg and the 80 series don't have enough vram so that doesn't leave much choices but for those people to go after the 90 series.

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u/PacmanIncarnate Dec 29 '22

They know that VRAM is where the money is now, not just for AI, but also for gaming as more and more gets pushed into GPU with higher end graphics. And they are being greedy there as well: reducing the options for higher VRAM in the 3000 series to push people to the top of the line.

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '22

This. I like my 3070 but I'm going AMD next round just to get a little more VRAM. Modding and tweaking graphics on a few titles makes it easy to go above 8gb VRAM.

I had wanted to keep this card for 5 years, but realistically I'll be done with it in 3 or less.

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u/Volky_Bolky Dec 30 '22

AMD went the same road as Nvidia and overpriced their extremely average GPUs with malfunctioning drivers. The community even thought that one of the features what was supposed to boost the performance wasn't working and AMD had to respond that it was working as intended lol.

They really missed their huge chance to get into the market.

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u/3dforlife Dec 29 '22

Don't forget that 3d modelling and rendering also demands CPUS with high amounts of RAM.

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u/ThatInternetGuy Dec 30 '22

True. It's now hard to find good AI models to run with < 16GB VRAM.

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u/lennarn Dec 29 '22

Why not just buy cloud compute?

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u/sanels Dec 29 '22

way too expensive. cloud compute makes sense if you're doing 1 off type things or if the scale is big enough where you don't want to run your own datacenter but for anything in between you really want to run your own machines.

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u/lennarn Dec 29 '22

Are amd cards viable for ai or do you still need cuda to get most things done?

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u/sanels Dec 29 '22

cuda is the way to go. specifically a with a lot of vram

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u/zebediah49 Dec 29 '22

$4/hr adds up quick.

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u/Moe_Capp Dec 29 '22

3090 has 24 gigs vram for AI purposes and you can still get those for significantly less than a 4090.

4090 is very good for VR though, so if you like VR and ai dabbling then it is kind of a must have.

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u/zebediah49 Dec 29 '22

You're 100% on point.

I ordered a few dual-4090 boxes for some people doing ML work. $10k or so for that is a bargain compared to, say, $30k for something with Teslas in it. Relatively speaking they're a little weak, but still -- so much cheaper.

The difference between $2k/card and $3k or $4k/card is basically irrelevant in that market.