Don’t blame Nvidia
NVIDIA’S NOT-SO-NEW GeForce RTX 3080 12GB graphics card has arrived with pretty much zero rejoicing. The poor old thousand-dollar GPU has taken a beating from professional commentators and PC-using proles alike. And I get it. Another megabucks card destin
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of Nvidia’s corporate culture, in general. It has long been the prickliest, most thin-skinned of the major tech players, getting into more pointless spats and having a greater propensity to do things like blacklisting members of the media for perceived transgressions than its rivals, Intel and AMD.
I understand the particular derision reserved for the RTX 3080 12GB. For starters, it’s a reminder that the 3080 should have had 12GB from the get-go. At the same time, it’s another expensive new GPU that barely moves the needle for performance, just like the RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3080 Ti, and RTX 3090 Ti.
Put another way, the 3080 12GB changes nothing apart from Nvidia’s margins. It’s another GPU that shifts the average price of the GA102 GPU found in the 3080 and 3090 chipsets slightly upmarket. The 3080 12GB isn’t about gamers, it’s about Nvidia making more money. That makes people angry but, actually, I can’t see the problem.
Nvidia is a publicly listed company with demanding shareholders. The current GPU market is insane, largely due to no fault of Nvidia’s. It didn’t invent crypto, nor did it create a pandemic or disrupt global supply chains. Ultimately, Nvidia has an obligation to its shareholders. If there is cash to be made, Nvidia should make it. And there is serious cash to be made from GPUs at the moment. There is one counterargument involving Nvidia’s longterm interests and those of its shareholders. Is there a chance that not being seen to care about gamers will alienate what you could call its true customer base?
After all, the crypto madness and the pandemic will pass. At which point, Nvidia will have to fall back on its core customer base. For a product such as the RTX 3080, that means gamers. Personally, I don’t think it’s a genuine worry. Let’s say two years from now, crypto has crashed, the chip shortage is history, and Nvidia’s Lovelace refresh GPUs, which is roughly where we’ll be by then, are comfortably the best cards on the market. Are gamers going to overlook them? Nope.
If it’s a close call between Nvidia and AMD graphics, maybe with Intel in the mix too, you could imagine a few people with hurt feelings not going with Nvidia. But I can’t see it being a major factor to the extent that shareholders will feel it the same way they feel the profits from selling megabucks GPUs for a couple of years over the pandemic.
Moaning about Nvidia’s rhetoric on the 3080 12GB being all about gamers is futile, too. What is Nvidia supposed to say?
I remember when AMD launched the Radeon HD 4870 and told the world how it would forever be committed to giving gamers 80 percent of the performance of Nvidia’s big boy GPU for half the money. Then it unceremoniously dropped that idea as soon as it had a winner in the HD 7970.
Anyway, the point remains that it’s pointless to jump on Nvidia for doing what it was set up to do, namely make money selling graphics chips. The majority of factors that are distorting the current GPU market are completely beyond Nvidia’s control. The implied idea that Nvidia should sell off GA102 GPUs for far less than what the market will pay for them is ultimately silly. It was never going to happen.
All of which means we’re just going to have to be patient. Normality will return. Vaguely affordable graphics cards with decent performance will be a thing again. Heck, if Intel’s Arc GPUs turn out well—admittedly, that’s a huge, 12-story, neon-lit ‘if’—then we might even enter a golden age of three-way competition between Intel, Nvidia, and AMD in PC graphics. Here’s hoping.
Six raw 4K panels for breakfast, laced with extract of x86... Jeremy Laird eats and breathes PC technology.