For those not in the know the "4080 12GB" as compared to the 4080 16GB was not just the same card with a little less RAM, as you might assume from the name. It also had ~20% fewer GPU cores and was significantly slower for that reason.
I just don’t see the logic in the naming in any way shape or form.
As opposed to the rest of the 40 series cards?
If you’re looking for a pro card and have the cooling and power to support it (not to mention, the workflow needs that could benefit), that’s great. If you’re a gamer or enthusiast, the price is still high enough (not to mention the other changes you might need to make to your rig to support the card) that the actual delta between the potential and what you’ll actually do with the card means you should probably just stick with either a 3090 that is now half the price, or hold out for the other 4000 series cards if you must get a next-gen card.
It doesn’t apply to every game or every resolution, but there are actual game scenarios where a 4090 makes sense. Price and heat and power and space not withstanding, it’s a meaningful upgrade.
Most games don't meet this bar, and I think gamers who expect to be able to set every slider to the max and go to town—yes, even on a $2K GPU—are mostly responsible.
I'm fine with nearly all gamers getting a better experience even if that means the tiny fraction of gamers who can and are willing to spend insane amounts of money on the best of all possible video cards are not able to take full advantage of their crazy hardware in most games.
This is especially beneficial when deadlines slip and suddenly consumers have a lot better hardware than you where expecting.
Releasing an "extreme" preset that no consumer PC can really run yet is just a matter of leaving those higher-quality assets in + enabling those full resolution options for VFX. Allowing users to use ray tracing at full resolution(something which will kill any GPU on the market) requires just adding an extra config option - there's very little engineering time required. QC will need to do a full pass of these options, but in the grand scheme of things tested that's not a huge deal.
I find it difficult to return to games such as Assassin's Creed II because of their muddy textures and low draw distances. These issues feel like something that could have been avoided with just a tad more forward thinking!
There are also games like Quantum Break which (at least at launch, not sure if it was ever fixed) included mandatory upsampling which the user couldn't disable. The reason given was that the game wasn't designed to be playable at native resolution, and no current hardware would be able to run it that way.
Extreme draw distances: large open-world games or those with very long, content-intensive environments need to resort to tricks to unload parts of the world that are not visible or quickly accessible. Extreme draw distance can mean keeping orderS of maginitude more objects resident, which could mean a lot more materials loaded, more draw calls, more VRAM usage, or more swap.
Higher resolution shadows: Hard shadows tend to look bad, soft shadows tend to perform bad, and worse with more lights. It takes a lot of deep GPU knowledge to do these in a visually convincing and high quality manner. The difference between "good enough" and "perfect" will easily cost you double digit fps at a minimum.
Full quality textures: As with the draw distance caveat, implementing LODs is rather work-intensive. Some people will tell you that you can automate it, and they're half-right. If you are looking for top-notch game quality, that absolutely does not cut it, but if you're not trying to go the extra mile it can be serviceable.
Games are super inconsistent in how far they push technology vs push the art, but there is rarely a "turn the dial to 11" knob ready to turn. The production requirements and technical limitations mix in unpredictable ways.
Other times, games push ridiculously far in certain directions that later become mainstream, and execute well enough that, after they are copied into other mainstream games, they feel deficient - not in spite of their success, but as a direct result of it!!
The point is that all of this merely requires more resources at runtime, not any additional work on behalf of the developer. So, by allowing limits higher than is practical on hardware at the time of release, the game can scale somewhat better on future hardware. What's the downside?
High-res textures are a different thing, since they actually have to be painted. Or upscaled, I suppose, but that's still code somebody has to write.
Ah, I want to clarify again—I was imagining the developers already had higher quality original textures, which they had downscaled for release. The textures in Assassin's Creed II, for instance, have the look of images that were saved down to a lower resolution from larger originals. But I could be wrong, or even if I'm not, it might be less common nowadays.
As you say, the goal is to include things that only require computational resources at runtime (even an order of magnitude more).
Many buying a Gaming PC will be buying a device that will do double duty and the price differential is best described by the GPU required for work vs play and if we want to truly compare it to console quality we ought to be comparing it to a budget GPU similar in performance to a PS5. For example a $370 nvidia gtx 3060 vs a $500 console.
https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/k400-plus-...
There is a lot of confusion because some people assume turning on DLSS increases settings but it actually lowers quality. Sure DLSS is good enough that most don’t notice, but you can say that about lowering most settings slightly to improve performance.
Which just means better hardware beats DLSS at the same settings.
DLSS 3 still only looks fine on cherry picked screens: “It looks like DLSS 3's weakness lies in hidden geometry, where information is missing between two frames due to geometry overlapping another set of geometry while in motion. This can cause DLSS 3 to "shutter" and output ugly artifacts as it tries to fill in the void of missing detail.” https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dlss-3-early-review-rtx-40...
4090 has .28 GP/s/$ at base clock.
Considering this is coming out two years later, I'm not so inclined to call it a bargain.
Because that's the issue isn't it? Everyone wanting for nVidia to just sell those chips for less?
They'll slap 4070Ti or something on it and sell it to you for the same price.
30 series launch MSRPs looked very good until it became clear you couldn't get them for that price, partly because they were having to partially roll back the 20 series price increases, so it wouldn't be impossible to see a repeat.
This time around the 4090 is an excellent card, the 4080 16GB is a lot slower and the 4080 12GB a lot slower than the 16GB.
They've also jacked the prices: the 4080 should be $750 and the 4090 should be $1500. Arguably lower again given the coming recession and the market being flooded with the previous generation.
It will be interesting to see what AMD do as they could make life very difficult for nVidia.
And "by a lot slower" you mean "they're all faster than previous generation flagship 3090".
So while the graphics card formerly known as RTX 4080 12GB might perform about the same as the RTX 3090, it's no better value.
The issue isn't the pricing, even though that's an issue.
The issue is what looks like an intentional attempt to confuse consumers by selling two products with roughly the same name, but one of them has 25% greater performance. Some consumers may think "I'm coming from a 6GB card, 12GB is plenty, I don't need to pay more for the 16GB one, I'll get almost the same performance" without knowing the technical details.
Ideally they'll still read/watch reviews and get the best product for their budget, but that doesn't excuse misleading names.
Are you talking about last gen? AFAIK you can’t actually buy the 4080 12gb yet, right?
So you'd get the same price, just newer chip, newer encoder and DLSS3 support and all that at lower MSRP than what 3090 cost when it was new and launched?
That sounds like same value to me... or even a slightly better deal.
(prices made up, I have no idea how much TVs cost right now)
At any rate, $900 is too much! Of course different buyers have different budgets and tolerance for rapidly increased pricing. Two years ago I increased my $220 budget for GPUs to $300. Maybe next year I'll go as high as $350.
There will be cards in that budget, they just won't be faster than the 1500$ card from last year.
I said the main issue was naming of products designed to confuse consumers, not my anecdotal preference for price point?
But additionally, we'll see if the market at large bears such price inflation.
The monetary value of a thing is definitionally how much money you can sell it for.
Inflation is driven by consumers having more money. This means that more can be charged for the same products and the consumers will begrudgingly pay. This means more will be charged.
This is why giving ~50% of US net-taxpayers free cash caused inflation to spike.
I paid $1,600 for an evans and Sutherland card with 32 MEGABYTES to run Softimage on NT 4 because I couldn’t afford an SGI in 1997
I just want you to know I love this comment
Except anyone with a brain saw through it and enough content generated, that trick simply wouldn't work anymore.
The 4080 16GB is around where a 70 series card tends to sit.
[0] https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/nvidia_release... Ignore the dlss2 vs dlss3 numbers, just look at the base numbers since dlss3 numbers are interpolated framerates
Though I have to wonder, do we want bigger 40 gen dies? The 4090 already guzzles at 400w at full tilt, and gets ar least 200+ fps at pretty much all games except maybe cyberpunk, and can complete video editing workloads at twice the speed of the 3090.
Do we need an even bigger lovelace chip?
Also I was playing the Darktide beta, and at 4k I want about double the framerate I currently get on a 6800xt (FSR 1.0 and DLSS (according to friends and comments on reddit+discord) both look bad in it). We're moving past crossgen games at this point too (and UE5 seems very heavy), so for eg. 100+ fps or 4k something in range of ~50% faster than a 3090 would be nice.
Now mere mortals can play around with Stable Diffusion and other art-generation technologies, this is going to increase demand for these types of cards.
My 3080 is well capable of generating 512&768 images with a high step count in under a minute, and 500 odd steps (just for fun) in around 2 minutes (or even less with different samplers)
The interesting bit is when we get more VRAM (24-32GB) and can actually train the models with off the shelf hardware without breaking the bank.
https://www.techpowerup.com/299183/nvidia-ad103-and-ad104-ch...