Without competition Nvidia will continue to drive prices sky high.
And let's hope Intel manages to stay in the game for the same reasons.
It's hard to get my head around a top end video card costing AUD$3,000.
Even AUD$1,500 seems a ridiculous amount to spend on a graphics card.
On paper yea, but in practice it isn't really though. AMD 7900 series are cheaper than the super expensive Nvidia 4090/4080, but only because they're weaker in several categories, so you're not getting any real benefits for the same money. Less price but also less performance.
If you're doing DL/ML work, then Nvidia is still the only choice for most consumers/businesses.
Also, industry insiders are reporting that the AMD 7900 reference cards at MSRP are in very limited supply, with most going to the US, and that once they sell out, which they will, the ABI board partners will bring a $100 price bump to bring them closer to Nvidia.
Gamers aren't getting the salvation they were hoping for this time from AMD. It's not really a competition anymore, AMD is simply joining Nvidia in the club of price-gouging consumers too.
You're getting identical rasterization performance at a lower cost.
Now, that cost is still obscenely expensive and the 7900 XT (non X) is also terribly priced for the performance. So I'm not defending that.
But I also don't use raytracing personally because in the current generations it just costs too much. I don't want to degrade and noise my image with DLSS/XESS/FSR/whatever just to get raytracing. So raytracing performance is low on my priorities.
Not that lower if you go beyond the MSRP which most people won't see in stock. Industry insiders are reporting ABI prices for the Radeon 7900 XTX on the shelf to be $100 higher than MSRP, while Nvidia is reportedly lowering the 4080 price by 100$ to meet them in that same $1,100 price-point.
So in the end 7900XTX and 4080 are "the same performance for the same price" if you restrict yourself only to rasterization performance as your only metric and ignore the current bugs the AMD cards have and the extra ML/DL features Nvidia cards offer.
They're still both $1,100 GPUs, far beyond what most gamers are willing to spend on a not-the-highest-end GPU, which makes me think they'll still not sell, as the whales are still going for the $1,600 4090 which is selling like hot cakes while the value chasing gamers are waiting for something much cheaper or buying cards one or two generations older at steeper discounts.
For my life circumstances, I'd tend to agree.
But if I were fabulously wealthy, or if the 4090's were for some reason the ideal cards for my machine learning work, it might be reasonable.
Yeah OK