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Comment by senttoschool | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia knows that the profit margins at mid-tier GPUs are tiny - so they're pushing people to buy the 4070, 4080, and 4090.

Wafer prices have increased drastically in the last decade - to the point that midrange cards are no longer midrange priced.

It simply isn't really profitable to make real midrange cards anymore.

In addition, discrete GPUs market is a declining market and has been for 15 years or so. Therefore, in any declining market, the low-end and mid-range products will get squeezed and the high end will get pushed. The remaining buyers of discrete GPUs are willing to pay higher prices. Those who don't will buy a laptop with an Nvidia GPU already in it or some sort of SoC (like Apple Silicon/AMD APUs/Intel APUs).

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The market for GOUs is declining because crypto is over and because the GPUs are so underpowered and overpriced that people don’t want to buy them.

And if GPUs cost so much to make, why do they get discounted so drastically when the manufacturers eventually decide to compete?

>The market for GOUs is declining because crypto is over and because the GPUs are so underpowered and overpriced that people don’t want to buy them.

No, this is not true. DIY PCs aren't as popular as before due to the advancements in laptops and interest swinging to mobile. People are buying far more laptops than 10-20 years ago. In fact, gaming laptops outsell gaming desktops 2:1 now.[0] The gap is expected to widen.

The market for discrete GPUs has been declining long before crypto. Crypto just slowed the decline.

Notice the word discrete. The entire GPU market isn't declining. Only discrete.

>And if GPUs cost so much to make, why do they get discounted so drastically when the manufacturers eventually decide to compete?

Part of it is because of price inflation due to covid and crypto bubble. So prices are just going back to a more normal.

[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20210406085311/https://www.idc.c...

>gaming laptops outsell gaming desktops 2:1

Based on desktop CPU sales or based on pre-built sales? I don't know what qualifies as a gaming laptop these days but the best laptops for software development often have discrete graphics cards in them e.g. 1660 Ti

Based on however IDC defines a gaming laptop.

I'm guessing it's having a non-APU AMD/Nvidia GPU inside the laptop.

But it makes sense to me. Laptops have gotten much better, and most gamers aren't buying Nvidia 4090. The most common GPU is just a GeForce GTX 1650 which many laptops have and have thermals that easily fit inside a laptop.

It's not surprising at all that gaming laptops outsell gaming desktops. This isn't the 2000s anymore where if you want to play PC games, you build a DIY desktop tower and buy a discrete GPU.

It's a myth that most PC gamers use top of the range GPUs. Most of them use low-end or mid-range GPUs.

> In fact, gaming laptops outsell gaming desktops 2:1 now.

This doesn't show what you think it does. The majority of desktop gaming PCs are self built and won't show up in that statistic.

Additionally GPUs are the most commonly upgraded component during the lifetime of a built.

>This doesn't show what you think it does. The majority of desktop gaming PCs are self built and won't show up in that statistic.

It probably does. I never paid for the report but I assume IDC collects data on DIY desktop towers and make an educated guess.

Regardless, gaming laptops sells far more than DIY computers.

In 2020 Nvidia + AMD sold 41.5 million desktop GPUs.[1] That doesn't add up at all with 16.7 million desktop PCs.

[1] Second graphic: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-maintains-lead-as-s...

Discrete GPUs can go into old desktop PCs. That's my guess.

And it's not clear what % of them were used for gaming vs crypto mining.

Their margins on their enterprise cards are far far higher.

The A100 which is similar to 4090 in silicon goes for 15-20x. Nvidia is probably deriving as much profit from cloud at this point as gamers.

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