Take a hard look at the specs, and you'll soon realize the RTX 5080 is just an RTX 5070 in disguise. Nvidia's greed may be at play, and we'll prove it by analyzing historical GPU configurations.
Nvidia's RTX 5080 is Actually an RTX 5070 - Wait, What?
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Vulcanproject
Posts: 1,770 +3,380
We know that Nvidia already tried this with Lovelace but rolled back the planned 12GB RTX4080. This time they pushed ahead with the plan. We really need an AMD part that is like 85 percent of the 5080 but half the price.
I think back to Nvidia Tesla where they had no competition and were asking $650 for a launch GTX280 which was ridiculous for the time. Only for AMD to launch the 4870 a few weeks later for $300 which was typically within ~15 percent on titles it lost and as fast on many others.
Within three months the GTX280 was $400 at MSRP and usually retailed below that. It's a long faded memory but there has to be a disruptor for Nvidia behaviour to change.
I think back to Nvidia Tesla where they had no competition and were asking $650 for a launch GTX280 which was ridiculous for the time. Only for AMD to launch the 4870 a few weeks later for $300 which was typically within ~15 percent on titles it lost and as fast on many others.
Within three months the GTX280 was $400 at MSRP and usually retailed below that. It's a long faded memory but there has to be a disruptor for Nvidia behaviour to change.
Sadly, that strategy won't work any more. If Nvidia faces strong competition or their cards don't sell as well as planned, they will release super series, sooner, for the same price (or lower, if they have to) and they are going to prevent AMD from having a piece of the cake by any means necessary. Nvidia is a PR company now as much as they are AI. They do play their mind games successfully. I've already argued with so many people on social media that think new 50 series is twice as fast as the previous one (left the discussion after a few replies because it's impossible to argue with them)
Vulcanproject
Posts: 1,770 +3,380
The 'Super' series is hardly a new tactic. In fact Nvidia did release refreshed Tesla parts only about six months after the originals, the GTX285 and GTX275.
The GTX285 was faster and launched at only $359, by then a perfectly reasonable proposition compared to the $650 GTX280 from the very same year. Only AMD competition prevented Nvidia gouging, and this was fifteen years ago. Nothing can be done today unless there is a good part from a rival. Let's hope 9070XT is that part.
takaozo
Posts: 1,059 +1,621
And finally we have a 70 series class at $999, good job Nvidia you have outdone yourself this time. Not even if it had the ratio of the 3070 vs 2080 Ti I wouldn't consider it. This means equal or better than the 4090.
But when looking at the current prices and the new tarrifs coming in soon, this can be the $2500-3000 card real fast.
PC gaming is dead and beside stupid games last years Nvidia is putting the cherry on top.
But when looking at the current prices and the new tarrifs coming in soon, this can be the $2500-3000 card real fast.
PC gaming is dead and beside stupid games last years Nvidia is putting the cherry on top.
If AMD brings out a 9070XT as good as a 4080 for like $600, Nvidia will respond with a 5070 super/Ti/Ti Super priced accordingly. Heck, they could sell their entire 5070 line up for a loss this generation in order to pull AMD down and we know well Nvidia has a huge profit margin. AMD with only 2 mid tier cards doesn't have much wiggle room.
Consumers are also to blame for these prices, knowing that this is a scam and still accepting it causes these outrageous price gouging. To make it worse prices are massively inflated due to intentional and planned shortages, as all non-defective transistors and chips are being allocated to the 'AI' arms race.
AMD will not come to our rescue, they've abandoned the high end in favour of that same 'AI' race, which has heated up due to Deepseek. Thus, the 9070XT will, probably, another GRE at best. The 7900XT and XTX are still the high end.
AMD will not come to our rescue, they've abandoned the high end in favour of that same 'AI' race, which has heated up due to Deepseek. Thus, the 9070XT will, probably, another GRE at best. The 7900XT and XTX are still the high end.
They don't mind if we stop buying them. For the moment at least, mindless chat bots are far more lucrative than mindless games.
Actually, Deepseek may be a wakeup for Nvidia to get back to its roots. It's a reminder that AI isn't going to stay so lucrative.
Chris Rchr
Posts: 7 +18
The Covid period has already caused quite a stir by showing that consumers were willing to pay too much for products that didn't deserve it. Nvidia wasn't going to hold back.
I think that while it seems fair to pay a little more for ever more powerful GPUs, Nvidia's practice of always increasing the price of the same performance ratio cannot last over time. With a $1000 GPU taking +30% in performance and also in price with each generation, we arrive in 6 years at +2000$ excluding inflation. Madness.
Wouldn't a bursting of the AI bubble be a lifesaver, so that Nvidia can come back down to earth and restore value to what has allowed it to survive until now, gaming?
I think that while it seems fair to pay a little more for ever more powerful GPUs, Nvidia's practice of always increasing the price of the same performance ratio cannot last over time. With a $1000 GPU taking +30% in performance and also in price with each generation, we arrive in 6 years at +2000$ excluding inflation. Madness.
Wouldn't a bursting of the AI bubble be a lifesaver, so that Nvidia can come back down to earth and restore value to what has allowed it to survive until now, gaming?
They're absolutely awful and meant to indoctrinate people and, eventually, replace all search engines and websites. One doctrine, one orthodoxy, one truth and only the ever lasting and eternal now.
This AI nonsense is exactly what Orwell warned us against.
We can be hopeful but you can be certain that Google, Meta and M$py are going to increase their AI purchases to stay ahead of Baidu and Deepseek.
deathspeed
Posts: 606 +501
As I've mentioned before, I've owned Nvidia since the GeForce2 MX, but I've always been interested in the budget/mainstream cards. With the pricing games they have been playing after the 16xx series, my RTX 2060 is very likely the final new Nvidia card I will ever own.
Megalomaniac
Posts: 132 +136
I was able to get the 5090 FE model.
I never would have gone for the 5080 because I wanted, ultimately, to get the maximum amount of VRAM available. I always expect the "90" version to simply be the best of the best until a "90 Ti" version comes due.
But lets face it: the games mostly are lackluster and don't demand this level of performance - performance you can only really trace using benchmark programs. If the performance is noticeably poor with my eyes, that's when I know I need to upgrade hardware. At this point we are just upgrading to upgrade. I saw a huge difference playing Cyberpunk when I upgraded from a 2080Ti to a 3090. No benchmark...I just "saw" it. I'm sure the same amount of fun I'm having with my 5090, I'd be able to have with a 5080 or my old 4090 or my old 3090. The games themselves just don't demand this kind of investment.
As for Deepseek... that's just a kneejerk reaction to "there's something better". Most investors really don't understand what it is Nvidia represents and they're just shuffling money around. Deepseek is programming. What they don't have is hardware. They don't cater to a captive audience of computer gamers willing to drop thousands of dollars of video game parts.
I never would have gone for the 5080 because I wanted, ultimately, to get the maximum amount of VRAM available. I always expect the "90" version to simply be the best of the best until a "90 Ti" version comes due.
But lets face it: the games mostly are lackluster and don't demand this level of performance - performance you can only really trace using benchmark programs. If the performance is noticeably poor with my eyes, that's when I know I need to upgrade hardware. At this point we are just upgrading to upgrade. I saw a huge difference playing Cyberpunk when I upgraded from a 2080Ti to a 3090. No benchmark...I just "saw" it. I'm sure the same amount of fun I'm having with my 5090, I'd be able to have with a 5080 or my old 4090 or my old 3090. The games themselves just don't demand this kind of investment.
As for Deepseek... that's just a kneejerk reaction to "there's something better". Most investors really don't understand what it is Nvidia represents and they're just shuffling money around. Deepseek is programming. What they don't have is hardware. They don't cater to a captive audience of computer gamers willing to drop thousands of dollars of video game parts.
seeprime
Posts: 905 +1,320
Not quite dead. There's just no reason to throw money at a super greedy corporation that's intentionally putting out intentionally inferior products to what they're capable of releasing.
nVidia is becoming a software company. They spec their hardware so it only lasts so long and that's essentially the length of the license you're buying from them. The 5070 with 12GB of VRAM is basically going to be obsolete on day one @ $550. I'd buy a 16GB 5060 over a 12GB 5070. There just isn't enough room in there to run DLSS and Frame gen and store game assets effectively. Even Intel is putting 12gigs on their "entery level" GPUS. 16GB needs to be the new midranged but I guess nVidia is trying to make $1000 the new midranged price point.
The current state of the gaming community is disappointing. Nvidia has mastered the art of price manipulation, extracting the maximum amount of money from consumers. This shift reflects the natural progression of technology—from revolutionary and game-changing to a mature, commoditized market where profit maximization takes priority.
Over the years, Nvidia has refined its strategy: enticing big spenders with flagship models while strategically marketing the x80 series to those with FOMO, offering less but making it feel like more. Given Nvidia’s massive profits from AI, you’d hope they would ease up on gamers—but with stock valuations as the top priority, gamers continue to be an afterthought.
The only real solution is strong competition from AMD and Intel. Nvidia’s near-monopoly is the core issue, and unfortunately, it seems like gamers will be out of luck for the foreseeable future.
Over the years, Nvidia has refined its strategy: enticing big spenders with flagship models while strategically marketing the x80 series to those with FOMO, offering less but making it feel like more. Given Nvidia’s massive profits from AI, you’d hope they would ease up on gamers—but with stock valuations as the top priority, gamers continue to be an afterthought.
The only real solution is strong competition from AMD and Intel. Nvidia’s near-monopoly is the core issue, and unfortunately, it seems like gamers will be out of luck for the foreseeable future.
Subset6
Posts: 78 +78
They just need more future headroom to sell the ignorant and uninformed a 5080 Super or TI.
They don't need a price drop if they don't plan on selling any cards to consumers. If nVidia stopped selling cards tomorrow it would be 4-5 years before AMD reached 50% market share. And after their latest "we know how many people are using DLSS" announcement, we know they're collecting user data for profit now.
Nvidia is not going to change if you ***** consumers don't stop buying their cards.
Yeah, you're not entirely wrong. But then, when there's no competition at the upper end, consumers don't have much choice either (of course you could make the argument that consumers don't have to shop at the upper end or that even if there was competition they'd buy Nvidia anyways). I bought a 5090 and I plan on keeping it for 5-6 years, that's my normal cadence anyways, but I also want to be able to ride out the tariff storm that's going to make the next four or more years challenging (I also do LLM work, so not just for gaming). I really hope that my next GPU purchase in 6 years will be more difficult, meaning a proper choice between Nvidia and at least AMD, maybe even Intel.
I'm upgrading from a 2080 Ti too and I just got a 5090. The VRAM made a compelling argument for me, as well. Pretty excited to see that same upgrade you saw!
You're right that the games of today don't need all that performance or VRAM. I'm someone who likes to keep my system/components around longer, though, and the extra performance and VRAM really makes a difference when you think about games being released 5 years down the road (although, to be fair, my backlog is so big that I don't know if I'll actually play them then with one or two exceptions, but the VRAM is nice for LLM tasks, and the 2080 Ti is showing its age on games like MSFS and older games that have brought in ray tracing, like the Witcher 3).
Question:
Is the 5090 with 512bit and 1.8TB/s memory bandwidth currently at the max bandwidth gddr7 currently has? It seems the more cores the more memory bandwidth needed for perf to scale. And if that's case, if using gddr7 is the only way to further increase memory bandwidth waiting for higher gbit gddr7 chips like 24gbit-64gbit instead of the current 16gbit?
Is the 5090 with 512bit and 1.8TB/s memory bandwidth currently at the max bandwidth gddr7 currently has? It seems the more cores the more memory bandwidth needed for perf to scale. And if that's case, if using gddr7 is the only way to further increase memory bandwidth waiting for higher gbit gddr7 chips like 24gbit-64gbit instead of the current 16gbit?
Major weakness to this type of price evaluation using percentages:
- Tim calculates how good the prices are *from the flagship as the baseline*
- nVidia can game that system by pricing the flagship (thus everything else) even more exorbitantly.
I bet they're taking notes now. They could price the 6090 at $9k, then offer the 6080 for $3k and still be the "good guys". "Just 33% of the flagship!!"
- Tim calculates how good the prices are *from the flagship as the baseline*
- nVidia can game that system by pricing the flagship (thus everything else) even more exorbitantly.
I bet they're taking notes now. They could price the 6090 at $9k, then offer the 6080 for $3k and still be the "good guys". "Just 33% of the flagship!!"
The cards sold out in 5 minutes and are being resold at 2-5x the buying price.
I dont think they care about any of our opinions as they continually laugh themselves to the bank.
I dont think they care about any of our opinions as they continually laugh themselves to the bank.
Until the price comes back down to earth I'm going to stick with buying used GPUs on eBay way better bang for your bike and there's absolutely no way I'm spending this kind of money on a new video card it's an entertainment device nothing more. What I really wish is the game developers would stop counting two in video with a new games requiring RTX and other such things My nice RX 5600 XT suddenly can't play the new games which just means the developers lost a sale I'm not going to play that game I refuse to.
And if they continue to go on this route I have absolutely no problem picking up a console or just sticking with retro computers there's plenty of old games that offer plenty of enjoyment you could play games for the rest of your life that came out a decade or two decades ago and I'm prepared to make that change because I'm not giving them this amount of money I don't care what they think it's worth.
And if they continue to go on this route I have absolutely no problem picking up a console or just sticking with retro computers there's plenty of old games that offer plenty of enjoyment you could play games for the rest of your life that came out a decade or two decades ago and I'm prepared to make that change because I'm not giving them this amount of money I don't care what they think it's worth.
MasterMace
Posts: 341 +343
Too often people forget Nvidia's been trying to do this same thing nearly every generation: marketing a lower card as higher than it is.
People caught it in the RTX 40 series, and Nvidia was forced to change the name of the 4080 to the 4070Ti, and then the 4080Ti to the 4080.
The RTX 20 series was so bad it was largely agreed there was only 1 new card and the rest were downtiered rebrands.
The GTX 10 series is where Nvidia started it's Founder's Edition debacle where they are actively competing with their board designers in sales.
Nvidia was sued for the deceptive practice in the 900 series when people found out that the 970 was only 7/8ths of the card that Nvidia advertised. They lost the class action lawsuit, and was forced to cut the prices of the 970 from the $330 launch to $270.
Nvidia openly admitted to it in the 600 series, saying they were "surprised" by the lack of competition from AMD, and that the 680 wasnt supposed to be the flagship, it was their 195W "Hunter" card that suddenly they could charge $500 for.
The 970 lawsuit weighs heavier when you remember back to the GTX 480 when TSMCs 40nm yields weren't there and Nvidia had to disable 32 of the 512 shader cores, and they had an abysmally performing heavy power using card (250W).
thats right, the 400 series higher power, underperforming, hot cards were 250W. here in the RTX 40 series, Nvidia's cards were using so much power, they had to make a proprietary power socket, which was catching fire, and people are still not pushing back. Nvidia's doubled down in the RTX 50 series as a result, which is a stark departure from the recoveru they had in the GTX 500 lineup. Now they are using 600W, their proprietary plugs require 4 - 6+2 pin connectors each, and some cards double this! Igor and der8auer just did their reports on the unstable 3 piece PCBs in the 5090s that need 8- 6+2 pin power connectors.
All of it is worse because Auntie Lisa wont bring down the hammer on the Leather Jacket Nephew.
People caught it in the RTX 40 series, and Nvidia was forced to change the name of the 4080 to the 4070Ti, and then the 4080Ti to the 4080.
The RTX 20 series was so bad it was largely agreed there was only 1 new card and the rest were downtiered rebrands.
The GTX 10 series is where Nvidia started it's Founder's Edition debacle where they are actively competing with their board designers in sales.
Nvidia was sued for the deceptive practice in the 900 series when people found out that the 970 was only 7/8ths of the card that Nvidia advertised. They lost the class action lawsuit, and was forced to cut the prices of the 970 from the $330 launch to $270.
Nvidia openly admitted to it in the 600 series, saying they were "surprised" by the lack of competition from AMD, and that the 680 wasnt supposed to be the flagship, it was their 195W "Hunter" card that suddenly they could charge $500 for.
The 970 lawsuit weighs heavier when you remember back to the GTX 480 when TSMCs 40nm yields weren't there and Nvidia had to disable 32 of the 512 shader cores, and they had an abysmally performing heavy power using card (250W).
thats right, the 400 series higher power, underperforming, hot cards were 250W. here in the RTX 40 series, Nvidia's cards were using so much power, they had to make a proprietary power socket, which was catching fire, and people are still not pushing back. Nvidia's doubled down in the RTX 50 series as a result, which is a stark departure from the recoveru they had in the GTX 500 lineup. Now they are using 600W, their proprietary plugs require 4 - 6+2 pin connectors each, and some cards double this! Igor and der8auer just did their reports on the unstable 3 piece PCBs in the 5090s that need 8- 6+2 pin power connectors.
All of it is worse because Auntie Lisa wont bring down the hammer on the Leather Jacket Nephew.
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