People with excess money. There doesn’t need to be a lot of them, just enough to justify the scalping.
Past generations were mostly scalped for bitcoin mining, and this one will probably be scalped for AI enthusiasts. Both have potential revenue streams used to justify the cost.
The gamers were the smallest part, and probably will be this generation too. There are a few (poorly optimized) games where they do improve the experience, but yeah the last few gens have had diminishing returns even on the top end games. Certainly not enough to justify their massive price increases in my opinion.
Both have potential revenue streams used to justify the cost.
You sure about that? AI in any semi-professional environment uses proper AI accelerators with loads of ram and not overpriced consumer cards. And that ignores the fact that AI never produced any relevant revenue stream.
Miners, do they even exist anymore? Bitcoin is ASIC land and ethereum switched to proof of stake?
I work in CV and a lot of labs I’ve worked with use consumer cards for workstations. If you don’t need the full 40+GB of VRAM you save a ton of money compared to the datacenter or workstation cards. A 4090 is approximately $1600 compared to $5000+ for an equivalently performing L40 (though with half the VRAM, obviously). The x090 series cards may be overpriced for gaming but they’re actually excellent in terms of bang per buck in comparison to the alternatives for DL tasks.
AI has certainly produced revenue streams. Don’t forget AI is not just generative AI. The computer vision in high end digital cameras is all deep learning based and gets people to buy the latest cameras, for an example.
People with excess money. There doesn’t need to be a lot of them, just enough to justify the scalping.
Past generations were mostly scalped for bitcoin mining, and this one will probably be scalped for AI enthusiasts. Both have potential revenue streams used to justify the cost.
The gamers were the smallest part, and probably will be this generation too. There are a few (poorly optimized) games where they do improve the experience, but yeah the last few gens have had diminishing returns even on the top end games. Certainly not enough to justify their massive price increases in my opinion.
You sure about that? AI in any semi-professional environment uses proper AI accelerators with loads of ram and not overpriced consumer cards. And that ignores the fact that AI never produced any relevant revenue stream.
Miners, do they even exist anymore? Bitcoin is ASIC land and ethereum switched to proof of stake?
I work in CV and a lot of labs I’ve worked with use consumer cards for workstations. If you don’t need the full 40+GB of VRAM you save a ton of money compared to the datacenter or workstation cards. A 4090 is approximately $1600 compared to $5000+ for an equivalently performing L40 (though with half the VRAM, obviously). The x090 series cards may be overpriced for gaming but they’re actually excellent in terms of bang per buck in comparison to the alternatives for DL tasks.
AI has certainly produced revenue streams. Don’t forget AI is not just generative AI. The computer vision in high end digital cameras is all deep learning based and gets people to buy the latest cameras, for an example.