NVIDIA held the conference event “GTC 2022” from September 19th. In addition to unveiling the new GeForce RTX 4090/4080 GPU, the company’s CEO gave a keynote speech and a Q&A session. Among them, it seems that the sad hope for the user was told that “the downward trend of GPU price is over”. Foreign media Digital Trends Report and others.
NVIDIA is a well-known semiconductor manufacturer for GeForce series GPUs (and graphics boards). At GTC 2022 held by the company, the new architecture adopted by Ada Lovelace GPU “GeForce RTX 4090” and “GeForce RTX 4080” was announced. It has been revealed that the RTX 4090 will be released in October and the RTX 4080 in November (related article). Although the specifications and new technology attracted attention, it was the price that had an impact on consumers. Honestly, it’s expensive.
First of all, for the RTX 4080, the price for the domestic market is 164,800 yen for the 12GB memory model and 219,800 yen for the 16GB model. And the RTX 4090 is said to start at 298,000 yen. It is quite expensive, close to 300,000 yen. It is natural that the price of the latest graphics board is high. On the other hand, when the GeForce RTX 30 series was announced, the price of the “GeForce RTX 3090” was set at 229,800 yen (related article). Although it is not possible to make a simple comparison, it cannot be denied that the price of the high-end model has increased dramatically.
Moreover, at GTC 2022, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang himself seems to have said that the price of such GPUs should not be expected to drop. According to Digital Trends, Huang said during a media Q&A session at the event. Another foreign media outlet, Gordon Ung PC World, appears to have asked Huang a question about GPU pricing. And when asked, he said that he thinks that “GPUs are becoming cheaper, it will be a story of the past.”
In response, Huang first said, “Moore’s Law is dead.” Moore’s Law is a prediction called by indicators such as “in 1.5 to 2 years, integrated circuit transistor density will double.” In other words, Mr. Huang denies the wishful thinking that “rapid technological improvements will make it easier to get high-performance hardware at low prices.” Huang went on to say that the price of silicon wafers used to make semiconductor devices has been rising. The increase in material costs will also be reflected in the price.
The pace of improvement in integrated circuit performance is slowing, and material costs are increasing. Huang seems to think that these will make GPU prices more expensive than they used to be. Naturally, performance per GPU price is expected to continue to improve steadily due to the generational change of parts in the future. However, it is unlikely that prices will fall at the same pace as before. On the other hand, he emphasized that the performance of this 40 series GPU, which is in the same price range, is “extremely good” than the company’s GPU in the $899/$1599 price range in recent years. It emphasizes the excellence of Ada Lovelace’s new architecture. The generational change seems to have progressed to performance that is definitely commensurate with the price.
Taking NVIDIA Huang’s head is quite sad for PC gamers looking for high-end computers. Meanwhile, AMD, the company behind the GeForce Radeon rival, is preparing to announce a new GPU. In August, a demonstration of the operation of the new GPU was shown adopting the new architecture RDNA 3. The other day, company executives announced the official unveiling of the new AMD GPU on November 3rd.suggestiondoing. I would like to watch the future of GPU price competition in such a situation.
