Yep, it's the RAM, but also just a mismatched value proposition.
I think it's clear at this point Nvidia is trying to have it both ways and gamers are sick of it. They used pandemic shortage prices as an excuse to inflate their entire line's prices, thinking they could just milk the "new normal" without having to change their plans.
But when you move the x070 series out of the mid-tier price bracket ($250-450, let's say), you better meet a more premium standard. Instead, they're throwing mid-tier RAM into a premium-priced project that most customers still feel should be mid-tier priced. It also doesn't help that it's at a time where people generally just have less disposable income.
Nvidia over pricing their cards and limiting stock, acting like there is still a gpu shortage from all the crypto bros sucking everything up.
Right now, their competitors are beating them at hundreds of dollars below nvidias mrp like for like with the only true advantage nvidia has is in ray tracing and arguably VR.
It's possible we're approaching another shorter with the AI bubble though for the moment that seems to be pretty far off.
TL;DR Nvidia is trying to sell a card at twice it's value cause greed.
My Nvidia 1070 with 8gb vram is still playing all of my games. Not everything gets Ultra, nor my monitor isn't 4K. Forever I am the "value buyer". It's hard to put money into something that is marginally better though. I thought 16g would be a no-brainer.
You all should check prices comparing dual fan 3070’s to 4070’s they are a $40 difference on Amazon. Crazy to see. They completely borked their pricing scheme trying to get whales and crypto miners to suck their 40 series dry and wound up getting blue balled hard.
Aren’t they taking the 4080 completely off the market too?
I mean yeah when I‘m searching for GPUs I specifically filter out anything that‘s less than 16GB of VRAM. I wouldn‘t even consider buying it for that reason alone.
I haven't paid attention to GPUs since I got my 3080 on release day back in Covid.
Why has acceptable level of VRAM suddenly doubled vs 4 years ago? I don't struggle to run a single game on max settings at high frames @ 1440p, what's the benefit that justifies the cost of 20gb VRAM outside of AI workloads?
I don't know about everyone else, but I still play at 1080. It looks fine to me and I care more about frames than fidelity. More VRAM isn't going to help me here so it is not a factor when looking at video cards. Ignoring the fact I just bought a 4070, I wouldn't not skip over a 4070 Super just because it has 12GB of RAM.
This is a card that targets 1440p. It can pull weight at 4k, but I'm not sure if that is justification to slam it for not having the memory for 4k.
So many options, with small differences between them, all overpriced to the high heavens. I'm sticking with my GTX 1070 since it serves my needs and I'll likely keep using it a few years beyond that out of spite. It cost $340 at the time I bought it (2016) and I thought that was somewhat overpriced. According to an inflation calculator, that's $430 in today's dollars.
What's going on? It's overpriced and completely unnecessary for most people. There's also a cost of living crisis.
I play every game I want to on high graphics with my old 1070. Unless you're working on very graphically intensive apps or you're a pc master race moron then there's no need for new cards.