And you won’t find 4080s worth an MSRP. You can easily add €50 unless you manage to get a FE form.

I’ve said it many times online, but I’d like to say it here as well: I think Nvidia has miscalculated the high prices it has seen it pay in recent years. The people who paid out these prizes are mainly not players, but businessmen who can use cards to make money, not even speculators and creators, but cryptocurrency creators.

ETH was very high and the price of electricity was relatively low, so even cards over €2,000 were paid off in about a year, and the rest was pure profit. And then, after a few years, that card can still be sold as a used card for a significant portion of the purchase price. So, it really didn’t matter that the card cost a lot of money, because it was a pure money account that gave positive results, so the investment was worth it. On the other hand, players rightly found these prices to be blameworthy and wanted to pay only if they thought the price was worth it, and it wasn’t that much.

Nvidia saw those high prices and wanted to take a larger share of that same value, then raised the prices themselves. But the market now looks very different: GPUs are no longer profitable to mine, and certainly not within the life span of such a card, so the financial arithmetic now points to a negative result. This means that people are no longer buying that card to make money, and certainly not at very high prices.

Then you only have 3 markets left. One of those markets, the creators who use such cards for 3D rendering or video editing, is still very close to the lost cryptocurrency market because they also use the card to make money, but even then it’s a different account, because the product of these cards can’t be translated directly To cash as it was with cryptocurrencies, so expensive cards were less interesting there. Even then, the cards can be brought in as a business expense or amortized over several years, leaving those folks willing to pay a premium for premium models but less willing for non-premium models.

The second market is the speculator market. Speculators can make some money with the 3000 generation because for a long time there was a big difference between supply and demand due to the epidemic and production problems, which made people from other markets more inclined to buy via amplifier at inflated prices. But with 4000 generation cards there is no such difference, on the one hand because when prices returned to normal, people began to buy more than 3000 generation cards and did not immediately need a new one, and on the other hand because of the lack of production from the 3000 generation less present in Generation 4000. Moreover, there is an oversupply that scalpers simply cannot get rid of their cards, even at the price they originally bought them for or by returning them to the store.

The final market, the player market, is still around and is a loyal customer, but not at any price. The player who buys a card looks at what they want from the potential purchase and especially how much it will cost. Gamers have a much larger budget than the other three markets and within that budget are looking for the card that best delivers the performance they need. Then you notice that players can be divided into categories based on their screen resolution, desired frame rate, and how willing they are to adjust their settings. Hence, players are more willing to forgo those last two categories if doing so ensures that they don’t go over budget.

Then you see that the 4080 is a direct competitor to the 4090 in the current market, because they are both focused on the luxury segment with 4K or even 8K resolutions at higher frame rates. That’s a very small group of less than 5% of players, and they probably already bought a good card before the 4080 hit the market. Most gamers still play at 1080p, with a minority at 1440p, and they don’t ever want a $1,000 card. They want a card from around €2-300 for 1080p, around €5-600 for 1440p, preferably on the lower end, and in the 3000th generation that was more or less true.

Looking at Nvidia’s current card chip, the 3060 is currently the king of 1080p because it easily gets 120fps at that resolution, the 3070 is well suited for 1440p, and the 3080 and above is meant for 4K. Then when I look at the 4000 lineup and the idea that everything is moving up a notch every generation, the 4060 would be a perfect fit for 1440p and the 4070 for 4K. So the 4000 lineup would ideally have the 4050 for 1080p which hovers around $300, the 4060 around $500, and the 4070 around $700 for 4K. Then the price ranges are maintained and you don’t have to spend a fortune.

I think we should just move away from the idea that a certain card number goes at a certain price and instead there is a set price per performance level and the performance levels go down one level in terms of card number per generation. So don’t say the 4060 should cost that much, the 4070 should cost that much and the 4080 should cost that much, but say: for a card that can do 1080p120 you have to pay that much, a card that can do 1440p120 costs that much and a 4K card is available that much price, then choose the card that best fits that budget.

It remains to be seen what will happen at CEX in a week and what Nvidia will say there. My prediction anyway is that Nvidia will do a presentation where they’ll share the rest of the entire 4000 lineup from the 4050 to 4070 Ti and clearly state what level of performance they’re aiming for with these cards and what price range they fit into. Maybe we’ll eventually see lower card numbers for people on a lower budget who are aiming for 1080p60 instead of 1080p120 or 144, think 4040 or something.