Declining GPU prices are a thing ‘of the past’, says Nvidia CEO
The company revealed the latest generation of its graphics cards this week
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said that falling GPU prices are “a story of the past”.
Huang was speaking to the media this week after Nvidia announced the latest generation of its graphics cards, headlined by the RTX 4090.
It claimed the 4090, which will be released next month priced at $1,599, runs Microsoft Flight Simulator at two to four times the speed of Nvidia’s RTX 3090 card, which it’s designed to replace.
The RTX 4080 will release in November in two SKUs, a 16GB GDDR6X which will retail for $1,199 and a 12GB GDDR6X which will cost $899.
As noted by MarketWatch, the 4090 is priced 7% above the 2020 launch price of the 3090, while the 4080 costs 29% more than the 2020 launch price of the 3080.
“A 12-inch [silicon] wafer is a lot more expensive today than it was yesterday, and it’s not a little bit more expensive, it is a ton more expensive,” Huang said following the announcement.
“Moore’s Law’s dead,” he continued, referring to the observation that the number of transistors on a chip double roughly every two years.
“And the ability for Moore’s Law to deliver twice the performance at the same cost, or at the same performance, half the cost, every year and a half, is over. It’s completely over, and so the idea that a chip is going to go down in cost over time, unfortunately, is a story of the past.”
Nvidia’s upcoming cards are powered by Ada Lovelace, the new generation of RTX tech. It’s designed to substantially improve ray-traced lighting in games thanks to its use of DLSS 3, an AI-powered performance multiplier.
Further reading
Nvidia is bringing ray-tracing to Portal with an RTX version
Huang also claimed (via Digital Trends): “The performance of Nvidia’s $899 GPU or $1,599 GPU a year ago, two years ago, at the same price point, our performance with Ada Lovelace is monumentally better. Off the charts better.”
Nvidia announced Portal RTX this week too. It’s an official mod for the Valve puzzle game made using RTX Remix, a new platform that will allow users to inject RTX lighting into classic games.
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