Summary
- AMD failed to compete with Nvidia in the GPU market, despite offering better value in terms of pricing. Nvidia still dominates due to superior performance and brand perception.
- GPU prices have skyrocketed, making them a luxury item rather than an affordable component for PC gaming. Even mid-range options are facing high price tags.
- The future of GPU performance and pricing looks bleak, with rumors suggesting that there won't be significant improvements in the next generation of GPUs.
We're fresh out of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday frenzy, and many of us splurged on new components to build a new gaming PC. But all those discounts don't change the fact that 2023 was a disappointing year for PC gaming parts, particularly desktop GPUs. After the disastrous launch of the RTX 3000 and RX 6000 series graphics cards, people expected some relief when the next GPU generation was on the horizon.
What followed was a different kind of misfortune. The last quarter of 2022 brought in a new age of overpriced GPUs (and even the unlaunched RTX 4080 12GB) from Nvidia and AMD. Performance was better than the previous-gen cards, but at what cost? The RTX 4000 series of 2023 should have offered much better price-to-performance with its mainstream GPUs, and AMD shouldn't have inflated its prices without improving its ray tracing tech. Sadly, none of those things happened, and 2023 ended up being an awful year for people who wanted to build a PC.
1 AMD didn't do enough to compete
Nvidia still rules in mindshare
Ever since RDNA 2 GPUs became available, there's been palpable excitement in the community that AMD would finally go toe-to-toe with Nvidia and break the latter's stranglehold on the discrete GPU market. We got some semblance of that with the attractive pricing of RX 6000 GPUs, but the overall feature set, including ray tracing and upscaling performance, left much to be desired. Despite the better value offered by Team Red, the hardware surveys still bled green all over.
We expected RDNA 3 to offer competing ray tracing and upscaling performance like the RTX 4000 series, but that didn't happen either. Bolstered by the prevailing market conditions, AMD just couldn't undercut Nvidia enough to incentivize customers to switch to a Radeon GPU. Nvidia still commands dominance in the market due to a combination of superior ray tracing performance, upscaling tech, and favorable brand perception.
Gamers have waited too long for AMD to get its house in order. It's repeatedly dropped the ball on not just its pricing but its execution of features like FSR 3. Today, you can buy the objectively phenomenal RX 7900 XTX for around $350 less than the RTX 4080 (its closest competitor), but would you really take that deal? The very fact that this is a genuine question is a sign of how wrong things have been at AMD.
2 2023 finally made GPUs a luxury
Moore's Law is dead, and so is your GPU upgrade
Once Nvidia realized we would pay through the nose for a new GPU — whether for gaming, crypto mining, or anything else — the RTX 4000 series was doomed to raise our expectations for GPU pricing. The age of 80-series cards priced at $700 never saw the light of day and didn't see a comeback with the 40-series cards either. The flagship RTX 4090 launched with an eye-watering MSRP of $1,599, with the RTX 4080 (the actual one) costing $1,200.
We keep lamenting the absurd pricing of high-end GPUs, but even the mid-range and budget segments are facing the brunt of this new normal in GPU prices.
The RTX 4090 was actually priced at $100 more than the already overpriced RTX 3090, and the supposedly more affordable RTX 4080 cost almost double the MSRP of its predecessor. Nvidia wasn't pulling any punches in cementing its new approach toward consumer-grade GPUs — selling them as luxury products. Even if you somehow justify the absurd pricing of their most powerful GPU ever, products like the RTX 4080 and the RTX 4070 Ti had no business costing as much as they did.
I'm not even going into Nvidia's inexplicable practice of skimping on VRAM, even on $1,000+ GPUs. Say what you will about AMD GPU performance, but at least it offers plenty of VRAM for most of its SKUs. Regardless, even AMD's $1,000 flagship isn't doing any favors for the industry; it is only looking better in comparison. If you were waiting for Team Green to offer somewhat affordable products with a considerable performance uplift over previous-gen cards, you'll likely have to keep waiting and hope for the best with the RTX 5000 series in 2025.
3 Value for money became obsolete
Budget and mid-range have been abandoned
We keep lamenting the absurd pricing of high-end GPUs, but even the mid-range and budget segments are facing the brunt of this new normal in GPU prices. Both Nvidia and AMD seem to be focused on the AI GPU market, content with neglecting the consumer gaming space as long as the bottom line stays healthy. The "mid-range" segment, as we knew it, doesn't exist anymore.
The era of $400 mid-range cards is long gone, and even though the RTX 4070 at $600 is only 20% costlier than the RTX 3070, it's also only about 20% faster. While Nvidia has decided to completely abandon the budget segment — releasing the abysmal RTX 4060 at $300 — AMD still offers acceptable mid-range and budget options like the RX 7700 XT and RX 7600, albeit with the problems we already addressed above.
The way it stands, if you want to experience all the fancy new visual advancements in your games at respectable framerates, you'll need to forego value-for-money in favor of pricey graphics cards that eat up a lot of your PC building budget. Sure, you can build a budget gaming PC and make certain compromises in your game selection and settings, but you aren't truly getting the benefits of "RTXon" or "generational improvements" at those prices.
More of the same in 2024 and beyond?
If the rumors about Nvidia's RTX 40 Super series are to be believed, we won't be seeing any significant performance uplift. For instance, the RTX 4080 Super is rumored to be only 5% faster than the RTX 4080. Nvidia's next-gen Blackwell GPUs might not arrive till 2025, but even this opportunity probably won't see AMD come up with anything to beat Nvidia at the high-end.
Reports claim that AMD might focus solely on the mainstream market with its next generation of GPUs, leaving Nvidia comfortably at the top of the gaming space with the RTX 4090 and the upcoming RTX 5090. While this might be a step back for AMD, it could help it carve its own niche in the mid-range and budget segments where Nvidia is struggling a lot.