YOU'VE BEEN FRAMED

GPUs are now 1,000+ investments. How did we get here?

- Phil Iwaniuk 

Cometh the hour, cometh the bombastic marketing campaign from Nvidia. Acronyms are thrown at you and you’re encouraged to nod along at comparison wipes in games while RTX and DLSS are toggled on and off. This one’s got 9728 CUDA cores – how many’s yours got? That few? No no, that won’t do. You need this new one now. And it’s yours for £1,200.

No matter how hard Nvidia’s PR teams have worked on the launch of team green’s new RTX 40-series cards, there’s still just one spec that stands out and it’s the price. The flagship 4080 card costs nearly twice that of its predecessor, the RTX 3080, which retailed for $699/£649 at launch in September 2020.

Of course, buying a graphics card for something close to MSRP in 2020 was as likely as leaving your house for anything other than exercise or letting a stranger’s cough in a public place go without mention. Market factors including but not limited to crypto surges and crashes, a semiconductor shortage, and the fact we were all stuck at home with nothing to do but upgrade our PCs inflated graphics card prices to absurd degrees.

But those market factors have largely diminished. We’re leaving our houses again, crypto has crashed, electricity prices have surged, and semiconductor production is at least in motion again. So how did Jen-Hsun’s lot arrive at that price for the Founder’s Edition of the 4080?

CUDA SHAKER