Reply 140 of 191, by Meatball
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Geri wrote on 2022-10-13, 19:00:GPUs are dinosaurs of the past, it makes no sense for a generic person to buy a graphics card. Graphics cards are a fine topic for a retro forum like this, but its not something a normal person cares any more. When we observe new generation of igps, an integrated AMD, Intel, or even an vivante/s3/mali/powervr based chinese/korean/russian/british/taiwanese whatever igp clone will perform very well in PC and mobile systems. On modern PC systems, even software rendering - such as llvmpipe - offers enough 2D and 3D performance for the average user.
Buying graphics cards indeed makes sense for those who have very old systems, or their main hobby is gaming. That means: the demand for graphics cards are very small compared to like the late 90s/early 2000s where they had to sell yearly 200 million graphics cards to keep up with the market demand. Which means a shrinking market, where less and less people have to pay the increasing development costs. This means very expensive cards, and lower production numbers in overall.
As literally everyone is moving into integration and low power consumption, including manufacturers, businesses and end users, its a dead end for companies like nvidia and their multiple 100w graphics cards in the long term. Right now there is no task a geforce 4xxx can do, but the igp of a random $200-300 android phone or laptop cant, unless you ramp up the resolution to sizes a normie cant even tell apart.
A Geforce4 Ti4200 was a $200 card in 2002. Factoring inflation it would be $330 today. An RTX 3060 sells for $360. As you say, any card today would destroy cards from back then, but it does seem the performance to price ratio has stayed relatively constant, even if volume has dropped. If you were referring to the halo models, the kind of people who would buy an RTX 4090 today are the same people who would buy a Ti4600, and there were never many of those people (or product) relative to the Ti4200-type crowd (another constant).