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Everyone knows the first rule of capitalism: more competition means less money to spend. Under normal circumstances, that is the very nature of the economy; if companies compete, the biggest winner will be the consumer.
But things have taken an unexpected and unprecedented turn lately, especially in the graphics card business.
Nvidia introduced its upcoming 3000 series of graphics cards. It’s not a big deal, is it? Everyone expected that anyway. But one part surprised everyone: The upcoming RTX 3000, which will provide “entry-level” performance compared to its bigger brothers RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, will sell for $ 500 (around TL 3,700).
Now that’s the big problem. Because the RTX 3070, with its “entry-level” performance, will be more powerful than the current high-end graphics card, RTX 2080Ti.
An entry-level next-gen graphics card that outperforms the previous generation’s biggest gamer in performance isn’t surprising at all. You could attribute this to the new Ampere architecture that Nvidia just announced that it will use in the RTX 3000 series. But the only thing that cannot be explained is the difference in price.
The 2080Ti, a near-fetish item among gamers for the past few years, currently sells for more than $ 1,200. But RTX 3070 will sell for $ 500. Now we’re talking.
Why is Nvidia doing this?
“Nvidia’s biggest rival is now Nvidia,” said Mesut Çevik, editor-in-chief of the prominent Turkish tech news website DonanımHaber. You are absolutely right.
Nvidia’s strongest competitor in the graphics card arena has traditionally been AMD, after it acquired ATI in 2006. Since then, it has rivaled Nvidia with many budget-oriented cards and has become very popular with game-conscious gamers. budget. It has also introduced some high-end cards to the market, such as the Radeon 7 and the RX 5700. But even these cards have weakened compared to the 2080Ti. Now, Nvidia has announced even more powerful cards. So what’s up?
This means the ultimate supremacy and dominance of Nvidia, of course. According to a survey conducted by Valve’s Steam platform, Nvidia has a whopping 73.82% market share among gamers, while AMD cards can only get 16.25%.
Now, let’s get back to our question: why? Why is Nvidia doing this with all the market share it has, with no real contenders or rivals, and why is it not using its vantage point to become an evil monopoly? Let’s take a look at the Steam poll I mentioned.
In the survey, it is clear that Nvidia has struggled hard to sell its high-priced RTX series cards from the previous generation, namely RTX 2060, 2070, 2080 and 2080Ti. But why is it important to sell these RTX series cards for Nvidia? For his ambitions, of course.
The Revolution Led by Ray Tracing and DLSS
Nvidia’s greatest ambition lately has been the successful implementation and diffusion of Ray Tracing technology. This technology has made lighting effects so photorealistic that it blurs the lines between reality and graphics. In addition to Ray Tracing, there is also Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology, which acts as a catalyst for Ray Tracing, which requires a large amount of horsepower. DLSS literally fills in the blanks.
As Ray Tracing demands a lot from the graphics card, the frames per second (FPS) drop and lower performance is the nature of the technology, at least in its current state. For example, with Ray Tracing off, you can get 100 FPS in a game, but when you turn it on, as the card gets tired, the FPS can drop to 30 or even lower.
Then DLSS comes into play, reducing the amount of ray traced lights and making up for the missing ones with artificial intelligence (AI). Some of the lights that you will see in the game will not be plotted in real time, but will be generated with DLSS technology powered by AI, but you will not even notice. And your pre-30 tier FPS rates will rebound to 60-70. This is why DLSS is so meaningful, useful, and revolutionary.
Nvidia has worked hard to make Ray Tracing and DLSS technologies mainstream because it wanted to assert its position as the best manufacturer of graphics cards that can achieve high Ray Tracing performance. But it has largely failed due to prohibitively high prices.
Now with the upcoming RTX 3000 series, which will offer budget-oriented RTX 3070 and high-end 3080 and 3090, their goal is to do so.
If it can deliver on what it promised, and I don’t think anyone will doubt it, we’ll be able to play ray traced games on a budget. And since Nvidia sells the entry-level RTX 3070 for $ 500, you’ll also have the incentive to sell its best cards for higher prices, while also selling more and more graphics cards shipped in green boxes.
RTX 3070 will enable 4K 60 FPS gaming, a previously unthinkable feat with a $ 500 card. RTX 3090, on the other hand, will ship “8K gaming ready.”
8K games, my God. I will stick with my 1080P monitor for a while.
But Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing will be awesome, at least I think so. I’ll need to buy an RTX 3070, even if it’s just to see the bright lights of Night City in its ray-traced goodness.
This also reminds me of the old Nvidia motto: the way it should be played.
