Those are the "Founder's Edition" prices for the first cards from Nvidia, so it's not quite this bad either.

MSRP on cards from OEMs should start at $499 for the 2070 and $699 for the 2080 ($100 cheaper than Nvidia's).

Personally I still think it's insane. I have a GTX 970 from October 2014 and that was $369.

EDIT: Even my $369 was a bit of a premium (OC edition and shortly after launch, I don't remember but I'm guessing I bought whatever was in stock). Wikipedia claims the GTX 970 launched in September 2014 at $329.

Assuming the $329 MSRP is comparable to the $499 announcement, the __70 line is up 52% in two generations. I'm sure it's better hardware, but that's a big pile of money.

And if my 970 experience holds through today, the OEM cards that are actually available are going to be pricier than the MSRP, but maybe still lower than the Founder's Edition.

We'll see where the 2060 ends up.

Founders edition 2080 is £749, and the cheapest non-Nvidia one is £715 from Gigabyte. The difference is tiny and those prices are still insane.

We're also talking huge VRAM jumps, and RAM manufactoring has also hiked prices.

For those confused, these are about what the 10 series Founder's Editions were priced at originally. When the 10 series was released, the 9XX series was around the same price as the 10 series is now compared to 20. The price isn't going up by 70-90%. It's that the previous series (10) is going down.

Does that mean the 10 series isn't worth it? By all means, no. The 9 series was still an excellent series when 10 was released, and people did pick the up.

Ehhhh, not really, but the release seems a bit different this time around. The 1080 Founders Edition and 1080 Ti FE cards both debuted at $700 USD. (The 1080 Ti was released nearly a year later.) This puts it closer to the now released 2080 FE, which is $800 USD.

The 2080 Ti FE, however, is in a league closer to the Titan X/Xp, which were at $1,200. Also they're releasing the highest-end Ti edition at the same time as the ordinary version, which is a first for Nvidia, I think? (The Titan Xp was also launched after, not concurrently, with the 10xx series...) I think the concurrent launch of the 2080 Ti with the ordinary variant means they're positioning it more like an alternative to the Xp, while the non-Ti variants are closer to the ordinary gaming cards you'd normally get. In other words, for people willing to blow their price/perf budget a bit more.

For DL workloads the 1080 Ti is very cost effective (vs the Xp), so it remains to be seen which variant will have the better bang/buck ratio for those uses. I suspect the fact these include Tensor Cores at their given price point will probably be a major selling point regardless of the exact model choice, especially among hobbyist DL users. The RTX line will almost certainly be better in terms of price/perf for local DL work, no matter the bloated margins vs older series.

They may also be keeping prices a bit inflated, besides margins, so they can keep selling older stock and pushing it out. The 9xx series, as you said, continued to sell for a while after 10xx was released. I expect the same will be true this time around, too, especially with prices being so high.

> Ehhhh, not really

Ehhh, yes really.

1080 FE $699 USD 2080 FE $799 USD

That qualifies as almost the same price in my book. By and large, not a 70-90% price increase as being suggested.

Unless you want to explain how 700-800 is a 70-90% price increase?

Tensor cores are great for inferencing; for training their support is still a bit shaky, last time I checked.

Tensor cores (e.g. SIMD matrix FMAs) are extremely useful for training. There is nothing shaky about it.

I do not get why you're being so bizarrely negative about this card. Yes, there are an enormous number of applications, for both training and inference, where an 11GB ridiculously powerful card (both in OPS and in memory speed) can be enormously useful.

Yes, I agree, tensor cores are awesome, if your framework of choice doesn't have some rough edges you inevitably hit when you try to do advanced models on e.g. V100, but which work just fine on TPU. I think the presented Turing card is a masterpiece, just given I was hitting 11GB limit with some semantic segmentation and multi-object detection a year ago, I am obviously disappointed that this wasn't increased, and I am forced to buy RTX 5000 instead ($2300) or used K80/P40. Also, for a gaming card outside a few RTX games I doubt it will give adequate value to gamers that expected 144Hz or faster VR and similar goodies. For raytracing and as a fusion of RT and DL it's truly redefining computer graphics.

Tensors cores were built for training. For inference they added the int8 instructions (dp4a) which have lower precision. The Turing also has int4, and for inference this card blows the Volta out of the water since the v100 was only ~TOPS for int8. The Turing is 250 TOPS for int8 and 500 TOPS for int4.

Which 10x0 FE did cost $1200? Did I miss something?

1080 FE $699 USD 2080 FE $799 USD

That qualifies as about the same price in my book, and not a 70-90% jump.

As for the Ti price when 1080 series was released, there was none.

For the 1080, by your numbers, $799/$450 represents a ~78% price increase.

First those are founders edition pricing which cost an extra 100$. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17802871 Also 1080's did not start at 450$ each.

The 2080's price will drop eventually, until then nVidia has no reason to lower prices when they are going to be sold out for weeks if not months.

The price of 1080's where $600-$650 for the founders edition cards when they first came out. I know cause I preordered at those prices. I think the price of the 2080 FE cards are fair given that they are not only faster at raster graphics, but they also have the Raytracing/AI capabilities.

Did you forget that 1080 was 699 at launch? I remember because that's how much I paid for it.

Alright fair. 50-80%, not 70-90%.

These are also Founders Edition prices. Still the 2080ti is pretty expensive even at non-FE pricing:

RTX 2070 cards will start at $499, with RTX 2080 at $699, and the RTX 2080 Ti starting at $999.