Yeah. Let me just walk down to Best Buy and get myself a GPU with over 24 gigabytes of VRAM (impossible) for less than $3,000 (even more impossible). Then tell me ASi is nothing compared to Nvidia.
Even the A100 for something around $15,000 (edit: used to say $10,000) only goes up to 80 gigabytes of VRAM, but a 192GB Mac Studio goes for under $6,000.
Those figures alone proves Nvidia isn't even competing in the consumer or even the enthusiast space anymore. They know you'll buy their hardware if you really need it, so they aggressively segment the market with VRAM restrictions.
Oops, I remembered it being somewhere near $15k but Google got confused and showed me results for the 40GB instead so I put $10k by mistake. Thanks for the correction.
A100 80GB goes for around $14,000 - $20,000 on eBay and A100 40GB goes for around $4,000 - $6,000. New (not from eBay - from PNY and such), it looks like an 80GB would set you back $18,000 to $26,000 depending on whether you want HBM2 or HBM2e.
Meanwhile you can buy a Mac Studio today without going through a distributor and they're under $6,000 if the only thing you care about is having 192GB of Unified Memory.
And while the memory bandwidth isn't quite as high as the 4090, the M-series chips can run certain models faster anyway, if Apple is to be believed
Even the A100 for something around $15,000 (edit: used to say $10,000) only goes up to 80 gigabytes of VRAM, but a 192GB Mac Studio goes for under $6,000.
Those figures alone proves Nvidia isn't even competing in the consumer or even the enthusiast space anymore. They know you'll buy their hardware if you really need it, so they aggressively segment the market with VRAM restrictions.