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Pro-Consumer vs Anti-Consumer - Die Shrink Telegrams (Patreon)

Published:
2023-06-29 06:43:50
Edited:
2023-06-29 06:49:41
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Well here we are hot off the heals of the launch of the RTX 4060...and we cannot escape the "Anti-Consumer debate" conversation!  Here's the type of stuff we want to talk about in this episode:

The 7770 was weaker than a 6850, cost more than a 6870, and yet got good reviews because it was close to discount last gen price/performance...have we forgotten that this was the norm in the "good ol' days" 10 years ago?

At what price point would the RTX 4060 or RX 7600 be "Pro-Consumer"?

What direction should GPU design and segmentation go in?

What direction should CPUs go in? You want 40 cores? Cheaper cores?

Is XBOX Game Pass "Pro-Consumer", or a race to the bottom?

Elevated pricing on recently announced VR Devices (PS VR2, Quest 3, Apple VP)

In other words - this episode is all about defining, debating, and venting what we think or mean when we say something is "Anti-Consumer", "Pro-Consumer", or going in the right or wrong direction!  Yes, this will be an eclectic episode - have at you!  You have ~13 hours to submit your thoughts and questions below.  You know the drill...

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-hd-7770/

https://www.techspot.com/review/2701-nvidia-geforce-rtx-4060/

Comments

Aluveitie

With the big gap between the 4090 and 4080, it feels like Nvidia's lineup would make much more sense if every card except the 4090 would have been one tier below with a real 4080 added to the mix. Then every card would have been a more meaningful upgrade over the last generation and memory capacity would also be more appropriate. The 4060 would have been a good 4050 at around 250$.

kjm015

Hello, Tom and Dan! It's looking like the RTX 4060 is yet another flop in a series of lackluster launches. If Nvidia and AMD keep releasing GPUs in line with their current product segmentation, then this entire generation is doomed to rot on retail shelves. Do you think there will be a refresh or course correction similar to what Nvidia did with their Turing "Super" release back in 2019, or is the remainder of the Lovelace and Navi III product stack doomed to this same fate?

AndrewInAustralia

Speaking as someone who works in STEM, I want bigger/faster cores. A lot of things are still single threaded processes. If a package has the abilities to use a huge number of cores it's generally been shifted to be calculated on a gpu. So 6 or 8 cores and make them fast. I've had to disable e cores on a desktop as they were nerfing the performance of a Geotechnical engineer software package...

QuickJumper

I think there will be many changes to core design in upcoming years. First of all there will be a big push for AI which will allow a new kinds of functionality, for example in PC games I think that in-game AI could be massively improved, maybe even things like in-game generated sounds and music, AI will also allow more efficient computing resources utilization. From the cores perspective in the long-term 16 cores will be a standard, with AMD's v-cache technology progressing and Intel also improving the little cores it will be economically possible to create very cheap 16 cores which will achieve better performance overall then big 8 or 12 cores. Whichever company will provide more complete package will have advantage. It's not about being 5% better it's about having smarter design. People can guess which company understands this better.

KarbinCry

Do you feel that the "pro-consumer" label has been tainted by the many techtubers and tech tabloids (WCCF, VideoCardz) who exploit it while surfing the wave of whatever (almost always) stupid popular outrage is that given week?

Silvannos

Dear Tom and Dan! For me, anti-consumer means that company is actively making it hard for me to find out if their hardware is what I need. So, Nvidia does this with their naming of the mobile GPUs and stuff around it. However, there's one good thing there too. Probably, it was totally unintended. RTX4060 is so weak, that mobile RTX4060 above 110W are actually the same GPU with the same performance. So a decently priced RTX4060 laptop is a way to go over desktop at certain situations. Do you also feel that there is a difference between anti-consumer and not reading/not caring to read the market? Or, in your eyes, this is the same? I wouldn't say RTX4000 series is anti-consumer, just overpriced and the market and Nvidia will slowly adjust this, we just need to vote with our money and not buying their GPUs. If the prices fall, their products will be good. It's not food and we do not need to buy overpriced electronics most of the time.

Gach

Dear Tom and Dan, Anti-consumer these days is often pro-datacenter. Silicon can be sold to business for much higher margins and total revenue than it can to gamers. In a way, shifting pricing teirs up makes the gaming business more sustainable and allows these companies to justify making consumer products long term. For that matter, business bubbles burst, but gamer demand for increased performance and features is comparatively reliable. While I want as much performance for as little money as possible, I also think the harware market is evolving and will look a lot different in 10 years. I can see medium to high performance gaming APUs, XR headsets, and handhelds being a majority of the gaming market. Maybe discrete GPUs get relegated to the pro-sumer category. My point is, we are entering a transitional time for the gaming market, possibly the biggest transition since 3D acceleration began. There will be growing pains, but I'm hopeful that we will still get better performance and visuals over time, even if it becomes relatively more expensive as well.

Gach

For CPU design, I'd really like to see a big.HUGE philosophy of 8-16 big cores together with 1-4 cores optimized for clock and IPC over power and area efficiency. Essentially the inverse of Zen c. I'm also really curious to see how specialized accelerators evolve in the next 5-10 years.

Cleansweep

Hey Tom and Dan, At this point, I think a lot of the talk about how "anti-consumer" is the result of a one-two-three combination of CPU/GPU stagnation at different points in the past decade, crypto-bubbles screwing up everyone's upgrade cycles, and the big jump in console performance. If you've been following tech since the PC golden age around 2012, seeing modern hardware stagnate at certain levels of price, performance, features, and/or core count makes you think of when Intel went into milking mode with its incremental 4 core CPU upgrades, especially when it comes to Nvidia. I feel like Intel and AMD have a little less impression that they're milking, either because of their current or past difficulties, although AMD certainly feels like its stagnating on CPU core count. I think a lot of the anti-consumer sentiment comes from the crypto-bubbles that formed in 2018/2021-22. If you got a GPU in 2015 and tried to stick to a 3 year upgrade cycle, you were in the middle of one crypto-bubble. If you tried to stick to a 5 year upgrade cycle, you landed in 2020, where you either got a then current GPU, or held out for Ampere/RDNA 2... then ran right into the next crypto-bubble and hardware shortages. So you either paid way too much money for a GPU, or waited until mid-2022 to mid-2023 to replace your old GPU... which is right when VRAM quantities became the new problem. Then there was the current gen consoles using Zen 2, RDNA 2, and lots of RAM. If you had a recent CPU and upper mid-range GPU, you could match or beat that performance. If you didn't, you were and still are looking at costly hardware upgrades that may not have all that much longevity before the next big console/PC hardware upgrade cycle. A lot of people are feeling either priced out or ripped off by price/performance in PC gaming and desperately hoping for some kind of correction for the market. You can have cheap hardware and upgrade more often, or more expensive hardware and try to eek out every last possible bit of performance over a longer lifespan, but it seems like the PC market is skewing way too much towards the latter, especially with hardware bubbles starting to pop up more frequently.

AI Generated Fish

Hi Tom and Dan, I wouldn't define anti consumer as being pricing related, it's the act of manipulating a market to remove or reduce consumer choice. Examples: Nvidia, APPLE, intel. Nvidia pushing Cuda and making DLSS a black box only available to their cards and DLSS 3 only available to 40 series where they used it to substitute for actual gen over gen performance in a lot of tiers. Apple's walled garden where they don't even allow side loading or other software options on their phones and resisted USBC. Intel paying OEMs to not use AMD chips in laptop. It does become something that takes value from the consumer, but they do it by first limiting alternatives.

Schattenjäger

Tom and Dan, I don't have any particular input on your first bullet point, so I'll skip it. I'll just note that my current GPU is a GTX 980 4 GB and wow am I feeling it. Really need the 7700/7800 (XT) to come out already so I can get something high-mid tier that'll last me another 6 years! For the RTX 4060/RX 7600 to be "Pro-Consumer" pricing, they'd have to be no higher than $200. And it's mostly because of the VRAM capacity. They're simply entry-level cards and need to be priced like it to justify their existence. GPU design should pursue chiplets like AMD has with CPUs, which is an excellent idea for all the reasons you and knowledgeable others have noted already. Also stacked V-cache to keep package size down, though I imagine that will become less of a big deal as node size continues to shrink. Maybe some day we'll see on-package L4 or 5 memory for consumer cards! Segmentation is a different issue. In the current tech level, with the consoles having the specs they do, 8 GB or less is entry level, 12 "basic", 16 functional, and 20+ great. So they should segment primarily by VRAM, not processing power, and price accordingly. Likewise, CPU development is fine. Chiplets all the way, and 16 cores is *plenty* for desktop, until and unless the consoles break that themselves or otherwise justify more than 16 cores for a gaming rig. X-BOX Game Pass is fine. It's a good thing, even, granting Netflix-like power to console players with a (relatively small) library of playable titles that changes a bit regularly, and includes not just big AAA titles, but also Indies and small-scale games. I think the pricing on the newest VR devices is realistic, but unfortunately will not drive uptake because it is *so high*, even the PS VR2.

AI Generated Fish

This is more of a dovetailing of your CPU and GPU questions, but 8 cores is enough. Making those 8 cores stronger is definitely better. Strix Halo has been your most exciting leak for me because this is like the goldilocks of laptop Socs. Plenty of cores, gen over gen IPC growth, graphics that are enough for QHD. I dont think strix halo itself will come to desktop but I think thats the future equation for entry level PC gaming. I actually built an AMD A10 system because it would play my games with no discrete GPU, it was plenty for me. Strix on desktop and the successor should be fine for 1080p gaming. Leave 1080p for integrated graphics, qhd and low 4k for low end discrete, enthusiast discrete would be 4k, I don't even care if they have a pro-sumer 4090 level class. I have zero issues with the 4090 existing, it's just silly that it's the only card in the 40 class that delivered any kind of value.

Alex Sloter

Hi Tom and Dan, I think products are pro-sumer then they allow the purchaser to own the product and use it as they like. For example, XBOX Game Pass is a race to the bottom in my opinion because, while a monthly subscription is cheaper than buying an individual game, you never actually own anything. Should you cancel your subscription after a few years, you own nothing, even though you have spent hundreds of dollars on the service. Also, I see reliance on features to the detriment of hardware as being anti-consumer because it can prevent the purchaser from making full use of the product in certain situations. The 40 series is anti-consumer in this way because it depends on a feature, DLSS 3, to boost performance beyond last gen in the mid-tier and lower. What if a game doesn't support the new feature? Then the purchaser has paid next gen pricing for last gen performance in that particular game. Features should be bonuses to hardware, not the other way around.

Cleansweep

I feel like the direction future CPU baselines specs should go in is pretty clear from AMD's POV: -Entry level: less cores/threads and cutdown iGPU/other features than most recent console APU -Mainstream: equal cores/threads and iGPU/feature parity with most recent console APU -High end: more cores/threads, better IO, better features than most recent console APU Personally, I would like tons more cores AND a pricing race to the bottom, but from a business POV, AMD keeping the gaming market alive with affordable APUs and CPUs that get close to/match console performance seems more sustainable and easier for them to market. For GPUs, maybe GPU segmentation and design should be determined based on the resolution and the median price of the most commonly sold 32 to 40in TV in Walmart is. TVs set the resolution standards for consoles, even if they have to use upscaling to hit those targets, so why not apply that metric to GPUs? The only other design choice I can think of is prioritizing more capacity per VRAM module whenever drawing up the new GDDR specs. If we PC gamers are going to be stuck with cards for over 5 years, you better give us more than enough VRAM to even have a chance of running those games.

SumRndmPenguin

Hi Tom and Dan. I think part of the reason that people have forgotten how things worked in "the good ol' days" is that a lot of us weren't enthusiasts during that period. I can't speak for everyone, but I myself have only been following computers since 2019 (right before shit hit the fan lol), so my knowledge of older pc parts only really goes back to the 10 series at best.

Chris Rijk

I think most people would agree with the idea that too little competition is a bad thing. However, I sometimes see people say that more competition is *always* better. I don’t agree with this and you can have too much competition as well. In such a scenario, companies have little profit which also means little R&D. Tech is R&D heavy, so little R&D means a slow rate of development. It’s easy to demand lower prices but this is not free of consequences. Rather than “more competition” I would suggest we need “effective competition”.

Sarcastro

I blame Dan. For everything.

Chris Rijk

Hi Tom, out of curiosity I was looking at reviews of older GPUs and what they said about VRAM capacity. My general summary is that all reviewers glossed over VRAM capacity and instead heavily focused on shiny new features like RT, upscaling, video encoding and so on. I can’t help but feel that dedicated review sites and channels failed consumers in this regard and need to be called out on it. I also came across an old video of yours titled “AMD RX 6700 XT Review: Gamers need 12GB, Creators need Ampere”. Other reviewers should learn from you about what really matters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpjAjfaUajk

Chris Rijk

For consumer CPUs, for the sorts of applications where dozens of little cores work well, I’d suggest that GPUs would work much better in most cases. If the companies developing compute heavy applications aren’t making use of GPU acceleration then that’s their loss and I’d suggest that users should look elsewhere.

Chris Rijk

Modern consoles use APU designs because it’s the most efficient and cost effective solution. Having a separate CPU and GPU does allow for much greater flexibility and upgradability but it does come at a cost. Because of the cost advantages I would expect APUs to dominate the low-end of PC gaming in the longer term. That will make life tough for low-end dGPUs. Whether you consider it a net win for consumers probably depends on how much you value upgradability.

Linus

The 4060 is obviously just a renamed 4050 with a name to make it look like a higher tier GPU. The same goes for the 7600. And remember the 6500 XT was probably just a 6500 or 6400 XT renamed to a 6500 XT. This means that from AMD's side they've pretty much pulled the same strategy twice in a row. I believe the 7600 should be $200 ($199) maximum to genuinely appeal to gamers. As for the 4060... While I do hate the DLSS 3 marketing, it is a viable option for singleplayer games, so for those gamers that exclusively play singleplayer games I could understand a 10-25% markup for the 4060. That said the 4060 should cost $250 maximum to even be slightly appealing. The $300 segment should be reserved for GPUs with 12GB of vram MINIMUM. The 4060 with 8GB at $300 is in my opinion an insult to Nvidia's own customers.

Chris Rijk

This might sound strange but I think that the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 can be marginally "pro-consumer" even while having poor sales. Their prices just need to be low enough to have a noticeable impact on the prices of previous generation products. I think that’s the bare minimum we should expect from a new release and maybe it’ll be worth reviewing prices again in a few weeks.

Woody Chang

We have to remember that anytime a company is pro-consumer, they still have to look out for their bottom line. A lot of us were spoiled by the 10 series and its price to performance ratio but Nvidia made pricing decisions that made sense for them at the time but they would never make again. (1080ti *cough*) I suspect that the bar will be lowered for what is considered pro-consumer moving forward. Will pro-consumer in 10 years just mean that they're actually letting us buy products as opposed to forcing us to rent them? I'm pretty pessimistic, so I'm guessing it will actually happen.

Jen-Hsun Huang, AI is not circular

GPU segmentation should drive prices up to enable more cutting edge R&D and support the additional cost of newer process nodes, as well as maximizing the pleasure shareholders get when you buy a new GPU to game on!