I continually find your comparisons to expensive cars to be a miss, they're such completely different markets with a MUCH wider spectrum than GPU's. It feels like you're trying to liken the high end of GPU's to that to stretch it well beyond the reality of the market were actually discussing, to try enhance your point, but it achieves the opposite.
30k USD to 3.3 million USD is 110x increase, taking a new Toyota GT86 vs a Bugatti Chiron prices.
170 USD to 1999 USD is a 11-12x increase, taking a 3050 6GB vs a 5090.
Those two comparisons are off by a factor of ~10
Perhaps whatever point you're trying to make could be made without referring to cars, and specifically ultra niche brands for the wealthy? If only for me and because I said please?
Even then the comparison is a miss. A car "enthusiast" would tend to do something like spend £50-100k over the course of five years buying/restoring/improving a beloved car, reading magazines, frequenting forums, doing most of the work themselves. Someone who buys a chiron is just rich, not necessarily an enthusiast. Very similar to a computer enthusiast. Whereas a typical car user would just buy a £20k Toyota and drive it for ten years before replacing it with the equivalent. Like the typical computer user who just buys a Dell and replaces it when the next version of Windows releases.
Sure, but then please make it clear how much of a price difference is relevant for you to be talking about product classification. Because we're all about individual twists and turns on definitions at this point.
Correct. So if I restore an old PC that I found in a carboot sale / flea market for pennies, and manage to use it as a secondary rig, that's kind of an enthusiast thing to do, right? I don't need a 5090 for that.
Do you guys collectively have any clue about how diverse the car world is? I mean, you speak as though you 100% know the PC world, but you fail there pretty hard after reading a page of your discussion.
Let me explain the PC world real quick. The Apple II is basically as strong in compute as a modern speak and spell book. Despite that, the things are revered, rebuilt, and sell for small fortunes.
Youtube - rebuilding an Apple II That's a product from 1977 that literally could not be brought up to date with an infinite amount of modifications...unless you count gutting it and replacing the innards as updating. Despite this, the enthusiast community for PCs love these things. Do note, I am agreeing with
@AusWolf, because enthusiast is not just about what is fastest today. That's a type of enthusiast.
Likewise, there are multiple different types of racing. Some car enthusiasts enjoy the benefits of an electric motor. Others seek out muscle cars that are, by legal definition, antiques. They then gut them, weld in a roll-over preventing tube frame, update with a new engine and guts, and enthusiastically take their antique car out to the races to compete against the latest rice burners. That almost sounds like the PC enthusiasts who do take modern hardware and shove it into the guts of old things...like a certain class of PC enthusiasts that are on this forum. I also see the "regular" car users out there doing exactly what you suggest, and buying a Toyota every few years to replace their old one...and ironically they do benefit from enthusiast tech filtering down because...and hear me out...when the racing tech gets adopted enough the economies of scale allow it to be priced down to regular models.
Funny that. Nvidia is a company that has gigantic capital reserves. They also do not offer the best product for the money, they offer the product that they set the margins on. In automotive imagine if a generational improvement of cars decided that they suddenly weren't going to support automatic windows and doors anymore. Imagine if they improved your automotive experience by presupposing your destinations and automatically throttling your vehicle to save on fuel efficiency. That's what the PC industry has done with FSR and DLSS...because they sure as heck aren't offering us more as the price of things like DRAM chips craters.
I could keep going, but why. Both
@wolf and
@dgianstefani are forgetting that there are more than the enthusiasts who want to go out and buy a Bugatti...because it doesn't hit with the narrative that Nvidia has constructed. To be abundantly clear, that narrative is that Nvidia somehow can make the 8GB work...because they'd never sell a half baked product. I mean, there's a whole school of thought that exists in automotive that if you designed a car with a top speed of whatever the speed limit was you'd save lives...but historically the response to that has always been that those cars do not sell unless heavily discounted. It's almost like the parallel in the PC world is giving you whatever the bare minimum of memory bandwidth is (as a function of bus size, memory quantity, and operating speed) a direct parallel for throttling car performance...but neither of you want to understand the parallel because admitting that things are complicated because both markets are complicated requires that you admit that maybe there's a core issue with labeling anything enthusiast. Almost like it's a term that was pirated to sell crap like the LGA2011 platform. Like prosumer. It's almost like if they can label things they can quantify them and sell things to them. It's almost like Nvidia wants everything to be an enthusiast product, so they can sell their cast-offs as premium product...and that sucks for consumers.
Like an 8GB card selling on the street for nearly $500 in 2025 sucks...considering the 3070 in 2019, with DRAM chips that were less abundant and more expensive, demonstrated had its practical limits with in niche cases, that would and will increase as time goes on.
