Thinking about SUPER a bit longer, there is actually a business case to be made here for a constant refresh in that vein for every gen - and faster than we're used to seeing a refresh usually.
First generational release stack = preliminary fire, early adopter territory, availability hit/miss. We saw this to some degree with Turing as well, but then Turing wasn't even nearly as much of a leap as Ampere so obviously only specific and especially top end SKUs were hard to get. 2080ti really - they didn't make many, but they did sell them ('all' of them so to speak).
The lower SKUs had only a few, maybe even just one strong contender: the 2060 which dropped the 1080 performance to a lower tier price point. The rest of the non-SUPER stack (and RTX, not GTX, I consider that a one-off for Turing alone to bridge the gap between old and new) was totally uninteresting: the performance was already available for years with the Pascal line up, and at equal or even
lower price to boot.
Nvidia gauged the market and response, and then launched SUPER. The only reason to do this is because they think they'll make more money
with a better offer within the same gen. After all, its not truly a refresh is it... rather a rapid replacement of old stuff with new. When the volume and stack (perf/dollar/feature) is conservative, its easy to move to a SUPER refresh especially as the node gets better over time.
So maybe SUPER is the new staggered launch Nvidia has always had, but rolled out differently: its no longer feasible to save the top end SKUs for last or even first, they want to hit the entire mid-to-top of the stack virtually at the same time instead of spacing stuff months apart for x104 > x102 (>106) to appear. Advantage: they can recalibrate everything instead of just doing final tweaks on the stuff they have yet to release. In a way, their generational launches are 'more agile'... and more easily changed if the market responds in a strange way. They can sample the market twice per gen, too, helping them for future releases and with low volume, there aren't many cannibalized sales.
This would answer MANY questionable moves of late but more importantly, this approach allows Nvidia maximum risk mitigation, which isn't a bad idea given that they are still pioneering with RT.
And, if their initial bet was OK, they can just postpone SUPER until competition arrives -another thing you don't easily do with an entire SKU like say the x102 die products. Maybe they also took a lesson from Pascal which, for two FULL generations never even needed the 1080ti to begin with. Let's face it... it was lonely at the top for many years and I think that one killed a LOT of Turing sales.
Youre in the same boat as me. if i cant truly double or triple my performance for the price my current card launched i dont see the point in upgrading now either. I dont care about raytracing. its just a bs gimmick like "hairworks" and amd had with the "tress fx" and both caused massive frame hits. just like raytracing.
Amen to that, baby steps are for toddlers.
BTW, 58 posts per day, bud? Thought I was hardcore
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