A little faster, a lot cheaper

I’ll start this review with a rant. A rant about the entry-level GeForce RTX 4080 and its list price.

At $1199 USD, the GeForce RTX 4080 was a product that perfectly epitomized everything that was wrong with the PC enthusiast hobby, today. That is, these GPUs cost too much. As a product, it was fine. It’s a really good GPU and much faster than the RTX 3080 it effectively replaces. However, in the GeForce RTX 40 Series it was so far behind the RTX 4090 in performance that the $400 difference in price (in theory the RTX 4090 is $1599 USD) didn’t make much sense. Or is it just me? I am crazy;

Speaking of paranoia, I’m actually fine with insanely expensive, super high quality products. There is a market for them. Build a 40-series TITAN and price it at $2500, and the wealthy among us – and top YouTubers – will bask in its high-performance sheen. But offering a discounted AD103 for $1199 was so unbelievable, so awful, that it… didn’t hurt NVIDIA in the slightest. Sure, the RTX 3080 was $699, and the $1199 price for the RTX 4080 represented a $500 on-gen increase, but AMD didn’t exactly take over the high-end market with RDNA 3.

But the RTX 4080 must not have been selling that well or it wouldn’t need a price cut now. Or maybe NVIDIA just wants to cultivate some of that gamer goodwill, right Josh?