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Nvidia's RTX 50 series is disappointing, and we are the ones to blame
Nvidia's RTX 50 series GPUs were announced over a month ago. The dust has now settled, the cards have been out for a while, and the disappointment is universal. The Blackwell lineup has delivered middling gains over the previous generation, with the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 being little more than "Ti" versions of their predecessors.
This refresh of a generation might have left everyone seething due to
AI-generated frames, record-high prices, and stock-outs, but we might have no one to blame but ourselves. For years, we have let Nvidia do as they please, failing to keep a check on the company's predatory pricing and elitist features. Moreover, as consumers, we repeatedly overlooked deserving competition while Nvidia made bank.
We failed to vote with our wallets
Nvidia tasted blood and went in for the kill
"Vote with your wallet" is a common saying when prompting someone to show or withhold support for a product. This is what we, as consumers, should have done with Nvidia long ago. The company's history of charging luxury goods prices for their graphics cards started back in 2018 with the RTX 2000 "Turing" cards. The RTX 2080 Ti launched at an MSRP of $999, which was still overshadowed by everything that came after.
The demand for Nvidia's flagship GPUs kept touching record highs despite the rapidly rising prices. Perhaps the worst example of this was the pandemic-era GPU crisis where consumers showed they were willing to pay just about anything to grab an RTX 30 series graphics card. Be it paying scalpers double or triple the MSRP or lining up outside stores for days to buy $1,600-$2,000 GPUs on launch day, consumers never failed to become enablers of Nvidia's greed.
Nvidia was naturally emboldened to see this play out, and doubled down on its strategy with the RTX 40 series, and more recently, the RTX 50 series. Nvidia's GPUs might be the most powerful ones out there, but the average gamer still doesn't need all that power to play modern games. Regardless, we had a chance to protest against $1,000 GPUs, and we never used them.
We never put our money where our mouths were
Everyone says "Buy AMD", but not many do
Since around 2014, Nvidia convincingly dominated the GPU market, with its Maxwell, Pascal, and Turing GPUs way ahead of anything AMD could offer. In 2020, however, AMD finally managed to compete with Nvidia at the very top, thanks to its RDNA 2–powered RX 60 graphics cards. Outside the
RTX 4090, a $1,599 monster most people never considered buying, AMD's flagship RX 6900 XT went toe-to-toe with Nvidia's RTX 3080 Ti.
This was finally the time the general sentiment around AMD cards started shifting, with the community often praising AMD's better-value GPUs compared to Nvidia's overpriced offerings. It seemed like while everyone claimed AMD was the smarter choice, not many people actually picked Team Red when buying a new graphics card. AMD's RX 60 and RX 70 series have multiple GPUs that offer greater value than Nvidia models, even at the high-end.
It's often claimed that inferior ray tracing and software features are the reasons behind it, but in the segments that move the most GPUs i.e. budget and mid-range, performance-per-dollar trumps everything else.
AMD even offers way more VRAM than Nvidia GPUs at every price point. Despite that, Nvidia's mindshare makes most people completely disregard AMD GPUs. Look at the Steam Hardware Survey, and you'll have to cross over 20 GPUs before seeing a desktop AMD card on the list.
AMD has finally decided to stop competing in the high-end segment with its
RX 90 series GPUs, set to arrive sometime in March. Whether this is an admission of defeat at producing the fastest GPUs in the world or a smart business decision, you can take your pick. What's clear, however, is that consumers consistently rewarded Nvidia over AMD despite the latter often having the better product.
We got sucked into Nvdia's marketing hype
Ray tracing then, frame generation now
Nvidia was doing great before the RTX 20 series, thanks to the iconic GTX 10 series GPUs. However. the company wanted to create something to justify raising prices next generation. This is how real-time ray tracing arrived on consumer GPUs, and things were never the same again. At the time, ray tracing was even less relevant than it is today. Sure, it looks great in a handful of titles and is becoming mandatory in some new ones too, but it never justified paying a premium for Nvidia GPUs.
Still, consumers considered it a must-have feature and happily glossed over AMD cards in favor of tanking their framerates. Even today, there are maybe
10 games that justify the ray tracing tax, with the feature mostly going unnoticed in all other supported titles. What's more surprising is that AMD's high-end graphics cards are able to do ray tracing to a great degree, especially the RX 70 GPUs, but that doesn't convince users to buy AMD either.
The same thing will probably play out this generation as Nvidia's RTX 50 series convinces the vast majority that AI-generated frames are equivalent to "more performance."
AMD's RX 90 delay isn't helping it either, as both the general public and AMD fans grow restless, believing the delay means something went horribly wrong, and not that AMD is perfecting the software stack.
Will 2025 be any different?
I can only hope that AMD justifies the delayed RDNA 4 launch by delivering something truly revolutionary. At least that way, I'll have some more legitimate reasons why more consumers should buy AMD instead of Nvidia. The way it seems right now, the RX 90 series will have much-improved ray tracing (hardware-powered this time), FSR, and value-for-money compared to the previous generation. Whether it will be enough to capture more mid-range market share or whether Nvidia's mindshare will be able to withstand it, is something we can't answer right now.
Source:
https://www.xda-developers.com/we-are-to-blame-for-rtx-50-series/
