Turing Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/youtub...gb-of-vram

Wouldn't it be cool to upgrade your graphics card with more VRAM? While the average person might not do it, YouTuber VIK-on published a video showcasing his journey to upgrading a Palit-branded GeForce RTX 2070 from 8GB of Micron GDDR6 to 16GB of Samsung GDDR6 memory.

VIK-on first got the idea of upgrading the RTX 2070 to 16GB when he was sent a leaked diagram for the RTX 2070 with a 16GB VRAM option. The leaked diagram shows that the RTX 2070 can support both 1GB and 2GB GDDR6 chips from Samsung (the 2GB chips are used to make 16GB of total VRAM capacity)

Remember those leaks on a potential 16GB RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 a few years ago? Well, this leaked diagram, if real, suggests that Nvidia was at least working on the idea behind closed doors.
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Either way, it was cool to see that upgrade an RTX 2070 to 16GB does actually work. Hopefully one day we'll see an RTX 2070 that is fully functional with 16GB of GDDR6 to see if adding an additional 8GB of VRAM would have been worth it for Nvidia.

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/31928...2060-super

Nvidia announced its RTX 3060 during CES last week, but according to one report, the company has actually restarted production of its RTX 2060 and RTX 2060 Super. If true, it would mean Nvidia doesn’t think it can alleviate the graphics card shortage quickly enough if it relies solely on 7nm GPUs.

The rumor comes from French site Overclocking.com, which claims to gotten confirmation from several brands. Reportedly, Nvidia shipped out a new set of RTX 2060 and 2060 Super GPUs to re-enable the manufacture of these cards. If true, Nvidia could potentially alleviate the GPU shortage by relying on TSMC’s older (and presumably, less-stressed) 12nm product line.
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Frankly, it’d be nice to see the RTX 2060 and 2060 Super back in-market, if only to bring a little stability to it. Here are Newegg’s current top-selling GPUs as of 1/20/2021:

Newegg’s best-selling GPUs are bottom-end Pascal cards. The last-gen RX 580 and the GTX 1660 Super are the only two consumer cards selling for under $500. Both of them are terrible deals at this price point.

There’s always a bunch of low-end garbage stuffed into the GPU market. Typically, these parts live below the $100 price point, where you’ll find a smorgasbord of ancient AGP cards, long-vanished GPU micro-architectures, and rock-bottom performance that almost always costs too much. Today, the garbage has flooded into much higher price points. Want a GTX 960? That’ll be $150. How about a GTX 460 for $145 or an HD 7750 for $155? There’s a GTX 1050 Ti for $170, which is only $40 more than the GPU cost when new, over four years ago.

Right now, it’s impossible to buy any GPU for anything like MSRP. If bringing the RTX 2060 and RTX 2060 Super back to market actually provides some stability and some kind of modern GPU to purchase, I’m in favor of it. At this point, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if AMD threw the old Polaris family back into market, either. While they wouldn’t be a great value at this point ordinarily, the cheapest RX 5500 XT at Newegg is $397. Under these circumstances, any midrange GPU manufactured in the last four years that can ship for less than $300 would be an improvement.

The past five years have been the worst sustained market for GPUs in the past two decades. Currently, GPU prices have been well above MSRP for 24 out of the past 56 months, dating back to the launch of Pascal in late May, 2016. This isn’t expected to change until March or April at the earliest. When cards aren’t available at MSRP for nearly half the time they’ve been on the market over five years and two full process node deployments, it raises serious issues about whether we can trust MSRPs when making GPU recommendations. Right now, the best price/performance ratio you can get in the retail market might be an RX 550 for $122.

The GPU market in its current form is fundamentally broken. Manufacturer MSRPs have the same authority as any random number you might pick out of a hat. There are a lot of factors playing a part in the current situation, including manufacturing yields and COVID-19, but this problem started four years before the pandemic.

AMD and Nvidia need to find a better way to ensure that customers are able to buy the cards they actually want to purchase, or they need to delay their launches for a sufficient length of time as to build up a meaningful stockpile of hardware, sufficient to supply launch demand for a matter of days, not seconds. Alternately, they may need to delay launches until yield percentages and availability are high enough to ensure a constant stream of equipment to buyers.

Right now, we have launch days that sell out instantly and interminable delays between new shipments. If these rumors are true, and we hope they are, Nvidia bringing back the RTX 2060 and 2060 Super will help a little in the short term, but what we obviously need is for AMD and Nvidia to take a fundamentally different approach to product inventory management. As things stand, these aren’t product launches. They’re product teases.