1. The media over-hyped the demand by gamers.
2. The prices crashed at the worst possible time for everyone, just as we enter a depression and massive inflation. Plus you know 40xx is about to launch.
3. You'd be INSANE to buy a card now, if you have the cash, then wait a few months and get double the performance for the same money.
4. Yes NVIDIA sold gamers down the swanny by selling to miners and giving gamers the middle finger, so it's no surprise that we return the favour.
There have been some decent deals lately. So I don't think you are insane in any way if you wanted to buy a GPU. You can get a 6800XT for £650 now. It will be a long time before you see a next gen card that can beat it easily at that price.
Now sure, I would not buy a 3090Ti or 6950XT now. That would be crazy. However, we all know it will be AGES before either company let the cheaper and more performance next gen cards go.
As an example? I would hazard a guess and say that what you will see first is the 4080 and 4090 and equivalent AMD cards. Then they will wait, because firstly those are the ones they want to sell because they are the most expensive but mainly because the cards that you would be insane to buy now
because of them never EVER EVER arrive at launch.
IE the 4070, 4060Ti and etc etc will all be dragged out for ages and ages. And I can bet you they will be hobbled in some sort of way like the 3070 and 3070Ti were too, where they didn't give you enough VRAM to make them last.
So do I regret paying £700 for a 16gb 6800XT with a water cooler strapped to it? no, no I don't. Because I KNOW that by the time Nvidia launch anything for £700 that can beat it very clearly I will have a lot more gray hair than I have now.
It was nearly a year, mining be damned before any one could get a 3070 any way. By that time it didn't seem anywhere near as good as it did at launch.
In the meantime? I have already been gaming every night on my 6800XT. Where as I could still have been waiting.
I dunno why people get "next gen fever" and get all in a panic and suddenly think that overnight the cards you can buy now are all of a sudden totally crap and can't run games. Always made me laugh when reviewers dropped the 2080Ti from their benchmarks once the 30 series were out.
The reason people are not buying cards has many facets, but mainly -
1. It is summer, and another cracking summer if you like that sort of thing.
2. The cost of living has shot up.
3. We are no longer in lockdown, which would have 1000% artificially inflated gaming and PC gaming because people could not go out.
I could go on, but yeah, hardly any of the reasons I can think of have anything to do with people punishing Nvidia or AMD. Fact is that gaming and PC gaming were a great lockdown hobby like many others and were artificially inflated by lockdown.
I collect BMX bikes and parts. And I can tell you I bought practically nothing during lockdown because it was all LOL prices and now? people can't give it away. For the same reasons above. Who wants to sit in their garage building bikes and ETC now that they have to go back to work and can go out etc?
Now yeah, I totally get that mining made it very difficult to get a GPU. And I totally get that we all got shafted by the companies selling to miners and etc. However, like I said, the demand was totally off the charts.
During lockdown we did not win a game of PUBG for months. Because all of the people who used to play it and were really good at it stopped playing, then all of a sudden games over discord with your buddies was a safe and cheap way to ride it out. Those pro players have all fallen off a cliff lately.