Lamenting the raising of prices is absolutely fair, but every industry goes through this. I cycle a lot, and there’s a strong base of people that are deeply upset at the cost of the bikes the pros are using. It used to be that almost anyone could buy the model bike that won the Tour de France, where they’d go for £1,200-1,500, full spec and all. Now Pogačar’s Colnago V4Rs cost $8,215 for the base model, likely closer to $12,000 for a fully spec’d version. I just think that this is happening everywhere as things get more and more optimized. You have to dig deeper and deeper to eek out those gains.
Think of the sheer amount of time, effort, and hardware that goes into AI features and such. Upscaling and frame generation need a lot of data to be processed to make it viable, and the cost of the cards will have to offset this research cost.
The only thing that maybe leans towards it being somewhat greed driven was the audio edits they made in their presentation, but again, I still just don’t think that’s enough to say “this is greed” or not. Is selling at a profit at all “greedy”?
I bought the original r4 just after release in 2013 and it’s still going. I’ve been wanting a new case but I just can’t justify it as this one’s still in great shape despite having had 4 builds run through it, handfuls of hard drives and it being used to test friends failing hardware.
Built a friends first PC with them a few months ago and used the define 7, its the same but with some nice minor tweaks to make building even easier.
I’d advocate for getting one. Last year 70% of my gaming was on the deck, it really has shifted my attitude towards gaming.