How NVidia slowly sells Quadros to gamers

Lapsio · March 20, 2019

So I'm using computer as workstation and for quite a while I'm using Quadro x4000 series cards since that's basically best I can afford. I always buy used Quadro cards, but this time I decided to look at new RTX 4000 since there's not many used P4000 yet and buying "new old" P4000 wouldn't make much sense. And then I noticed that... it's cheap. Like holy shit it's actually cheap, it costs basically the same as P4000 and M4000 when they were new.

It caught my attention because something was not right here considering how people everywhere cry how RTX 2000 series costs kidney. So I decided to analyze pricing gap between Quadro and GTX/RTX over last 3 architectures. Quadro x4000 sits somewhere between x70 and x60 GeForce class (it's usually slightly underclocked/cut x70 chip). So I compared x4000, x70 and x60 for Turing, Pascal and Maxwell, giving following results:

[ 900, 500, 350, '1.80', '2.57' ] Turing
[ 815, 380, 300, '2.14', '2.72' ] Pascal
[ 790, 330, 200, '2.39', '3.95' ] Maxwell

Columns represent launch MSRP of x4000, x70 and x60. Last two columns are price ratio x4000/x70 and x4000/x60

Do you see how NVidia slowly closes gap between Quadro and GeForce cards? Quadro RTX 4000 is LESS than two times more expensive than 2070. And no, it's not like 2070 is that much better than RTX 4000, comparing to 1070 vs P4000, in both cases those cards are "similarly different". It's obvious that NVidia doesn't make Quadro cards suddenly cheaper and doesn't lower margins on them. This implies that "higher production cost" of Turing seems to be bullshit and NVidia just bumps margins on GeForce closer and closer to margins they got on workstation grade hardware.

What it means for me? Well, I feel less bad for buying Quadro because seems to be less overpriced comparing to GeForce than it used to be xD. But for gamers? It stinks. I'm not sure what's logic behind it - maybe NVidia assumes that top end competitive gaming is kind of business nowadays? So it's a bit like enterprise workstation? In a sense that it generates income. Maybe they just noticed that people start buying GeForce over Quadro for workstations so decided to close price gap a bit? I Dunno. But still I don't buy it. Looks like some intense dick move policy to me.

LukeSavenije · March 20, 2019

interesting

yet... laughs in 1070 ti

RAM555789 · March 20, 2019

That's the thing, competitive gaming really is a business now. Billions of dollars are moved around in the gaming industry between the games sold, all the YouTube's and streamers trying to make a living, and then you have professional gamers trying to win tortumentsat higher levels to win millions of dollars. There is a huge demand for normal GeForce cards over Quadro which has less to inflated prices. High demand means they can set the price higher and higher and not lose enough business to not pull a profit.

TeaDrinkingMaximus · March 20, 2019

Just ask AMD for a Vega or R7.

Lapsio · March 20, 2019

3 hours ago, TeaDrinkingMaximus said:

Just ask AMD for a Vega or R7.

I never really digged AMD workstation cards so I can't say if it's similar case for them but considering that gaming AMD cards prices gradually increase and Radeon PRO cards were always cheaper than Quadros I have no reason to believe they don't do the same. On the other hand gap is still pretty huge. Radeon PRO WX 7100 (Quadro P4000 competition) seems to be equivalent of RX 480/590 something like that, priced respectively 800 usd and 230/250 so pro/gaming ratio here looks much more like that from Maxwell era.

AMD cards are much more difficult to compare like this tho, since Vega 56/64 is not really the same architecture as RX 4x0/5x0 series. Similarly Radeon PRO WX 9100 is not the same architecture as PRO WX 7100 so there's bigger gap between them comparing to NVidia lineup.