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Originally posted by cybertraveler
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R&D costs to make a new GPU generation are a single thing, you can't just develop gaming GPUs or businness/computing GPUs cards separately, so the end product has to be technically able to do both, to an extent (number of stream processors and so on of course limits the power of a card, but the features are mostly the same across the board, the overall architecture is the same).
The point here is that you can't split evenly the costs on each card based on its actual raw power. It would rise the price too much for gaming cards, they won't sell.
You can't sell all such cards at gaming card pricing either, as that won't cover all your R&D costs.
And they can't just decide to not sell gaming cards at all and focus on the other market as that would again increase their costs and decrease the sales of the businness and compute cards, which is again bad.
This is why product design isn't a job for sissies.
So what they do is treat it like a service. You pay some money to get a device that provides you some level of 3D acceleration in games, which can be seen as a "service".
The fact that the hardware itself might be actually able to do anything else is a technicality, an artifact of what the technology in this field can provide, you did not pay for the development of those features when you bought your "gaming device" and should therefore have no access to them.
The price they are selling the consumer cards at is a price that includes only the 3D performance and gaming features. NVIDIA is adding a premium on that because they can, and some competition could surely help on reducing the premium. But this won't decrease the prices of businness or compute cards, as that's another market segment, paying for more features. Even basic Quadro that have raw 3D performance equivalent to 300$ cards can cost thousands of dollars.
People have trouble understanding that it actually works like this with most physical products, especially with electronics you're not paying that much the hardware itself (the physical hardware costs relatively little in materials as it's a mass-produced component), but R&D costs to get there with a product that can do many different things.
So you hear people saying "but why they made this board and then populate only half of it!?! They paid for the device already right?"... no they don't. They designed the product so they could install features as needed.
This way they could sell the product at a cheap enough price for you while keeping features in more expensive devices so they can sell them at higher prices, while both devices are basically coming off the same R&D budget, and neither would allow them to get enough money to cover it all.
For example (an example of someone that is less likely to be evil like NVIDIA) the Raptor Engineering company that made the PowerPC motherboards for consumer market has now provided a second board that slashes away a whole lot of components and features that quite frankly don't cost shit hardware-wise.
It's a bunch of connectors and dumb passive components that won't cost more than 400$ per board if bought by a consumer, much less if it is bought in bulk at manufacturing scales.
But they are offering that same board at around half the price of the full-feature one, around a 1500$ price reduction when they saved only like 400$ of components. Must be madness right?
If they designed the board from scratch it would have costed more or less the same as the other instead, 2500$ or more.
This stuff is the real job of product designers and marketing, deciding how to split the costs of R&D over products by making tiers of features and pricing so they can maximize the sales and therefore best cover the costs and actually make and maximize the profit.
their competitors will be able to undercut them by selling equivalent compute/workstation hardare to the same market at a lower price (a price much closer to the consumer market GPU hardware which you are arguing is capable of compute/workstation performance when not artificially restricted by software).
They can compete within the market segment, but not from a different segment.
You won't see a FirePro selling for what its 3D gaming value would be, that would mean AMD is selling it at a loss.
Also: some gamers do want and use GPU VM passthrough features.
That said you can still freely use KVM instead of Xen, it works fine with NVIDIA cards (one of the reasons I said that GPU firmware alone can't really stop passthrough). Recommended to use the passthrough setups relying on the card's UEFI bios (the card must have it. All cards that have less than 2 years can be assume to have that, for older ones you need to check for it by googling), as that's the best in terms of performance and ease to set up.
You are fixated on this mid-range card thing. IT WAS AN EXAMPLE.
After reading that, of course I am going to believe you're talking about making midrange cards (and other non-high-end cards) run worse.
I'd just like to point out that "more expensive ones" could have also meant the businness cards. You can play games fine on a Quadro or a FirePro. It's just kind of wasteful to drop 1-2k $ for a card that performs more like a 400-600$ gaming card and has other features you don't need.
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