> PS5 has something like 16GB unified RAM, and no game is going to really push much beyond that in VRAM use, we don’t really get Crysis style system crushers anymore.

This isn't really true from the recreational card side, nVidia themselves are reducing the number of 8GB models as a sign of market demand [1]. Games these days are regularly maxing out 6 & 8 GB when running anything above 1080p for 60fps.

The prevalence of Unreal Engine 5 also recently with a low quality of optimization for weaker hardware is causing games to be released basically unplayable for most.

For recreational use the sentiment is that 8GB is scraping the bottom of the requirements. Again this is partly due to bad optimizations, but games are being played in higher resolutions also, which required more memory for larger texture sizes.

[1] https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-reportedly-reduces-supply...

I really doubt your claim considering how many people I've seen buy 5k Macbooks Pros with 48+ GB of ram for local inference.

500$ 32GB consumer GPU is an obvious best seller.

Thus let's call it how it is: they don't want to cannibalize their higher end GPUs.

Maybe today, but the more accessible and affordable they become, the more likely people can start offering "self hosted" options.

We're already seeing competitors of AWS but only targeting things like Qwen , deepseek, etc.

There's Enterprise customers who have compliance laws and literally want AI but cannot use any of the top models because everything has to be run on their own infrastructure.

> PS5 has something like 16GB unified RAM, and no game is going to really push much beyond that in VRAM use

That's pretty funny considering that PC games are moving more towards 32GB RAM and 8GB+ VRAM. The next generation of consoles will of course increase to make room for higher quality assets.

Another use for high RAM GPUs is the simulation of turbulent flows for research. Compared to CPU, GPU Navier-Stokes solvers are super fast, but the size of the simulated domain is limited by the RAM.

Marketing is misreading the room. I believe there's a bunch of people buying no video cards right now that would if there were high vram options available

>Because the market of people who want huge RAM GPUs for home AI tinkering is basically about 3 Hacker News posters

You're wrong. It's probably more like 9 HN posters.

This isn’t a gaming card, so what the PS5 does or has is not relevant here.

Yeah am currently building a new PC , and have been waiting and waiting for B60 Pro release dates from partners - here is an offering from ASRock:

https://www.asrock.com/Graphics-Card/Intel/Intel%20Arc%20Pro...

They don't have a release date yet because they need to see sales results to commit to such a new product.

I think that's actually two GPUs on one card, and not a single GPU with 48GB VRAM

Never underestimate bragging rights in gamers community. Majority of us run unoptimized systems with that one great piece of gear and as long as the game runs at decent FPS and we have some bragging rights it's all ok.

> I am not sure there is significant enough market for those.

How so? The prosumer local AI market is quite large and growing every day, and is much more lucrative per capita than the gamer market.

Gamers are an afterthought for GPU manufacturers. NVIDIA has been neglecting the segment for years, and is now much more focused on enterprise and AI workloads. Gamers get marginal performance bumps each generation, and side effect benefits from their AI R&D (DLSS, etc.). The exorbitant prices and performance per dollar are clear indications of this. It's plain extortion, and the worst part is that gamers accepted that paying $1000+ for a GPU is perfectly reasonable.

> This segment really does not need even 32GB, let alone 64GB or more.

4K is becoming a standard resolution, and 16GB is not enough for it. 24GB should be the minimum, and 32GB for some headroom. While it's true that 64GB is overkill for gaming, it would be nice if that would be accessible at reasonable prices. After all, GPUs are not exclusively for gaming, and we might want to run other workloads on them from time to time.

While I can imagine that VRAM manufacturing costs are much higher than DRAM costs, it's not unreasonable to conclude that NVIDIA, possibly in cahoots with AMD, has been artificially controlling the prices. While hardware has always become cheaper and more powerful over time, for some reason, GPUs buck that trend, and old GPUs somehow appreciate over time. Weird, huh. This can't be explained away as post-pandemic tax and chip shortages anymore.

Frankly, I would like some government body to investigate this industry, assuming they haven't been bought out yet. Label me a conspiracy theorist if you wish, but there is precedent for this behavior in many industries.

We will buy 4 cards if they are 48 GB or more. At a measly 16 GB, we’re just going to stick with 3090s, P40s, MI50s, etc.

> 3x VRAM speed and 3x compute

LLM scaling doesn’t work this way. If you have 4 cards, you may get 2x performance increase if you use vLLM. But you’ll also need enough VRAM to run FP8. 3 cards would only run at 1x performance.

because then instead of RAM bandwidth now you're dealing with PCIe BW which is way less.

That only runs Mac OS so it's useless.

Even if they put out some super high memory models and just pass the ram through at cost it would increase sales -- potentially quite dramatically and increase their total income a lot and have a good chance of transitioning to being a market leader rather than an also-ran.

AMD has lagged so long because of the software ecosystem but the climate now is that they'd only need to support a couple popular model architectures to immediately grab a lot of business. The failure to do so is inexplicable.

I expect we will eventually learn that this was about yet another instance of anti-competitive collusion.

They sell the completed card, which has margin. You can charge more money for a card with more vram.