Japanese stores open late for RTX 4060 Ti launch, one person turns up

[midian182]

Facepalm: It's fair to say that the RTX 4060 Ti launch has not gone too well for Nvidia. Reviewers have slammed the card, complaining about its price, performance, and similarity to the previous-gen equivalent. It's left consumers somewhere between apathetic and angry, and nowhere is this more obvious than in Japan's Akihabara shopping district, where two stores that opened late for the latest Lovelace launch managed to attract a single customer between them.

VideoCardz reports that Japanese stores traditionally open at 10 PM when big launches like a new graphics card take place, which usually results in a queue of people waiting to buy the latest tech.

But just two stores opened in Tokyo's popular Akihabara shopping district for the RTX 4060 Ti launch. And rather than crowds of people, just a single person turned up to buy a card. News publication Hermitage Akihabara tweeted an image of the sole fan whose casual body language didn't suggest he was massively excited at the prospect of buying something that, in many games, offers performance the same or very close to the RTX 3060 Ti.

Another factor that's likely putting off Japanese PC gamers is the RTX 4060 Ti's price. We said $400 is too expensive in the US, but in Japan, higher sales taxes mean it costs at least 69,800 YEN, which is around $500.

We said the 8GB VRAM in the $400 RTX 4060 Ti is so deficient that it's comical – that amount of memory is becoming increasingly insufficient for many modern games. The fact a 16GB version that costs $100 more is arriving soon makes the situation even worse.

Plenty of YouTube reviewers agree that the RTX 4060 Ti is a dud – Gamers Nexus was especially scathing.

Waiting for a RTX 3080 TI at Best Buy pic.twitter.com/GrNsMoQOk3

– JSCarnage (@JSCarnageTV) June 3, 2021

The RTX 4060 Ti situation is a far cry from a couple of years ago when pandemic-induced unprecedented demand, cryptominers, and scalpers, resulted in people turn up en masse to swamp any stores that happened to have some cards in stock. Check out the people waiting in line to buy an RTX 3080 Ti from Best Buy in June 2021.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/98828-japanese-stores-open-late-rtx-4060-ti-launch.html

 

[Dr Roboto]

Like I said in the 4060 Ti review comment section. Nvidia stock popped 25% on earnings this morning to an all time high. Up 166% year to date. If you think they are going to lower prices, you are sorely mistaken. Everyone just needs to get used to higher prices for GPUs. I don't like it any more than you do, but the shareholders have spoken. They don't care about gamers. AI is now their core profit driver. Hail to the AI king baby!

 

[Dimitriid]

Like I said in the 4060 Ti review comment section. Nvidia stock popped 25% on earnings this morning to an all time high. Up 166% year to date. If you think they are going to lower prices, you are sorely mistaken. Everyone just needs to get used to higher prices for GPUs. I don't like it any more than you do, but the shareholders have spoken. They don't care about gamers. AI is now their core profit driver. Hail to the AI king baby!

I agree for the most part except for the part where you mention people need to get used to 'higher prices for GPUs'

Because honestly, I still maintain that they really don't: even the super low powered new Ryzen APUs on laptops (7840u) can pretty much match what I would say is the entry level performance we have today. Once those APUs get a bit more powered they're not the greatest experience but if if is between that and a 3050 or 6400 for example you might as well keep your money.

I say people should just buy used if they can afford to but that's obviously not sustainable and honestly just browse your steam libraries for once: Yes APU graphics probably won't play any new games at respectable levels but how many dozens or maybe even hundreds of games most of you already own that never actually played? According to the numbers I've seen the majority of owned games of steam still never get installed and for anything where a 1650 was sufficient if not excellent (So 4 or 5 years ago or older) or any indie games you can probably just make due without a GPU at all.

It is certainly way better than paying Nvidia or even AMD for the most part (Though they're slightly better is mostly due to the previous gen cards and they could at any point just stop making them). Nvidia might finally just stop investing so much on the gaming market because they've been overall a very negative influence overall and specially today where they are basically declaring war on like 90% of gamers and just want the enthusiast + rich people to pay at least 1000 USD for a GPU since everything else is intentionally bad by comparison.

 

[Irata]

Looking at Mindfactory, neither the 4060Ti nor the 7600 seem to be selling.

For the 4060Ti models they offer, it shows ‚more than 5 sold‘, unchanged since yesterday, they show no sales numbers at all for the 7600 that‘s been available for two hours now.

It does seem that both don‘t care about consumer graphics too much right now.

The partially ironic thing is that both nVidia‘s and AMD‘s latest models make the Radeon 6000 series look like the best cards (value wise) available right now.

 

[Neatfeatguy]

At my local Micro Center the 4060Ti, they are sitting on 99 of them. 30 of them are priced at $399 and the remaining are priced up to around $450. The inventory of this card hasn't changed yet, but the store has only been open for 30 minutes now. I'm really not expecting to see many of them sell.

The same store is sitting on about the same number of 3060Ti cards (104 without including a handful of open box), but the lowest priced one is $409 and the highest is priced $499. I don't expect any of these to sell as long as you can get a 4060Ti for slightly cheaper.

I don't know how Micro Center is going to move stock on the old 3060Ti without massively dropping the price by at least $100 on each model and this is just to clear the shelves. I'm not sure if they'd make any money doing it, but if they don't their remaining stock just won't move. Either recoup some of your cost or sit on inventory and have it tie up funds.

No one wants stagnation when it comes to tech updates - this is why phone companies are seeing a fall off on phone sales, too. Nothing new to really entice folks to buy a new phone every 12-18 months. Same thing with the 4060Ti - same price (or just about, give or take a little) of 3060Ti cards in stock and the performance is almost the same. No one wants that.

 

[Timoo]

Like I said in the 4060 Ti review comment section. Nvidia stock popped 25% on earnings this morning to an all time high. Up 166% year to date. If you think they are going to lower prices, you are sorely mistaken. Everyone just needs to get used to higher prices for GPUs. I don't like it any more than you do, but the shareholders have spoken. They don't care about gamers. AI is now their core profit driver. Hail to the AI king baby!

I think it's going to play out differently.
Since AI is their main driver now, they are going to lower the price of gaming cards that do not offer enough power for AI processing. Since selling 200% more cards at 20% profit, instead of at 50%, has always been a clever move, business-wise.

 

[LetTheWookieWin]

Like I said in the 4060 Ti review comment section. Nvidia stock popped 25% on earnings this morning to an all time high. Up 166% year to date. If you think they are going to lower prices, you are sorely mistaken. Everyone just needs to get used to higher prices for GPUs. I don't like it any more than you do, but the shareholders have spoken. They don't care about gamers. AI is now their core profit driver. Hail to the AI king baby!

I agree that both AMD and NVIDIA are not caring much about the gaming sector at present, but I disagree that we need to get used to getting screwed (at least in the long run).

I’ll find a new hobby before I make an anatomical donation for this one.

Also, gaming is still an $xx-billion market that is ripe for disruption. Imagine if we ever had something like an ARM or RISC-V IP core for GPUs that companies could customize and use to vertically integrate their products (like Apple, Google, and MS are doing with general purpose compute). This might not happen soon, but the opportunity is there.

 

[Julnor]

Finally Nvidia has solved the problem of scalpers and bots.

 

[Thatsdisgusting]

Like I said in the 4060 Ti review comment section. Nvidia stock popped 25% on earnings this morning to an all time high. Up 166% year to date. If you think they are going to lower prices, you are sorely mistaken. Everyone just needs to get used to higher prices for GPUs. I don't like it any more than you do, but the shareholders have spoken. They don't care about gamers. AI is now their core profit driver. Hail to the AI king baby!

It only means that from now on, gamers gpu sector would be considered second priority with low price products. So don’t wait for the latest and greatest (tensors) from nvidia to release in each generation, that’s for sure.

But two things - do you tolerate being screwed hard and tolerate being screwed by 150mm2 chips - that decisions are left solely for buyers.

 

[Threadcount]

Are we certain that one person was not just late for work, and they made him buy the GPU so it does not look that bad.

 

[AndreV]

Like I said in the 4060 Ti review comment section. Nvidia stock popped 25% on earnings this morning to an all time high. Up 166% year to date. If you think they are going to lower prices, you are sorely mistaken. Everyone just needs to get used to higher prices for GPUs. I don't like it any more than you do, but the shareholders have spoken. They don't care about gamers. AI is now their core profit driver. Hail to the AI king baby!

Maybe they've released that (faked?)news to make us believe they are doing very well and have no reason to drop the price, and thus, us having no option but to buy it as it is. You know, the typical corporate scummy move in capitalist society to trick the people into byuing more of their crappy stuff.

 

[gingerbill]

. Everyone just needs to get used to higher prices for GPUs.

You can be a sucker but I certainly wont be , I wont buy a new GPU till they are sensibly priced . If that means I never buy another then so be it.

 

[daffy duck]

Every bit as garbage as the AMD 7600. What miserable generation the current crop of video cards has turned out to be. Will skip them entirely. AMD has lost the plot, Nvidia literally don't give a f#ck. One can only hope those clowns at Intel can actually deliver something competitive and with good drivers with Battlemage next year.

 

[Kashim]

These tech companies are no better than oil companies now. Once their product / commodity reaches a sky high price for whatever reason (crypto-craze, war, etc.) they will do everything in their power to keep it there. They would rather cut production than lower prices. Leather-man tasted blood and now he'll never go back to cheap GPUs.

 

[Neatfeatguy]

At my local Micro Center the 4060Ti, they are sitting on 99 of them. 30 of them are priced at $399 and the remaining are priced up to around $450. The inventory of this card hasn't changed yet, but the store has only been open for 30 minutes now. I'm really not expecting to see many of them sell.

The same store is sitting on about the same number of 3060Ti cards (104 without including a handful of open box), but the lowest priced one is $409 and the highest is priced $499. I don't expect any of these to sell as long as you can get a 4060Ti for slightly cheaper.

I don't know how Micro Center is going to move stock on the old 3060Ti without massively dropping the price by at least $100 on each model and this is just to clear the shelves. I'm not sure if they'd make any money doing it, but if they don't their remaining stock just won't move. Either recoup some of your cost or sit on inventory and have it tie up funds.

No one wants stagnation when it comes to tech updates - this is why phone companies are seeing a fall off on phone sales, too. Nothing new to really entice folks to buy a new phone every 12-18 months. Same thing with the 4060Ti - same price (or just about, give or take a little) of 3060Ti cards in stock and the performance is almost the same. No one wants that.

Replying to my own - update on my local Micro Center reported stock:

My local Micro Center has closed doors for the day. They had 99 4060Ti cards at the start and are now reporting 96 - looks like they sold 3 of $399 models.

Wow....they're reporting to be down to 89 from 104 (not counting the open box) 3060Ti cards. That's a change of 15 and the cheapest models were selling for $10 over the 4060Ti.

Either the numbers for the 3060Ti were off to begin with or people are willing to spend more for a slightly less powerful GPU....and if the latter is the case, that's a big FU to Nvidia.

 

[pcnthuziast]

1 more than I would have expected.

#fool

 

[Irata]

I think it's going to play out differently.
Since AI is their main driver now, they are going to lower the price of gaming cards that do not offer enough power for AI processing. Since selling 200% more cards at 20% profit, instead of at 50%, has always been a clever move, business-wise.

They could do this if their 4N wafer supply at TSMC weren‘t limited.

Imho, each gaming GPU that could have been a data center chip instead represents an opportunity cost, so I doubt we‘ll see cheaper consumer graphics card prices. Rather, it might end up being a ‚this is what you can get, take it or leave it‘ situation.