Gamers Are Reportedly Skipping GPU Upgrades Due to Soaring Prices — Paying Bills Takes Priority Over Chasing NVIDIA’s RTX 5090
Well I am shocked, SHOCKED I say! Well, not that shocked.
https://wccftech.com/gamers-are-reportedly-skipping-gpu-upgrades-due-to-soaring-prices/Open linkView original on lemmy.world647
Comments198
The good games don't need a high end GPU.
Absolutely. True creative games are made by smaller dev teams that aren't forcing ray tracing and lifelike graphics. The new Indianna Jones game isn't a GPU-selling card, and is the only game that I've personally had poor performance on with my 3070ti at 1440p.
Terraria minimum specs: "don't worry bro"
Problem is preordering has been normalized, as has releasing games in pre-alpha state.
Anyone that preorders a digital game is a dummy. Preorders were created to assure you got some of the limited physical stock.
Clair obscur runs like shit on my 3090 at 4k :(
It doesn't help that the gains have been smaller, and the prices higher.
I've got a RX 6800 I bought in 2020, and nothing but the 5090 is a significant upgrade, and I'm sure as fuck not paying that kind of money for a video card.
I'm in the same boat.
In general, there's just no way I could ever justify buying a Nvidia card in terms of cost per buck, it's absolutely ridiculous.
I'll fork over 4 digits for a gfx when salaries go up by a digit as well.
I just picked up a used RX 6800 XT after doing some research and comparing prices.
The fact that a gpu this old can outperform or match most newer cards at a fraction of the price is insane, but I'm very happy with my purchase. Solid upgrade from my 1070 Ti
Not to mention the cards have gotten huge and you just about need a nuclear reactor to power them. Melting cables and all.
I have a 6700xt and 5700x and my pc can do vr and play star citizen, they are the most demanding things I do on my pc, why should I spend almost £1000 to get a 5070 or 9070 and an am5 board+processor?
Well that depends on your definition of significant. Don't get me wrong, the state of the GPU market is not consumer friendly, but even an RX 9070 provides over a 50% performance uplift over the RX 6800.
I don't think they're actually expecting anyone to upgrade annually. But there's always someone due for an upgrade, however long it's been for them. You can compare what percentage of users upgraded this year to previous years.
I just finally upgraded from a 1080 Ti to a 5070 Ti. At high refresh-rate 1440p the 1080 Ti was definitely showing its age and certain games would crash (even with no GPU overclock). Fortunately I was able to get a PNY 5070 Ti for only ~$60 over MSRP at the local Microcenter.
5000 series is a pretty shitty value across the board, but I got a new job (and pay increase) and so it was the right time for me to upgrade after 8 years.
"When did it just become expected that everybody would upgrade GPU’s every year and that’s suppose to be normal?" - that's a really good question because I don't think normal PC gamers have ever, and still aren't, like that. It's basically part of the culture to stretch your GPU to the limit of time so idk who you're complaining about. Yeah, GPU prices are bullshit rn but let's not make up stuff
Nah, there was a time when you'd get a new card every two years and it'd be twice as fast for the same price.
Nowadays the new cards are 10% faster for 15% more money.
I bought a new card last year after running a Vega 64 for ages and I honestly think it might last me ten years because things are only getting worse.
Sticking with 1440p on desktop has gone very well for me. 2160p isn't worth the costs in money or perf.
Somewhere around 1996 when the 3dfx Voodoo came out. Once a year was a relatively conservative upgrade schedule in the late 90s.
Those cards were like what though, $199?
That's still not cheap when you account for inflation. Of course there's a world of difference between "not cheap" and what they charge these days.
Still rocking a GTX 1070 and I plan on using my Graphene OS Pixel 8 Pro till 2030 (only bought it (used ofc) bc my Huawei Mate 20 Pro died on me in October last year 😔)
It's never been normal to upgrade every year, and it still isn't. Every three years is probably still more frequent than normal. The issue is there haven't been reasonable prices for cards for like 8 years, and it's worse more recently. People who are "due" for an upgrade aren't because it's unaffordable.
If consoles can last 6-8 years per gen so can my PC.
That's more than good enough for me.
I don't remember exactly when I built this PC but I want to say right before covid, and I haven't felt any need for an upgrade yet.
I'm still on the 1060 6GB card I bought on release for like $250.
What's wrong with 4k gaming? Just curious
Have you tried 4k? The difference is definitely noticeable unless you play on like a 20" screen
Not arguing FPS here lol. Arguing 4k, which you can run in 144hz in a lot of games even without a 5090, you failed to mention if you had tried 4k which I assume you haven't based on the switch to FPS instead of resolution
I play in 1080p so can't comment on 4k but I can confirm fps doesn't seem to affect me after 30fps. I don't perceive a noticeable difference between 30, 60, 120fps. Haven't played higher than that. I suspect 4k would probably look better to me than a higher fps though. But I'm happy with 30-60fps and 1080p so...
Somehow 4k resolution got a bad rep in the computing world, with people opposing it for both play and productivity.
"You can't see the difference at 50cm away!" or something like that. Must be bad eyesight I guess.
It's just kind of unnecessary. Gaming in 1440p on something the size of your average computer monitor, hell even just good ol' 1080 HD, is more than sufficient. I mean 1080 to 4k sure there's a difference, but 1440p it's a lot harder to tell. Nobody cares about your mud puddle reflections cranking along in a game at 120 fps. At least not the normies.
Putting on my dinosaur hat for a second, I spent the first decade of my life gaming in 8/16 bit and 4 color CGA, and I've probably spent the last thirty years and god only knows how much money trying to replicate those experiences.
I mean I play at 1440p and I think it's fine... Well it's 3440x1440, problem is I can still see the pixels, and my desk is quite deep. Do I NEED 4k? No. Would I prefer if I had it? Hell yes, but not enough to spend huge amount of money that are damaging to an already unrealistic market.
Does it really help gameplay on the average monitor? If it is a fast paced game Im not even paying attention to pixels
4K is an outrageously high resolution.
If I was conspiratorial I would say that 4K was normalized as the next step above 1440p in order to create a demand for many generations of new graphics cards. Because it was introduced long before there was hardware able to use it without serious compromises. (I don't actually think it's a conspiracy though.)
For comparison, 1440p has 78% more pixels than 1080p. That's quite a jump in pixel density and required performance.
4K has 125% more pixels than 1440p (300% more than 1080p). The step up is massive, and the additional performance required is as well.
Now there is a resolution that we are missing in between them. 3200x1800 is the natural next step above 1440p*. At 56% more pixels it would be a nice improvement, without an outrageous jump in performance. But it doesn't exist outside of a few laptops for some reason.
*All these resolutions are multiples of 640x360. 720p is 2x, 1080p is 3x, 1440p is 4x, and 4K is 6x. 1800p is the missing 5x.
Fucking youtubers and crypto miners.
Crypto mining with GPUs is dead, the only relevant mining uses ASICs now, so it would be more accurate to say:
Fucking youtubers and AI.
Fuck I'm old.
I bought a secondhand 3090 when the 40 series came out for £750. I really don't need to upgrade. I can even run the bigger AI models locally as I have a huge amount of VRAM.
Games run great and look great. Why would I upgrade?
I'm waiting to see if Intel or AMD come out with something awesome over the next few years. I'm in no rush.
But then the Nvidia xx90 series have never been for the average consumer and I dont know what gave you that idea.
Yeah no shit, what a weird fucking take
But why spend to ""eat food"" when you can have RAYTRACING!!!2
Unfortunately gamers aren't the real target audience for new GPUs, it's AI bros. Even if nobody buys a 4090/5090 for gaming, they're always out of stock as LLM enthusiasts and small companies use them for AI.
Ex-fucking-actly!
Ajajaja, gamers are skipping. Yeah, they do. And yet 5090 is still somehow out of stock. No matter the price or state of gaming. We all know major tech went AI direction disregarding average Joe about either they want or not to go AI. The prices are not for gamers. The prices are for whales, AI companies and enthusiasts.
5090 is kinda terrible for AI actually. Its too expensive. It only just got support in pytorch, and if you look at 'normie' AI bros trying to use them online, shit doesn't work.
4090 is... mediocre because it's expensive for 24GB. The 3090 is basically the best AI card Nvidia ever made, and tinkerers just opt for banks of them.
Businesses tend to buy RTX Pro cards, rent cloud A100s/H100s or just use APIs.
The server cards DO eat up TSMC capacity, but insane 4090/5090 prices is mostly Nvidia's (and AMD's) fault for literally being anticompetitive.
In the US, a new RTX 5090 currently costs $2899 at NewEgg, and has a max power draw of 575 watts.
(Lowest price I can find)
... That is a GPU, with roughly the cost and power usage of an entire, quite high end, gaming PC from 5 years ago... or even just a reasonably high end PC from right now.
...
The entire move to the realtime raytracing paradigm, which has enabled AAA game devs to get very sloppy with development by not really bothering to optimize any lighting, nor textures... which has necessitated the invention of intelligent temporal frame upscaling, and frame generation... the whole, originally advertised point of this all was to make hi fidelity 4k gaming an affordable reality.
This reality is a farce.
...
Meanwhile, if you jump down to 1440p, well, I've got a future build plan sitting in a NewEgg wishlist right now.
RX 9070 (220 W) + Minisforum BD795i SE (mobo + non removeable, high end AMD laptop CPU with performance comparable to a 9900X, but about half the wattage draw) ... so far my pretax total for the whole build is under $1500, and, while I need to double and triple check this, I think the math on the power draw works out to a 650 Watt power supply being all you'd need... potentially with enough room to also add in some extra internal HDD storage drives, ie, you've got leftover wattage headroom.
If you want to go a bit over the $1500 mark, you could fit this all in a console sized ITX case.
That is almost half the cost as the RTX 5090 alone, and will get you over 90fps in almost all modern games, with ultra settings at 1440p, though you will have to futz around with intelligent upscaling and frame gen if you want realtime raytracing as well with similar framerates, and realistically, probably wait another quarter or two for AMD driver support and FSR 4 to become a bit more mature and properly implemented in said games.
Or you could swap out for a maybe a 5070 (non TI, the TI is $1000 more) Nvidia card, but seeing as I'm making a linux gaming pc, you know, for the performance boost from not running Windows, AMD mesa drivers are where you wanna be.
Saved up for a couple of years and built the best (consumer grade) non nvidia PC I could, 9070XT, 9950X3D, 64gig of RAM. Pretty much top end everything that isn't Nvidia or just spamming redundant RAM for no reason. The whole thing still costs less than a single RTX 5090 and on average draws less power too.
Yep, thats gonna be significantly more powerful than my planned build... and likely somewhere between 500 to 1000 more expensive... but yep, that is how absurd this is, that all of that is still less expensive than a 5090 RTX.
I'm guessing you could get all of that to work with a 750 W PSU, 850 W if you also want to have a bunch of storage drives or a lot of cooling, but yeah, you'd only need that full wattage for running raytracing in 4k.
Does that sound about right?
Eitherway... yeah... imagine an alternate timeline where marketing and industry direction isn't bullshit, where people actually admit things like:
Consoles cannot really do what they claim to do at 4K... at actual 4K.
They use checkerboard upscaling, so basically they're actually running at 2K and scaling up, and its actually less than 2K in demanding raytraced games, because they're actually using FSR or DLSS as well, oh and the base graphics settings are a mix of what PC gamers would call medium and high, but they don't show console gamers real graphics settings menus, so they don't know that.
Maybe, maybe we could have tried to focus on just perfecting frame per watt and frame per $ efficiency at 2K instead of baffling us with marketing bs and claiming we can just leapfrog to 4K, and more recently, telling people 8K displays make any goddamned sense at all, when in 95% of home setup situations, of any kind, they have no physically possible perceptible gains.
1000W PSU for theoretical maximum draw of all components at once with a good safety margin. But even when running a render I've never seen it break 500W.
And then to stick it to the man further you're running Linux of course, right?
I tried Mint and Ubuntu but Linux dies a horrific death trying to run newly released hardware so I ended up on ghost spectre.
(I also assume your being sarcastic but I'm still salty about wasting a week trying various pieces of advice to make linux goddamn work)
Levelone techs had relevant guidance.
Kernel 6.14 or greater Mesa 25.1 or greater
Ubuntu and Mint idt have those yet hence your difficult time.
Try Bazzite. Easy, beginner friendly, but very God hardware support and up to date.
You clearly don't know what you're talking about here. Ray tracing has nothing to do with textures and very few games force you to use RT. What is "allowing" devs to skimp on optimization (which is also questionable, older games weren't perfect either) is DLSS and other dynamic resolution + upscaling tech
I meant they also just don't bother to optimize texture sizes, didn't mean to imply they are directly related to ray tracing issues.
Also... more and more games are clearly being designed, and marketed, with ray tracing in mind.
Sure, its not absolutely forced on in too many games... but TAA often is forced on, because no one can run raytracing without temporal intelligent upscsling and frame gen...
...and a lot of games just feed the pixel motion vectors from their older TAA implementations into the DLSS / FSR implementations, and don't bother to recode the TAA into just giving the motion vectors as an optional API that doesn't actually do AA...
... and they often don't do that because they designed their entire render pipeline to only work with TAA on, and half the games post procrssing effects would have to be recoded to work without TAA.
So if you summarize all that: the 'design for raytracing support' standard is why many games do not let you turn off TAA.
...
That being said: Ray tracing absolutely does only really make a significant visual difference in many (not all, but many) situations... if you have very high res textures.
If you don't, older light rendering methods work almost as well, and run much, much faster.
Ray tracing involves... you know, light rays, bouncing off of models, with textures on them.
Like... if you have a car with a glossy finish, that is reflecting in its paint the entire scene around it... well, if that reflect map that is being added to the base car texture... if that reflect map is very low res, if it is generating it from a world of low res textures... you might as well just use the old cube map method, or other methods, and not bother turning every reflective surface into a ray traced mirror.
Or, if you're doing accumulated lighting in a scene with different colors of lights... that effect is going to be more dramatic, more detailed, more noticable in a scene with higher res textures on everything being lit.
...
I could write a 60 page report on this topic, but no one is paying me to, so I'm not going to bother.
Doom the Dark Ages is possibly what they're referring to. ID skipped lighting in favour of Ray tracing doing it.
Bethesda Studios also has a tendency to use hd textures on features like grass and terrain which can safely be low res.
There is a fair bit of inefficient code floating around because optimisation is considered more expensive than throwing more hardware at a problem, and not just in games. (Bonus points if you outsource the optimisation to some else's hardware or the modding community)
That is a prominent example of forced RT... basically, as I described with the TAA example in my other reply...
idTech 8 seems to be the first engine that just literally requires RT for its entire render pipeline to work.
They could theoretically build another version of it off of vulkan-base, to enable you to be able to turn RT off... but that would likely be a massive amount of work.
On the bright side... at least the idTech engines are actually well coded, and they put a lot of time into making the engine actually very good.
I didn't follow the marketing ecosystem for Doom Dark Ages, but it would have been really shitty if they did not include 'you need a GPU with RT cores'.
...
On the other end of the engine spectrum:
Bethesda... yeah, they have entirely lost control of their engine, it is mangled mess of nonsense, the latest Oblivion remaster just uses UE to render things slapped on top of Gamebryo, because no one at Bethesda can actually code worth a damn.
Compare that to oh I dunno, the Source engine.
Go play TitanFall 2. 10 year old game now, built on a modified version of the Portal 2 Source engine.
Still looks great, runs very efficiently, can scale down to older hardware.
Ok, now go play HL Alyx. If you don't have VR, there are mods that do a decent job of converting it into M+K.
Looks great, runs efficiently.
None of them use RT.
Because you don't need to, if you take the time to actually optimize both your engine and game design.
I stopped maintaining a AAA-capable rig in 2016. I've been playing indies since and haven't felt left out whatsoever.
The majority sure, but there are some gems though.
Baldurs Gate 3, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Doom Eternal, Elden Ring, God Of War, ... for example
You can always wait for a couple of years before playing them, but saying they didn't miss anything is a gross understatement.
It's funny, because often they aren't prettier. Well optimized and well made games from 5 or even 10 years ago often look on par better than the majority of AAA slop pushed out now (obviously with exceptions of some really good looking games like space marine and some others) and the disk size is still 10x what it was. They are just unrefined and unoptimized and try to use computationally expensive filters, lighting, sharpening, and antialiasing to make up for the mediocre quality.
Indies are great. I can play AAA titles but don't really ever.. It seems like that is where the folks with the most creativity are focusing their energy anyways.
My new gpu was a steam deck.
Heck yes, made more sense to buy a steam deck than upgrade my PC.
I had lost all interest in games for a while. Desktop just ended up with me tinkering in the homelab. Steam deck has been so great to fall in love with gaming again.
It's just because I'm not impressed, like the raster performance bump for 1440p was just not worth the price jump at all. On top of that they have manufacturing issues and issues with their stupid 12 pin connector? And all the shit on the business side not providing drivers to reviewers etc. Fuuucccckk all that man. I'm waiting until AMD gets a little better with ray tracing and switching to team red.
Yeah I have a 3080ti, If I had an older card I would 100% be buying AMD right now though.
I think the Steam Deck can offer some perspective. If you look at the top games on SD it's like Baldurs Gate, Elden Ring, Cyberpunk, etc., all games that run REALLY poorly. Gamers don't care that much.
Colour me surprised
Resumes gaming with a 1000-series card
Still rocking an EVGA 980 here.
Back when building my PC, I actually considered getting a 980 Ti. Luckily I did go with the GTX 1070
(they were both similarly priced)
I've been waiting for a product that makes sense.
I'm still waiting. I can keep waiting
I have a 3080 and am surviving lol. never had an issue
Still running a 1080, between nvidia and windows 11 I think I'll stay where I am.
I have a 3080 also. It's only just starting to show it's age with some of these new UE5 games. A couple weeks ago discovered dlssg-to-fsr3 and honestly i'll take the little bit of latency for some smoother gameplay
Pretty wise, that's the generation before the 12HVPWR connectors started burning up.
Afaik the 2080was the last FE with a regular PCIe power connector.
3090s weren't burning up, though.
I am tired of be treated like a fool. No more money for them.
Rimworld doesn't need a new gpu
What it needs is a new multi-threaded engine so I can actually use all these extra cores. XD
Sounds like version 1.6 is supposed to get multithreading.
Can't wait
i wish i could remember how i got it to run on apple silicon last time because i can't do it now
Uhhh, I went from a Radeon 1090 (or whatever they're called, it's an older numbering scheme from ~2010) to a Nvidia 780 to an Nvidia 3070 TI. Skipping upgrades is normal. Console games effectively do that as well. It's normal to not buy a GPU every year.
Ain't nobody got time (money) for that!
As long as you make an upgrade that's equivalent or better than the current console generation, you're then basically good-to-go until the next generation of consoles comes.
I don't really care if my current graphics are better or worse than the current console generation, it was just an illustration comparing PC gaming to console gaming.
Still on a 1060 over here.
Sure, I may have to limit FFXIV to 30fps in summer to stop it crashing, but it still runs.
Hey, I'm also on a 1060 still! Admittedly I hardly game anymore, although I am considering another Skyrim playthrough.
They are talking about skipping 1 or 2 generations not taking 10 years off
Hey, it's not 2026 just yet!
I'm running Linux for everything and my GTX 1070 is still chugging along trying to power my 1440p 144hz monitor ^^'
Well, I mostly just play strategy games and CS2 (which I do have to run on almost the lowest possible settings without FSR. I basically turn everything to lowest except for lowest still AA setting and dynamic shadows to not have a disadvantage and get 110 - 180 fps depending on the situation)
But I'm planning on buying a used Radeon 9070 XT and just inserting it into my current build (i7 6800k based lololol) and on eventually buying a new build around it
(A 750W 80 Plus Platinum PSU should be able to handle a new 970 XT)
Me too, I was considering an Intel B580 mostly cause I feared another price surge...
Increasingly across many markets, companies are not targeting average or median consumers. They're only chasing whales, the people who can pay the premium. They've decided that more mid tier customers aren't worth it -- just chase the top. It also means a lower need for customer support.
Nvidia doesn’t really care about the high-end gamer demographic nearly as much as they used to, because it’s no longer their bread and butter. Nvidia’s cash cow at this point is supplying hardware for ML data centers. It’s an order of magnitude more lucrative than serving consumer + enthusiast market.
So my next card is probably gonna be an RX 9070XT.
It makes me wonder if this will bring more people back to consoles. The library may be more limiting, but when a console costs less than just a gpu, itll be more tempting.
Data on GPU shipments and/or POS sales showing a decline would be much more reliable than a survey.
Surveys can at times suffer from showing what the respondents want to reply as opposed to what they do.
I mean, as written the headline statement is always true.
I am horrified by some of the other takeaways, though:
I'm sure we'd all switch to room temperature fusion for power if we could, too, or use superconductors in our electronics.
That's the problem with surveys, isn't it? What's "latency being eliminated"? On principle it'd be your streamed game responds as quickly as a local game, which is entirely achievable if your target is running a 30fps client on a handheld device versus streaming 60 fps gameplay from a much more powerful server. We can do that now.
But is that "latency free" if you're comparing it to running something at 240Hz in your gaming PC? With our without frame generation and upscaling? 120 Hz raw? 60Hz on console?
The question isn't can you get latency free, the question is at what point in that chain does the average survey-anwering gamer start believing the hype about "latency free streaming"?
Which is irrelevant to me, because the real problem with cloud gaming has zero to do with latency.
That last one is especially horrifying. You don't own games when you cloud game, you simply lease them. We all know what that's done for the preservation of games. Not to mention encouraging the massive amounts of shovel ware that we get flooded with.
That's also how it is with a game you purchased to play on your own PC, though. Unless you have it on physical media, your access could be revoked at any time.
I don't know that cloud gaming moves shovelware in either direction, but it really sucks to see the percentage of people that don't factor ownership into the process at all, at least on paper.
That's why it's best to focus on absolute unit shipment numbers/POS.
If total units increased compared to the previous generation launch, then people are still buying GPUs.
Shipment/POS do not telling you anything about unfulfilled demand or "unrealized supply".
It's just how unit were shipped into the channel and sales at retail respectively.
These are the best data points that we have to understand demand dynamic.
Gamers are also a notoriously dramatic demography that often don't go through on what they say.
It really depends if they hired a professional cognitive psychologist to write the survey for them. I doubt they did...
GTX 1060 6Gb still going strong!
Runs FFXIV at 1440p.
Runs HL Alyx on my Rift.
Runs everything prior to this gen.
If I need to run a more modern game, I'll use my PS5.
Jesus christ man. I thought I was slumming it with a 3070.
hahahahahahahaha.
rx580
RX580 remains a power efficient champ. The old hot hatch of the GPU world.
That was a beautiful card, bought to use with vr, my gf is still rockin that system
I remember when High-end-GPUs were around 500 €.
I bought my most expensive dream machine last year (when the RTX-4090 was still the best) and I am proud of it. I hope it'll be my right for at least 10 years.
But it was expensive.
It seemed like horrible value at the time, but in hindsight a 4090 was not the worst investment, hah.
Also built a dream machine in 2022. I have a 4090, a 7700X, 32GB of DDR5 6000, and 8TB of NVME storage. It's got plenty of power for my needs; as long as I keep getting 90+ FPS @ 4K and programs keep opening instantly, I'm happy. And since I bought into the AM5 platform right at the beginning of it, I can still upgrade my CPU in a few years and have a brand new, high end PC again for just a few hundred bucks.
Fuck Nvidia anyways. #teamred
I wish AMD had something like CUDA that my video rendering software used so I could stop using nvidia.
I've been on Linux since 2018 (my PC is from 2016) and my next GPUs will always be AMD, unless Intel somehow manages to produce an on par GPU
Fuck those guys too honestly. AMD is fueling this bullshit just as much as Nvidia.
Nvidia is one of the most evil companies out there, responsible for killing nearly all other GPU producers destroying the market.
So is AMD with their availability of literally three video cards in stock for all of North America at launch. Which in turn just fuels the scalpers. Downvote this all you want guys, AMD is just as complicit in all of this, they've fuelled this bullshit just as much.
Nvidia is singlehandedly responsible for killing all competition but AMD. They destroyed all other GPU companies with the nastiest tactics to dominate the market, only AMD has been able to survive. You can't blame AMD for chip shortages, it's the after shock after the covid pandemic. Never ever has there been a higher demand for chips, especially thanks to the rising EV market.
You can't say AMD is as bad as Nvidia, as Nvidia is the sole reason the market got ruined in the first place. They are the worst of the worst.
And don't forget diaper Donny, who destroyed international trade with his fucking tariff wars.
Temu Nvidia is so much better, true. Please support the "underdog" billion dollar company.
I support the lesser evil option, yes. It's not like I have much other choices now, do I? Thanks to fucking Nvidia.
no don't buy hardware on Temu
All I want is more VRAM, it can already play all the games I want.
But with our new system we can make up 10x as many fake frames to cram between your real ones, giving you 2500 FPS! Isn't that awesome???
Bullshitted pixels per second seem to be the new currency.
It may look smooth in videos, but 30fps upframed(?) to 120fps will still feel like a 30fps game.
Modern TVs do the same shit, and it both looks and feels like ass. And not good ass.
I don't mean to embarrass you, but you were also supposed to say "AI!"
Points with a finger and laughs
Look at that loser not using AI
I just looked up the price and I was "Yikes!". You can get a PS5 Pro + optional Blu-ray drive, Steam Deck OLED, Nintendo Switch 2 and still have plenty of money left to spend on games.
Don't think I'll be moving on from my 7900XTX for a long while. Quite pleased with it.
Ah capitalism...
Endless infinite growth forever on a fragile and very much finite planet where wages are suppressed and most money is intentionally funneled into the coffers of a small handful of people who are already so wealthy that their descendants 5 generations down the line will still be some of the richest people on the planet.
I'm still surviving on my RX580 4GB. Limping along these days, but no way I can justify the price of a new GPU.
What about the used market? The Nvidia 1080/1080 TI or AMD 6000/7000 series is not too bad.
Same, but the 8GB edition.
UE5 runs like a tragedy
R9 380x does more than I need it too.
If it wasn't for video format compatibility (av1 mostly) then I would still some R9 fury coil whine as background noise.
The R9's were really something.
I bought a 3070 for far more than I should've back when that was new, and I don't plan to make that mistake twice. This GPU is likely going to be staying in this PC til it croaks. Never felt the need for anything more powerful anyway, it runs everything I need it to on high settings.
Same I got a 3080 12G a few months after release for $1k from EVGA and it's the most I've ever spent on a computer part. Next upgrade is def gonna be in the 600-700 range, not making that mistake again.
I have a 4090. I don't see any reason to pay $4K+ for fake frames and a few % better performance. Maybe post Trump next gen and/or if prices become reasonable and cables stop melting.
I don't think the 5090 has been 4k in months in terms of average sale price. 4k was basically March. 3k is pretty common now as a listed scalp price, and completed sales on fleabay seem to be 2600-2800 commonly now.
The problem is that 2k was too much to begin with though. It should be cheaper, but they are selling ML cards at such a markup with true literal endless demand currently, there's zero reason to put any focus at all on the gaming segment beyond a token offering that raises the margin for them, so business wise they are doing great I guess?
As a 9070xt and 6800xt owner, it feels like AMD is practically done with the gpu market. It just sucks for everyone that the gpu monopoly is here, presumably to stay. Feels like backroom deals creating a noncompetitive landscape must be prevalent, plus a total stranglehold with artificial monopoly of code compatibility from nvidia's side make hardware irrelevant.
One issue is everyone is supply constrained by TSMC. Even Arc Battlemage is OOS at MSRP.
I bet Intel is kicking themselves for using TSMC. It kinda made sense when they decided years ago, but holy heck, they'd be swimming in market share if they used their own fabs instead (and kept the bigger die).
I feel like another is... marketing?
Like, many buyers just impulse buy, or go with what some shill recommended in a feed. Doesn't matter how competitive anything is anymore.
Technically Intel is also releasing some cheapo GPUs in similar capability to nVidia but they all have the same manufacturers anyways.
There's major issues with those GPUs in some commonplace use cases and they have major scalping issues. Sure in some use cases there's zero issues, but this aint like the early 2000s when there were many brands that all basically worked.
Now you're either nvidia with every feature, amd with most features (kinda like a store brand), or intel with major compatibility flaws with specific games because it's technically a GPU.
I think patent laws and proprietary software supported by major OS have always had some impact, even the 90s, but yeah it's definitely a poor state for the market to be this concentrated.
And that's my main problem with what the industry has become. Nvidia always had sizable jumps generation to generation, in raw performance. They STILL get better raw performance, but now it's nowhere near impressive enough and they have to add their fake frame technologies into their graphs. Don't get me wrong, they always had questionable marketing tactics, but now it's getting even worse.
No idea when I'm replacing my 3060ti, but it won't be nVidia.
I am still on my GTX 1060 3 GB, probably worth about $50 at this point lol
I ran vr on one of those. Not well, but well enough.
IT litterally costs $3000
Thats almost 4 time the cost of my 3090.
Thats almost a year of work on my country lol...
1 2-week take home check for me. AMD is where I stay. $650 card lasting me 5 years on a 2k UWHD monitor at more than 180 FPS.
I’ll never understand NVIDIA owners.
For me it's the GPU prices, stagnation of the technology (most performance gains come at the cost of stupid power draw) and importantly being fed up with AAA games. Most games I played recently were a couple years old, indie titles or a couple years old indie titles. And I don't need a high powered graphics card for that. I've been playing far more on my steam deck than my desktop PC, despite the latter having significantly more powerful hardware. You can't force fun through sheer hardware performance
The progress is just not there.
I've got RX 6800 XT for €400 in May 2023 which was at that point almost a 3y old card. Fastforward to today, the RX 9060 XT 16GB costs more and is still slower in raster. Only thing going for it is FSR4, better encoder and a bit better RT performance about which I couldn't care less about.
Yeah raytracing is not really relevant on these cards, the performance hit is just too great.
The RX 9070 XT is the first AMD GPU where you can consider turning it on.
But I wouldnt turn it on and actually play with it even if I could because I will always take the better performance.
I've actually tried Path Tracing in CP2077 running at native Steam Deck resolution streamed to my Steam Deck OLED from my PC at max settings and it could do 30FPS locked fairly well (overlocked by 20% though). But the game looks absolutelly horrible in motion with it's terrible LOD so no amount of RT or PT can save it. It looks dope for screenshots though. But that's PT, RT is basically almost indistinguishable. And PT is many, many years away for it to be viable for majority of people to use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNcYZ5l_c48
(The game reports W10 but it was Fedora42 actually)
Depends. In Cyberpunk I can get 90-100fps on 1440p on ultra with raytracing on and FSR4 Quality (via Optiscaler). That is a very good experience IMO, to the point that I forget about "framerate" while playing.
That's Windows though, in Linux the raytracing performance is rather worse for some reason and it slips below the threshold of what I find noticeable, so I go for 1440p native.
Not surprised. Many of these high end GPUs are bought not for gaming but for bitcoin mining and demand has driven prices beyond MSRP in some cases. Stupidly power hungry and overpriced.
My GPU which is an RTX2060 is getting a little long in the tooth and I'll hand it off to one of the kids for their PC but I need to find something that is a tangible performance improvement without costing eleventy stupid dollars. Nvidia seems to be lying a lot about the performance of that 5060 so I might look at AMD or Intel next time around. Probably need to replace my PSU while I'm at it.
My kid got the 2060, I bought a RX 6400, I don't need the hairy arms any more.
Then again I have become old and grumpy, playing old games.
Hell, I'm still rocking with a GTX 950. It runs Left for Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2, what more do I need?
That's a thing of the past, not profitable anymore unless you use ASIC miners. Some people still GPU mine it on niche coins, but it's nowhere near the scale as it was during the bitcoin and ethereum craze a few years ago.
AI is driving up prices or rather, it's reducing availability, which then translates into higher prices.
Another thing is that board manufacturers, distributors and retailers have figured out that they can jack up GPU prices above MSRP and enough suckers will still buy them. They'll sell less volume but they'll make more profit per unit.
Is this a news story from 4 years ago?
Oh totes. NVIDIA continuing to lie even more blatantly to their face, driver bricking issues on updates, missing GPU ROPS performance, even more burn problems with a connector they knew continued to be problematic and lied about it, they and their retail partners releasing very limited inventory and then serving internal scalping while also being increasingly hostile to the rest of their consumers, ray tracing performance improvements they have to exclusive push in certain games and the newest most expensive hardware to actually get any benefit from their cards, false MSRP pricing and no recourse for long time loyal customers except a lottery in the US while the rest of the regions get screwed. Totes just that it's "too expensive", because when have gamers ever splurged on their hobby?
I don't buy every generation and skip 1 if not 2. I have a 40xx series and will probably wait until the 70xx (I'm assumimg series naming here) before upgrading.
I'm ngl, finances had no impact on my decisions to stay at 3080. Performance and support did. Everything I want to play runs at least 60 to 180 fps with my current loadout. I'm also afraid once Windows 10 LTSC dies I won't be able to use a high end GPU with Linux anyways.
You can always side-grade to AMD. I was using a 3070 and ditched Windows for Kubuntu and while it was very usable, I would get the slightest input lag and had to make sure the compositor (desktop effects) was turned off when playing a game.
After some research I decided to side-grade to the 6800 and it's a night and day difference. Buttery smooth gaming. It performs better with compositor on than Nvidia did with it off. I know 6800 isn't high end but it's no slouch either. AMD is king on Linux.
plus, i have a 3060. and it's still amazing.
don't feel the need to upgrade at all.
Yeah, my 2080ti can run everything sans ray traced stuff perfectly, though I also haven't had any issues with Indiana Jones or Doom: The Dark Ages.
Akschually, Doom DA needs to have raytracing enabled at all times, and your vcard is in the first nvidia gen that has it. While 10xx and 20xx haven't shown much of a difference, and both series are still okay for average gaming, there's the planned divide vcard producers wanted. RTX IS ON ads visuals were fancy at best (imho) while consuming too much resources, and now there's the first game that doesn't function without it, pushing consumers to either updgrade their hardware or miss out on big hits. Not the first time it happened, but it gives a sense why there were a lot of media noise about that technology in the beginning.
me neither. best is a 1070. don't play newer 'demanding' games, nor do i have a system 'worthy' of a better card anyway.
I'm on a 2080 or 2090 (I forget which). I thought I'd upgrade to the 40xx now that 5090s are out. I looked at the prices and absolutely not. The 5090s are around 500k JPY, and ordering from the US would work out to about the same with exchange, tax, and any possible tariff that exists this week. Salaries here are also much lower than in the west as well on average even for those of us in software.
4070s are still around 100k which is cheaper than last time I looked at 250k ish.
Price aggregator site in Japan if you want to play around: https://kakaku.com/pc/videocard/itemlist.aspx?pdf_Spec103=500 On the left, you'll see the cards to select and the prices are obvious on the screen.
Don't think they made a 2090. 2080 or 2080 ti I guess.
I'm still using my GTX 1070. There just aren't enough new high-spec games that I'm interested in to justify paying the outrageous prices that NVIDIA is demanding and that AMD follows too closely behind on. Even if there were enough games, I'd refuse to upgrade out of principle, I will not reward price gouging. There are so many older/lower-spec games that I haven't yet played that run perfectly for me to care. So many games, in fact, that I couldn't get through all of them in my lifetime.
Lezgooo 1070 crew reporting in (☞゚ヮ゚)☞
Bought a 5700xt on release for £400, ran that til last year when the 7900gre released in the UK. Can't remember what I paid but it was a lot less than the flagship 7900 and I forsee lasting many years as I have no desire to go above 2K.
AMD GPUs have been pretty great value compared to nvidia recently as long as you're not tying your self worth to your average FPS figures.
GPU prices are what drove me back to consoles. It was time to overhaul my PC as it was getting painfully out of date. Video card alone was gonna be 700. Meanwhile a whole ass PS5 that plays the same games was 500.
It's been 2 years since and I don't regret it. I miss mods, but not nearly as much as I thought. It also SOOO nice to play multiplayer games without cheaters everywhere. I actually used to be one of those people who thought controllers gave an unfair advantage but... you can use a M/KB on PS5 and guess what? I do just fine! Turns out that the problem was never controllers, it was the cheaters.
But then there is that. The controller. Oh my lord it's so much more comfortable than even the best gaming mouse. I've done a complete 180 on this. So many game genres are just so terrible to play with M/KB that I now tell people whining about controller players this:
Use gaming equipment for gaming and leave office equipment in the office.
If I keep playing the same games my current CPU and GPU will do me well for a long time
I'm sitting on a 3060 TI and waiting for the 40-series prices to drop further. Ain't no universe where I would pay full price for the newest gens. I don't need to render anything for work with my PC, so a 2-3 year old GPU will do just fine
Exact same here and I'm upgrading any time soon. MHWilds runs like ass no matter the card and I'm back to playing Hoi4 in the mean time.
I'm pretty sure that production of the 40 series has stopped. The 50 series uses the same node.
Been hearing this for the past 3 years
The PC industry has turned into a scuzzy hellscape for average joes that just want to have decent options at realistic prices. They don't even care about gaming anymore, it's about YouTube and BitcoinBruhzz now.
I've still got a still pretty decent setup (5800x3d 4070ti), but it's the last stand for this guy I'm afraid. Looking over the past decade or so, I've honestly had better gaming experiences on consoles for mere fractions of the price of a PC build. Mods and PC master race nonsense aside. Sure you don't need a subscription for online PC playing (I rarely play online), but you can barely get a processor for what a PS5 costs anymore. Let alone a video card, which is upwards of a lot of people's take home pay for a month, the way things are going.
Still rocking my 3060 ti since launch. Thinking of getting a 9060 XT.
I'm rocking a GTX 1660 and have no plans to upgrade. Ray-tracing is a scam and all the "AAA" titles that are too vram hungry for my card are not that attractive anyway.
980gt.
Though, due to circumstances, I've not played any games in about a year.
Before that I only really played Rocket League in the few years preceding. So if that still going when I do have time to play them I'll still be fine with my old GPU.
I am just using my GTX 1650 4GB VRAM (GDDR6) and it works fine for most of the things i do I can use Linux + FSR Hack to squeeze framerates out of games that perform poorly
and it runs my SCP:SL and tf2 fine
SCP:SL am using FSR HACK To squeeze more framerate until Nvidia fixes VKD3D
Maybe my next card is RX 6650 XT/AMD but still i might stick with my GTX 1650
When a new gpu was 500-900 usd it was fine.
But yeah, 2070rtx keeps chugging on
I just paid $400 for a refurbished MSI Gaming Z Trio Radeon RX 6800. The most I've ever spent. I never want to spend that much again.
First: Nobody gives a shit about the ray tracing craze, like not really. It applies to a thin margin of games, and is an option easily turned off or avoided. Seeing as AAA games are most of the ones developing for it anyway, and seeing as most of those are utter shit, yeah I'm not buying into the craze and spending obnoxious amounts of money on it.
There’s so many games out there I’d like to play, but I’m an adult with responsibilities. I don’t need the newest game or gaming hardware because no matter how hard I try to catch up I never will, so I don’t bother to try and I always have something to play on my hardware.
the most i use my gpu for at this point is minecraft shaders, i dont plan on upgrading in 10+ years
Food, not ROBLOX.
The GTX1660 I bought in 2023 for $300 is still running fine.
Bah, AAA games aren't interesting for me anymore. I like more indies nowadays, specially I am a fan of Doom-like games, I liked Selaco, Turbo-Overkill, I liked ghostrunner as well...
It's like how banks figured there was more money in catering to the super rich and just shit all over the rest of us peasants, GPU manufacturers that got big because of gamers have now turned their backs to us to cater to the insane "AI" agenda.
Also, friendly advice, unless you need CUDA cores and you have to upgrade, try avoiding Nvidia.
I was gifted a 2080Ti about a year or so ago and I have no intention on upgrading anytime soon. The former owner of my card is a friend who had it in their primary gaming rig, back when SLI wasn't dead, he had two.
So when he built a new main rig with a single 4090 a few years back he gifted me one and the other one he left in his old system and started using that as a spare/guest computer for having impromptu LANs. It's still a decent system, so I don't blame him.
In any case, that upgraded my primary computer from a 1060 3G.... So it was a welcome change to have sufficient video memory again.
The cards keep getting more and more power hungry and I don't see any benefit in upgrading... Not that I can afford it.... I haven't been in school for a long time, and lately, I barely have time to enjoy YouTube videos, nevermind a full assed game. I literally have to walk away from a game for so long between sessions that I forget the controls. So either I can beat the game in one sitting, or the controls are similar enough to the defaults I'm used to (left click to fire, right click to ADS, WASD for movement, ctrl or C for crouch, space to jump, E to interact, F for flashlight, etc etc...); that way I don't really need to relearn anything.
This is a big reason why I haven't finished some titles that I really wanted to, like TLoU, or Doom Eternal.... Too many buttons to remember. It's especially bad with doom, since if you don't remember how, and when to use your specials, you'll run out of life, armor, ammo, etc pretty fast. Remembering which special gives what and how to trigger it.... Uhhh .... Is it this button? Gets slaughtered by an imp ... Okay, not that button. Reload let's try this... Killed by the same imp not that either.... Hmmm. Goes and looks at the key mapping ohhhhhh. Okay. Reload I got it this time.... Dies anyways due to other reasons
Whelp. Quit maybe later.
Why not just buy a cheaper one? X060 or X070 series is usually fine in price and runs everything at high enough settings. Flagship is for maxed out everything on 4k+ resolutions. And in those cases, everything else is larger and more expensive as well; the monitor needs to be 4k, huge ass PSU, large case to fit the PSU and card in, even the power draw and energy... costs just start growing exponentially.
For me, with a 2080 already, I would have to spend much more than what my gpu was worth to have any significant upgrade. It's just not worth it.
That you misremembered the generation of Nintendo console that Quake 2 was on makes this the perfect chefs kiss millennial boomer comment, lol.