The GPU price hike is here and you should avoid any Nvidia card with more than 8 GB VRAM, if you value your bank balance
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/graphics-cards/the-gpu-price-hike-is-here-and-you-should-avoid-any-nvidia-card-with-more-than-8-gb-vram-if-you-value-your-bank-balance/Open linkView original on lemmy.ca
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If you're planning to buy a GPU in the 2020s it's probably best to aim for late 2023.
A used 1080ti is half the price of a 3060 and has more vram
Also is on life support drivers, does not support compute shaders and is not supported by modern Linux at all.
Life support drivers yes, not supported by modern Linux is a blatant lie.
How so? Nvidia dropped support, so as it stands you are at the mercy of the distro maintainers to keep the old drivers in the repos.
while fair, the crappy open source drivers are still under development as far as I'm aware.
As far as I could tell Neuveu drivers do not support older cards at all. It does load into the environment, but crashes as soon as there's any rendering trying to happen.
I just tried to find out and even they don't seem to know but the general answer seems to be yes?
"Does my card work with Nouveau?
The most likely answer for your particular Nvidia graphics card is: yes for 2D and maybe for 3D. You can find the details in Status on the front page.
If you have a laptop with dual Intel/Nvidia graphics, the Nvidia card may or may not be usable. The card may be selectable via vgaswitcheroo or a BIOS option, you should check those first. If neither works, you are probably out of luck. See the above link for Nvidia Optimus.
If you want a definite answer, try it. "
Then the status is just this lol:
"Current Status
"
3rd party repos or packaging it yourself. On Arch you can just update the pkgbuild yourself (or any other distro really).
Then buy a used 3060 for $250-$300
Ive got a 1070 that still works really well. Steam games and all.
Fixed the headline. You're welcome.
Unironically yes, for now at least, 9070 and 9070XT are well around their MSRP prices still.
just avoid buying hardware at all
Ah yes “Go for the 8GB card” you know, the same one we’ve been telling for years to avoid because of its limited vram capacity.
Just avoid nvidia. AMDs RX 9070 XT is still a solid deal. I bought one two weeks ago for under $700. This thing is fantastic, plays everything Ive tried and the open source drivers on Linux are a breath of fresh air compared to the nightmare of nvidias drivers
If one is on Linux I’d urge to avoid NVidia like the plague. Replaced my 4070 Super with an AMD card and I’ve had zero problems since.
I've been slowly switching the family PCs I manage for exactly this reason. I've warned my family that if windows stops working, I'm installing Linux on their PCs and will sit down with them to train them how to use it rather than put up with Windows anymore. Someday I'll be windows free, except for the office but I don't have any control over company property.
I thankfully have two company laptops, one with NixOS on it. It's rare that I need to use the Windows one.
My own computer runs on Tumbleweed. Every time there was an issue when doing a system upgrade, it was because of that fucking NVidia card. Thankfully with Tumbleweed you have Snapper functionality built in so rolling back is easy as hell, but there was a decent amount of time lost to troubleshooting and workarounds that I've just not experienced since switching from NVidia's garbage.
I've got one in my living room PC I use as a home theater PC and couch gaming system running Mint. It runs every game I've tried at 4K60 no problem. Definitely recommend as well. I think I paid $650~ at Microcenter for it.
I'm avoiding computing I guess.. I won't pay those absurd prices, and I will not every pay for cloud bullshit.
I'll abandon computing and the internet if it comes to it.
That's pretty much the point I arrived at a couple years ago when prices never really did come down after the crypto bullshit tailed off.
The latest hardware I bought was a 16 GB kit of DDR3 for my spare parts server.
I bought a 1080 for every computer in the house when all that really went stupid. They paid for themselves in 3 months of mining at night. I eventually stopped because I wanted the cards to last. They all still run.
I wish I could point and click new GPUs at AI and get them for free.
I got a used 3ds and dsi and been loving it. Love them more than my switch. I'll go for vintage hardware and vintage games if needed over paying for cloud computing.
Ah so the price hike is finally here after years of price stability...
Hot take, developers should start optimizing for 4GB of VRAM or less. I'm personally just fine with a 7th-gen console level of detail at 1080p60, and I'm even willing to settle for 720p30.
Then again, most of the games I play these days are literally from the 90s, so what do I know?
Nah I'm happy with 720p even for modern games - ideally 60fps but i'll take what I can get. I have a 1440p monitor and 720p looks good on it as it's an exact 1:2 ratio
Didn't know it was an integer ratio, I will try this on my 1440p monitor as well!
I would recommend using a tool - don't rely on your operating system or the game for upscaling. Lossless scaling works incredibly well for this. I'm currently playing FTL (720p pixel art game) on my 1440p screen and it looks magnificent with this tool set to integer scaling. Razor-sharp pixels instead of the blurry, mushy ones that it suffers from with its built-in upscaling.
None of this makes any sense with 3D games though, of course. You have to be blind to play 3D games at 720p on a modern display.
What's the point of using a lower resolution if not for demanding 3D games? Unless we're talking 240p for CRT gaming, but that's a whole different thing.
Yeah i tried playing the new halo on 720p "the bad way", and yeah it was pretty bad. I'm better of just continuing using DLSS performance mode.
I'm curious, why do you want to use upscaling on games that are easy to run? Are you using really old hardware or are the games more demanding than one might think?
No, I'm using pixel-perfect upscaling on 2D titles like FTL, because it simply looks better that way.
Here's a comparison between the built-in scaler and using integer scaling with Lossless Scaling (but any other tool that supports integer scaling would have the same result):
Built-in upscaling from 720p to 1440p.
Integer scaling (one pixel gets turned into four without any blending).
A tool that allows you to see the difference even on a small screen, with various options, including a slider:
https://twinlens.app/compare?share=2c26f762ee78
As you can see, it's the difference between blurry, mushed-up pixels and dull colors (since they get blended between pixels) vs. crisp, bright and much more pleasant to look at pixel art. It doesn't work this way with every game, of course: For my 1440p screen (2560x1440), a game needs to be 720p (1280x720 - exactly half as many pixels on each axis) for pixel-perfect scaling.
It should also be noted that in my opinion at least, this method only makes sense for modern 2D games that are designed for flat screen displays. With old games intended for CRTs, it makes more sense to use a good CRT shader instead. More info on this here.
By the way, this was very annoying to capture. Steam only took 720p screenshots of the integer-scaled image, as did two other screenshot tools I tried. I had to manually upscale the second screenshot using nearest-neighbor scaling (same thing as integer scaling) to simulate what it looks like.
As in, it wasn't here a year ago? Two years ago?
Its been here for long enough to set up a tent
The GPU price hike is here and you should avoid any Nvidia card
with more than 8 GB VRAM, if you value your bank balanceYou should be avoiding NVIDIA anyway, AI boom or not.
To be fair, people need to set their priorities straight. Even though these are marketed as 'gaming' hardware, are they actually?
I have an RTX 4060 8GB VRAM that seems to have people hating all over it, but I don't see the point, currently, to buy another GPU. It runs smoothly enough every single game I've attempted to run it, including stuff like Alan Wake 2. There's also the fact that most AAA games that demand a strong hardware are barely worth playing.
But as long as 'gamers' keep fixating on the idea that gaming can only be enjoyable when they own the best hardware to run things on 4k, 120fps, almost zero input delay, and whatever the fuck else the market sells as essential for a 'true gaming experience', that's what you get: extremely overpriced hardware, that will never feel enough.
I'm still getting by on just a Steamdeck. I don't own a computer otherwise, and my console really just plays a game or two.
That's not exactly true. Gamers have always been like that, but entry level cards didn't cost like high end ones like they do now. That only happened in recent years.
Same experience with my 3070, and expect it to be the situation for a good while still.
Considering where I'm posting this, maybe it's sacrilege, but I just don't think it makes business sense to develop a triple A game that can't run on the consoles - and console cycles have gotten really long.
I've been avoiding Nvidia for a while now. Too much buck per bang.
First crypto now AI, can the users just asking for a decent GPU catch a break here?
Crypto was limited bad since it only targeted GPU performance. AI targeting DRAM affects EVERYTHING. Phones, TVs, monitors, your router, smartwatches, ANYTHING that runs even a semblance of OS...
Microcontrollers are mostly safe as they use a different structure of RAM (500kB-8MB RAM doesn't need multi-thousand MT/s, so older tech is useful there).
But everything else is fucked.
You should also be avoiding cards with 8GB of VRAM.
This will be The Year of Optimization (copium)
AMD, Linux and indie games for the win.
Joke's on you, I don't have a bank balance
What? Nvidia cards have been super expensive for many, many years. Keep your old card- it's probably fine. If you need a new card get yourself a nice cheap B580 or whatever AMD is on now. Play some older games or just turn off some of the eye garbage. You'll be ok.
A B580 has 12 gigs, sips power, and is cheap as hell. Not everybody needs a flagship Nvidia guys.
The rising tide lifts all boats or some shit. Arc is rising in price too. Newegg has them at $310 if they're available. Ebay is $325+S&H. Any listing that's under $300 has $20+S&H fees in small print under the cost. Amazon has some models that are pushing $400 which is insane for this card regardless of what extras third party manufacturers are throwing at it. The market is extremely fucked right now.
Not to mention Intel provides probably the best Linux support out of the "Big 3"
https://linuxvox.com/blog/intel-arc-linux-drivers/
AMD has the best Linux support GPU wise but Intel is getting better every day. NVIDIA has a reputation for a reason.
Isn’t linuxvox AI slop?
More like they're infamous for their historical poor support/performance, but yeah.
That’s the reputation I was referring to. Linus Torvalds made waves when he told them to quite literally fuck off.
Oh it is? Never really paid too much attention, tbh - they seem to have concise "recipes" to accomplish certain tasks.....but now that you said it......
If you want Linux recipes, check out the arch Linux docs.
Just like ma used to make…
My wife and I both have A770 16GB cards in our gaming systems.
Have yet to play something it couldn't handle.
Every PC gamer in my circle did an emergency purchase of a new PC this year because as bad as it's now, we all know it's going to get a hell of a lot worse and probably won't go down in at least 4 years if ever. Even my broke ass bought a 5080 and a 5800X3D (because I had 96GB DDR4 RAM already). Even my wife agreed better do it now than having to buy during peak AI price stupidity.
What does one use that much DDR for?
Web browser tabs.
(I only have 64GB, but that's my answer. Firefox still eventually runs out of memory and crashes, BTW. Not blaming the browser itself; I think there's a memory leak in the JS in some of the tabs I keep open.)
I'll never understand people who use browser tabs as bookmarks. Tabs are meant to be temporary.
Interesting. I use tons of bookmarks and close tabs/firefox frequently so I often forget that web browsers are capable of using that much memory.
I'm pretty much the same except for the last part. I'm no stranger to opening dozens of tabs and seeing my RAM usage go up, but instead of leaving them open long term, I'll bookmark some and use Tab Stash to stow away the rest.
If I kept all my tabs open long term, I wouldn't have enough RAM to do anything.
Virtualization work, also helps a with memory leaks with games occasionally. I've had 64GB RAM since 2011 with the x79 boards and never went below that quantity. RAM was cheap so why not.
I'm kind of tapping out of it all for now. This 2070s will have to hold on another 7 years. There are still so many games I haven't played that I own and this card is too powerful for them, so I might as well do the 'ol backlog.
avoiding nvidia since the gtx 1070, which I still have and is fully functional!
I see, a man of culture. My last Nvidia card is also a GTX 1070 (before that had the 970 and before that the 750 Ti). Its in my last PC build, as I upgraded to AMD with my new PC. AMD is just much better choice on Linux. Imagine new low end cards in 2026 will be released with 4gb VRAM, while the mid tier 1070 has 8gb VRAM. It has been 10 years.
Im gonna frame the FX-8350 and 1070. True workhorses
Waiting on China to pick up the pace, I can wait...
The second hand market is the saviour of all
The RAM shortage is going to make them a lot of money. Aside from the price hike now, when RAM becomes sane again they can release 16GB versions of the same cards so they don't even have to come up with new chips.