Well I am shocked, SHOCKED I say! Well, not that shocked.
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 It was time to overhaul my PC as it was getting painfully out of date.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.
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
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.
even the RX9070 is running around $900 USD, I cannot fathom affording even state-of-the-art gaming from years ago at this point. I am still using a GTX1660 and playing games from years ago I never got around to and having a grand time. Most adults I know are in the same boat and either not even considering upgrading their PC or they’re playing their kid’s console games.
Every year we say “Gonna look into upgrading” but every year prices go up and wages stay the same (or disappear entirely as private-equity ravages the business world, digesting every company that isn’t also a private equity predator) and the prices of just living and eating are insane, so at this rate, a lot of us might start reading again.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I remember when High-end-GPUs were around 500 €.
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.
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.
fake frames
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.
Been hearing this for the past 3 years
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.
The GTX1660 I bought in 2023 for $300 is still running fine.
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.
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.
