Gamers Are Reportedly Skipping GPU Upgrades Due to Soaring Prices — Paying Bills Takes Priority Over Chasing NVIDIA’s RTX 5090
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.
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
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.
When did it just become expected that everybody would upgrade GPU’s every year and that’s suppose to be normal?
Somewhere around 1996 when the 3dfx Voodoo came out. Once a year was a relatively conservative upgrade schedule in the late 90s.
Sticking with 1440p on desktop has gone very well for me. 2160p isn't worth the costs in money or perf.
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.
Your PC can run 796 of the top 1000 most popular games listed on PCGameBenchmark - at a recommended system level.
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.
For the price of one 5090 you could build 2-3 midrange gaming PCs lol. It's crazy that anyone would even consider buying it unless they're rich or actually need it for something important.
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.
Paying Bills Takes Priority Over Chasing NVIDIA’s RTX 5090
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.
And then to stick it to the man further you're running Linux of course, right?
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
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)
I stopped maintaining a AAA-capable rig in 2016. I've been playing indies since and haven't felt left out whatsoever.
Don't worry, you haven't missed anything. Sure, the games are prettier, but most of them are designed and written more poorly than 99% of indie titles...
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.
I've been waiting for a product that makes sense.
I'm still waiting. I can keep waiting
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 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
I am tired of be treated like a fool. No more money for them.
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.
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...
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.
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.
GTX 1060 6Gb still going strong!
I remember when High-end-GPUs were around 500 €.
Fuck Nvidia anyways. #teamred
#teamred
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
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
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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 downgraded from a gtx1060 to a ryzen 5000g igpu terraria & factorio don’t need much.
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
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?
bitcoin mining
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.
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.
Is this a news story from 4 years ago?
plus, i have a 3060. and it's still amazing.
don't feel the need to upgrade at all.
me neither. best is a 1070. don't play newer 'demanding' games, nor do i have a system 'worthy' of a better card anyway.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
IT litterally costs $3000
Thats almost 4 time the cost of my 3090.
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
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 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.
If I keep playing the same games my current CPU and GPU will do me well for a long time
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.
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.
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.
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.
That you misremembered the generation of Nintendo console that Quake 2 was on makes this the perfect chefs kiss millennial boomer comment, lol.
Still rocking my 3060 ti since launch. Thinking of getting a 9060 XT.
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
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.
When a new gpu was 500-900 usd it was fine.
But yeah, 2070rtx keeps chugging on
The GTX1660 I bought in 2023 for $300 is still running fine.
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.
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.
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.
the most i use my gpu for at this point is minecraft shaders, i dont plan on upgrading in 10+ years
Food, not ROBLOX.
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.
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"
Clair obscur runs like shit on my 3090 at 4k :(