Whatever you do, don't buy an Nvidia GPU right now

Thing is: there is always the "next better thing" around the corner. That's what progress is about. The only thing you can do is choose the best available option for you when you need new hardware and be done with it until you need another upgrade.

Exactly. The best time to buy a graphics card is never
- really my rule of thumb has always been when it's a significant upgrade.
  
  for a long time i didn't really upgrade until it was a 4x increase over my old. certain exceptions were occasionally made. nowadays i'm a bit more opportunistic in my upgrades. but i still seek out 'meaningful' upgrades. upgrades that are a decent jump over the old. typically 50% improvement in performance, or upgrades i can get for really cheap.
- It depends on what you need. I think usually you can get the best bang for buck by buying the now previous generation when the new one is released.
- Graphics card. Not even once.
You have a magical button. If you press it now, you will get $100 and it will disappear. Every year you don't press it, the amount of money you will get if you do press it goes up by 20%. When should you press the button? At any given point in time, waiting just one more year adds an entire 20% to your eventual prize, so it never makes sense to press it, but you have to eventually or you get nothing.

Same thing with graphics cards.
- Is it compound or straight percentage?
  
  Cuz if it's just straight percentage then it's $20 a year, whereas if it is compound then it's a 2X multiplier every three and a half years roughly.
- Once you need it, or, alternatively, once you have enough to live comfortably for the rest of your life. It's exponential growth, you only get one chance, just gotta decide what your goal with the money actually is.
- Press it before you retire
  
  Same with graphics cards
Yeah it's always that: "I want to buy the new shiny thing! But it's expensive, so I'll wait for a while for its price to come down." You wait for a while, the price comes down, you buy the new shiny thing and then comes out the newest shiny thing.
- Yep. There will always be "just wait N months and there will be the bestest thing that beats the old bestest thing". You are guaranteed to get buyers remorse when shopping for hardware. Just buy what best suits you or needs and budget at the time you decided is the best.time for you (or at the time your old component bites the dust) and then stop looking at any development on those components for at least a year. Just ignore any deals, new releases, whatever and be happy with the component you bought.
I bought a 1080 for my last PC build, downloaded the driver installer and ran the setup. There were ads in the setup for the 2k series that had launched the day before. FML
- Yep. I bought a 4080 just a few weeks ago. Now there is ads for the refresh all over... Thing is: you card didn't get any worse. You thought the card was a good value proposition for you when you bought it and it hasn't lost any of that.
choose the best available option

"The" point. Which is the best available option?

The simplest answer would be "price per fps".
- Not always. I'm doing a lot of rendering and such. So FPS aren't my primary concern.

Or ever.

just 10-15 years at least, for smartphones\electronics overall too. Process nodes are now harder to reduce, more than ever. holding up to my 12nm ccp phone like there is no tomorrow ..

i saw a 4080 on amazon for 1200, shits crazy

As a Linux gamer, this really wasn't on the cards anyway

AMD is a better decision, but my nVidia works great with Linux, but I'm on OpenSUSE and nVidia hosts their own OpenSUSE drivers so it works out of the get go once you add the nVidia repo
- I had an nvidia 660 GT back in 2013, it was a pain in the arse being on a leading edge distro, used to break xorg for a couple of months every time there was an xorg release (which admittedly are really rare these days since its in sunset mode). Buying an amd was the best hardware decision, no hassles and I've been on Wayland since Fedora 35.
Laughs in dual 3090s on Linux coming from 5x 1070tis
- Laughs at dual 3090s on Linux
  
  That sounds like a hassle

All three cards are rumored to come with the same memory configuration as their base models...

Sigh.

Give us more fucking vram you dicks.
- I have 12gb vram, do I need more?

Major refresh means what nowadays? 7 instead of 4 percent gains compared to the previous generation?

The article speculates a 5% gain for the 4080 super but a 22% gain for the 4070 super which makes sense because the base 4070 was really disappointing compared to the 3070.
- Will the price be the same or up to 22% more expensive?
For anything ML related, having the additional memory is worth the investment, as it allows for larger models.

That said, at these prices it raises the question if it is more sensible to just throw money at GCP or AWS for their GPU node time.

freezes

stands there with my credit card in my hand while the cashier stares at me awkwardly

Meh I'm still gonna buy a 4070 Ti on Black Friday. Wish I could wait but my other half wants a PC for Christmas.

It really is a risky bet to make.

I doubt full price RTX 4080 SUPER upgrade will worth it over a discounted regular RTX 4080.

SUPER upgrades never crossed the +10%

I’d rather wait for the Ti version

really the RTX 4080 is going to be a sweet spot in terms of performance envelope. that's a card you'll see with some decent longevity, even if it's not being recognized as such currently.
- It will depend on the power upgrade offered by the 50XX and the game development studios appetite for more power.
  
  But TBH I don’t see Nvidia able to massively produce a 2 times faster chip without increasing its price again
  
  Meaning, nobody will get the next gen most powerful chip, game devs will have to take that into account and the RTX 4080 will stay relevant for longer time.
  
  Besides, according to SteamDB, most of gamers still have an RTX 2080 or less powerful GPU. They won’t sell their games if you can play it decently on those cards.
  
  The power gap between high-ends GPUs is growing exponentially. It won’t stay sustainable very long
I'm looking to get a 4090 this black Friday, and even with these refreshes, doesn't seem like my purchasing decision would really be affected, unless they're also refreshing the 4090.

It would help if they had any competitors. AMD and Intel aren’t cutting it.

My AMD card is great.
- Pretty damn happy with my 7900XTX too.
AMD is definitely pulling their load, but more competitors are always better.
For the vast majority of customers that aren't looking to spend close to a grand for a card that is infinitesimally better than a card for half the price, AMD has plenty to offer.
Intel is definitely catching up.
AMD is absolutely cutting it!! They may not get DLSS or ray trace as well but their cards still kick ass

Only slightly related question: is there such a thing as an external nVidia GPU for AI models? I know I can rent cloud GPUs but I am wondering if long-term something like an external GPU might be worth it.

A 3090 (used) is the best bang for your buck for any LLM / StableDiffusion work right now. I've seen external GPU enclosures, though they probably cost as much as slapping a used 3090 into a barebones rig and running it headless in a closet.
Generally speaking, buying outright is always cheaper than renting, because you can always continue to run the device potentially for years, or sell it to reclaim some capital.

Perhaps this is a good place to ask now the topic has been raised. I have an ASUS TUF A15 laptop with an nVidia GTX 1650Ti graphics card and I am SO sick of 500MB driver "updates" that are basically beta tests that break one thing or another. What are the chances of upgrading to a Raedon/AMD graphics card? Or am I stuck with this shit?

have an ASUS TUF A15 laptop with an nVidia GTX 1650Ti graphics card and I am SO sick of 500MB driver “updates” that are basically beta tests that break one thing or another. What are the chances of upgrading to a Raedon/AMD graphics card? Or am I stuck with this shit?

in a laptop? practically none. there are some very rare 'laptops' out there - really chonk tops - that have full size desktop gpu's inside them. the vast majority, on the other hand, will have 'mobile' versions of these gpus that are basically permanently connected to the laptop's motherboard (if not being on the mobo itself).

one example of a laptop with a full-size gpu (legacy, these aren't sold anymore): https://www.titancomputers.com/Titan-M151-GPU-Computing-Laptop-workstation-p/m151.htm note the THICK chassis - that's what you need to hold a desktop gpu.
- Well that sucks, but unfortunately I'm not too surprised.
You could use an separate external gpu if you have thunderbolt ports. It's not cheap and you sacrifice some performance but worth it for the flexibility in my opinion. Check out https://egpu.io/
In my experience, AMD is not more reliable on updates. I had to clean install trice to be able to have my RX 6600 function properly and months later, I have a freezing issue that may be caused by my GPU.

Whatever you do, don't buy an Nvidia GPU right now | Digital Trends