Desktop GPU Sales Lowest in Decades: Report

No shit. When 1080s from 6 years ago still work fine, there's clearly some stagnation. They need to cut prices if they want people to actually buy their shit.

Intel needs to come thru with Battlemage and fuck up team red and and team green

I think it helps that AAA graphics got so realistic that improvements feel more incremental relative to older games, and indie games proved that much simpler, cheaper graphics are viable and often even preferred, and devs started going for stylized art over realism more often. Probably also helps that Steam Deck is a thing now, and the Switch allows 3rd party games, so that hardware can be a target to consider too.
Anyway yeah. I'm still running a 1070, and at absolute worst I might have to reduce some graphics settings in the latest or most poorly optimized games, and we're long past the days where moderate or even minimal graphics settings looked awful. Games are still beautiful on lower settings.
A better GPU at this point would net me better FPS in some titles, but those games make up a relatively tiny proportion of what I play, and even then I still get a perfectly playable framerate as is.
So, yeah, not paying those prices for a tiny upgrade, and not when I remember prices pre-covid and pre-crypto miners. I can afford to wait out their greed.
- I keep explaining to people how the world actually kind of benefits from the Graphical Plateau; but so many insist to me “You will want more pixels. Have you seen raytracing?”
  The Steam Deck mostly gives an upper bounds for how much hardware a game should demand for the next few years, and it’s probably lower than some developers wanted it to be.
  The silliest thing about raytracing in particular is it was planned to be a developer convenience. So in an RTX-only future, we were all going to upgrade to much more powerful GPUs, only to run games that look about as good as what we already have.
Agreed, my 1080Ti is still all I need.
Whatever happened with Intel's discrete GPUs? I got whiplash trying to follow the news. At one point I thought the news was that they were discontinuing them altogether. But are they proceeding now?
- Honestly, pretty damn well. If they keep with it, I see good things for them.
  Imo, the A770 is a lower mid end hero. They've really improved their driver support, and I think Battlemage is going to be great.

Considering that both Nvidia and AMD have been constantly pushing the prices of baseline GPUs well beyond the golden standard of the 1060, even long after the Big Crypto Spike of 2020? Yeah, barely anyone would bother spending a small fortune on a GPU

Not only that, but the used market is skyrocketing, which is just gonna push these numbers even lower.
- There had to have been people in marketing that knew this would happen and were overruled by bean-counting executives. The top card of each generation outdoes the top of the previous gen, but for a couple of generations it's been increasing in price in almost lock-step with the performance increase. Often the newer card will have worse VRAM than the previous generation's equal-performing card because you're looking at an older top-spec card vs a newer midrange, and the midrange cards always have less VRAM. With AAA games now starting to really want more VRAM in order to have better visuals, the older cards wind up actually being the better option long-term.
Yeah, aren't they the highest ever, even accounting for inflation?
Then there is also buying used, which tends to be much cheaper than buying directly from either that it makes sense that their sales are falling off.
barely anyone would bother spending a small fortune on a GPU
well, except datacenters. can't get enough of them and the datacenter card prices would make you cry.

I'm still running a 1060 6gb card. I'll keep it for as long as I can, and then I'll likely upgrade to something that isn't the newest generation at the time.

I'll probably use my 1070 till it dies, and after that if I'm able to fix it :)
Ditto. My 1660 super and 10th gen i5 run Diablo 4 and Lightroom smoothly. No need to upgrade until that's not the case. It'll be 3 years young in November.
same. I'm on a 1060ti 6GB doing fine. My machine is at a point that it is maxed out, so I would need to build a whole new one. Still, I'm using Linux exclusively and lag a few years behind the latest games to save on money, so I'm no hurry. I'll get there when the prices want to come down to my level.

Makes sense considering how bloody expensive they are in a time of economic shittery.

I’d love to upgrade, but when I think about it logically there’s absolutely no point. My rig works fine for what I play right now, and the value just isn’t there in a new GPU for me.

They got used to miners buying everything the second it came out and the global supply chain shitting all over everyone. So they price them super high.

They're just ridiculously overpriced. Yes yes yes I know I know pc gaming good but you're literally spending the cost or more of a PS5 on a graphics card, it's just not competitive in the gaming sphere. I know I'm not looking to upgrade any time soon

I bought a 4070Ti for $1k and I deeply regret it. Not because I can't afford it, but because I let my want of gaming at 120 fps overpower my ethics of enabling a company to get away with these prices. It's definitely a regret I have.

I paid $1100 for a 3070 during the pandemic with a newegg bundle deal (trash stuff they couldn't sell). I already had a 2070 and it was a complete waste of money.
I feel that way too. My 2080 is still good so the itch isnt as strong but when I play something on my 4k TV and the fps dips below 60 the itch returns. I truly don't want to buy anything from nvidia or amd even for a good while so here's hoping Intel keeps at it and doesn't get stupid expensive as well

Personally I'm starting to buy second-hand hardware and I recommend it. Less pricey, more eco-friendly and less money in pockes of greedy corps

Almost all of my computer hardware is second-hand! My plex server was free from a guy on reddit and I built a second gaming PC for the TV for maybe $100.
I did this, but my new second hand GPU has loud and annoying coil whine.
Oh well, it could be worse.

Still rocking my 1070ti. I mostly play overwatch 2 and Minecraft so it works ok for me now. Also I'm broke and can't afford the upgrade.

I had a 1070ti since 2018 and it has run everything I have purchased just fine.
I thought about checking out this ray tracing stuff the kids are into, but is there a card under $300 that anyone recommends? It also would need to be mini itx as I have a tiny living room gaming PC.
- Sorry but I'm not sure you're going to get any good ray tracing experience for less than $300.
  AMD probably has the best general use GPU in that price range.
  Intel probably has the best (with a big asterisk due to driver and directx issues) gaming GPU in that price range.
  It's just hard to recommend buying a GPU right now imo.
1080 here. I'm really happy with the decision I made years back. Some games are terribly not optimized, but that won't make me cash out for a new piece of hardware.
And anything that's actually worth upgrading from my GPU is going to be even bigger and block the front panel pins on my new motherboard I was gifted last year. Yep.
Some AMD stuff is kind of cheap rn. You can get the 6700XT For around 340 USD. And it's good performance wise I think. Granted you are on something where you don't need it imo. I was on something a lot less powerful which is why I made the plunge.

I'm not surprised; I was killing some time at Micro Center yesterday and couldn't believe how high the prices were. Shelves were pretty much completely full. I found better deals over in the laptops for GPUs. At least with that purchase you get a whole computer.

I found better deals over in the laptops for GPUs.
Even that isn't a good deal. Laptop GPUs are a lot weaker than their desktop counterparts, the 4070 (laptop edition) is LITERALLY a 4060 desktop edition. They're misleading consumers into buying something worse than they're expecting, and the prices are still outrageous for the new generation.
- It's really shitty they are doing this. When desktops are providing way better price to performance ratio, they are trying to create the illusion that you can still get comparable performance with a slight increase in price, when in reality you are sacrificing a substantial amount of performance for mobility.
  If they made this part clear, I don't think there would be any appreciable decrease in laptop sales too.
  Do you think anyone opts to buy a laptop when they have no absolute need for mobility?

They don't understand average consumer looking to buy a desktop GPU is not the same as crypto miners looking to buy GPUs. Once crypto miners exited the market so did the main reason for an unusual number of units being sold leading to high prices in the first place, since to them it is a business expense.

I think Nvidia at least have theirs eyes on the ml market. Theys just dont care about even the mid range. The decision to not put a decend amount of vram on these cards serms like a deliberate move to prevent them running many ML workloads.

This doesn't shock me. NVIDIA really saw the pricing for the resale market for GPUs and said "we can charge this too"

No, you really can't. Also, a lot more people anecdotally aren't super aggressive with upgrades anymore. People are getting so much use out of their electronics that there really is no need to upgrade for most people unless something breaks.

Not surprising since the last gen was impossible to find due to crypto and the current gen is overpriced.

Not to mention them being HUGE physically and sucking down a ton of power. And the whole fire thing that hit the news that made a lot of people decide to wait.

My hopes are on Intel as viable 3rd party. Looks like AMD and Nvidia have agreed they can fleece customers for piss poor perf/price improvements.

With absurd capability of A770, yeah, it beat out on prices so if Intel release a 32 GB VRam GPU on their next round of offering, it'll crush both AMD and Nvidia if the price is somewhere around $350 and $450.
(For those wondering, A770 offers about 1/2 as much FLOP performance as 4090 RTX and it have 16 GB of VRAM for the price of $350. That's insane.)
If Intel is trying hard, then they could opt to skip the 32 GB VRam and go straight for 64 GB VRam and crush both AMD and Nvidia as a competition, because at that point, they can eat both the consumer and business GPU market share.
Yes, and it is quite disappointing. I am hopeful that Intel does well with Battlemage as a potential option.

The managers didn't realize that the high demand from the crypto explosion and covid 19 lockdowns is over. They didn't notice it coming probably still high on coke stroking their ....fat bellies. Large parts are seriously affected by the shitty economic situation because of a major war and the long term effects of the covid crisis. People are struggling while the food trading industry is mercilessly making record profits.

Of course people are not going to invest 50% of a monthly income on a gpu that is only marginally better and their trusty old 1060 is still good enough. The industry is completely out of touch with consumer needs and what they can afford and are willing to spend.

All the tech companies are so stupid for thinking COVID numbers were real. Like restaurants dipping to near zilch, the inverse was also temporary. No doordash, your model only worked during COVID when we couldn't go to restaurants. I'm not ordering a nice sit down meal in anymore. I'm going to go get my fastfood. Don't act all shocked that the money I spent was permanent.
Same with Amazon, GPUs, streaming services, all the things that flew high during COVID. How did you not see the dip coming?
- Because capitalism. Everything is set up on the literally-impossible goal of continuous, unending growth. Lots of shitty decisions get made on the assumption that you can always be continuing upward, even when you literally can’t anymore. Have one quarter where things dip a bit and it could be the end of you as the investors jump ship over it.

It's even worse if you do creative work on your PC. Nvidia dominates this field completely because of the performance difference. My GPU is old and I really really need a new card for my 3d work but Nvidia is such a awful company...

I stopped buying new a long time ago, it doesn't make sense financially or ecologically. It also doesn't help that I live in a part of Europe where all pc parts are more expensive by default. But used or refurbished is the way to, get a generation older quadro (or whatever they are called now, A something?) and you and your wallet will be happier.

Well maybe if they weren’t so power hungry and expensive people would upgrade.

Just, no reason to upgrade yet. My current card plays even the newest games at middling levels which is tolerable. Based on previous experience, I'll upgrade once every 5 years or so. I'm only two years into this secondhand card.

The obvious answer to this question is that the crypto bubble burst and AMD and nvidia are charging high prices for incremental gains.

I think the other piece to this puzzle though is that you dont need a high end gpu or even middle high to play a game at settings that look ok today. I upgraded from a 5600xt to a 6800xt recently but it was hard to pull the trigger and justify the expense because I was still playing new releases at decent enough looking settings at 60fps. Old hardware is lasting for longer, and you can still do quite a bit on midrange and lower end hardware.

In addition to that even integrated gpus are at a point where you can play games at a decent clip. Its not the high end max all settings experience, but my wife is perfectly happy playing games on her laptop with a 5800u and vega 10 gpu.

Can't really talk about AMD but NVIDIA are at a position to drop every other model except for the x90 without major repercussions. Hell they can even go full enterprise selling these A1000 at a ridiculous profit margin. For NVIDIA at this point the gaming GPU market is just a "good to have". Artificial segmentation in VRAM aside the chips are just too good to service the consumer market so they might as well sell them for silly money. They don't particularly care about selling the gaming GPUs because they aren't losing anything not doing so

I'm not surprised. I was killing some time at Micro Center yesterday and couldn't believe how high the prices were. Shelves were pretty much completely full. I found better deals over in the laptops for GPUs. At least with that purchase you get a whole computer.

i built my pc when gpu prices were sky high in 2020. i settled for a 980 at the time, and its served me really well, actually. it had been years and years since i built my own pc, and it really made me understand how meaningless having the highest tier, current gen hardware is. i thought by now i would have upgraded it for sure, but ive never had any reason to other than maybe wanting to experiment with self hosted ai. nvidia thinks the average consumer is gonna shell out some ridiculous amount of cash for their newest product when its barely better than the previous gen and you really dont need it unless youre chasing clout or tie your self worth to your 3dmark score.

I built mine in 2018 when prices were also high (but not the peak I don't believe) and settled on an RX570 since I really only needed it for transcoding with Plex and because I bought a second gen Ryzen 7 that doesn't have onboard graphics. I ran that thing up until last week when I was given both a 1080 TI and a Quadro P4000 for free from two different people. Now I have more GPUs than I know what to do with. I stuck the 1080 TI in since the P4000 only had DVI outputs (though it would be the better card for Plex), but now I have the option to do a little bit of gaming if I want (mostly play console) or do PCVR with my Quest 2.

I wish intel got more attention in this field. I have an a380 in my homeserver and its great for lighter tasks such as transcoding a handful of streams at a time. They've been putting a lot of effort into improving the drivers for gaming as well as general use.

They are priced pretty competitive too. I would just hate to run into a game I want to play that's held back specifically because of an Intel GPU.
I'm rooting for Intel now. Both Nvidia and AMD don't seem to care about average consumer who would be completely happy with a low to mid-tier graphics card if it was just cheap enough. I hope Intel's Battlemage would fix many of their current bugs and problems with some games and at the same time would get a sizable performance improvement. Right now I wouldn't be comfortable in buying a GPU that fails to launch some games randomly.
Another huge upside is Intel's great Linux support that they have had since, I dunno, forever. Since I wish to eventually move to gaming exclusively on Linux, it's a huge bonus as well.
- Agreed on all fronts. And there's never been a better time to make the jump to linux for gaming!
Yeah I think up until this year NVidia consumer cards only allowed 3 streams for hardware encoding no matter how many cards you had. It sounds like they've changed it to 5 in March this year, there is a way to supposedly unlock it though https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC
What I like about about Intel cards are they've always just worked for me out of the box, sometimes with NVidia I've had to do some tweaking or had issues with drivers but not as much within the lastbfew years.
- Yeah it's an artificial limit. Pretty sure you can remove it, saw something about it on github.
  And yeah, on linux at least since kernel 6.1 intel arc is really plug and play.

yeah, I mean I’m using a 2060 and still able to play most games at 4k. I’m not playing super hi spec modern games too often, but even those I seem to be able to do at 30fps or just run at 1080p.

2060 is more than enough for 1080p gamers
I get 75fps on iRacing with triple 1080 screens
love this card!

Curious to see what will happen with Intel's offerings at this point...

I'm optimistic for Intel's upcoming "Battlemage" ARC GPUs.
Someone needs to break up the stagnation of AMD and Nvidia, and Intel's in a good spot to do that. I just hope they keep the price low too, just like the first ARC.
- There have been some nice sales on the Arc cards. I'm considering picking one up for its AV1 capabilities.
- You just know that instead of reducing prices through competition in the GPU space, as soon as intel is broadly competitive feature and power wise, they’ll be rinsing the market just as strong as team red or green. And the new situation will be three sets of overprices gpus instead of two sets of overpriced gpus. This is intel we’re talking about here! They’re not exactly consumer friendly unless they absolutely have to be.

My mental calculus is: do I want to build a new gaming PC which will appreciably out preform my 1070 now for $2500, or do I want to buy the next 4 generations of steam deck for the same net price?

Everyone has a synced upgrade cycle now because EVERYONE upgraded when we were all locked in due to COVID. Does the massive spike in 2021/22 average out to a normalized graph? Yes?

HEY I HAD NOTHING ELSE TO DO OKAY
It's not even only that: crypto mining went from every card the miners could find to literally zero almost overnight. The spike was, honestly, more driven by crypto than gaming during the super-high sales in 2020/21 and then immediately vanished.
Of course, nVidia ALSO alienated the heck out of a lot of potential buyers who are sitting on the sidelines because they're not paying the inflated prices caused by that spike, so the crypto guys are gone, and the gamers are waiting.

Bought a 144hz 1440p monitor a couple years ago so I really need to upgrade my RX580, but I got fed up with GPU prices so just got a PS5 to tide me over.

It's all you really need, fam. And your games will keep looking good with no need to mess around with settings! I used to be PCMR, now I'm just "I wanna play games without screwing around" -- whatever platform that happens to be.

I would like to be able to push my 4k 120hz display with something like a RTX 4090. But its so damn expensive and will require me to upgrade my PSU on top of the $1600 Price of the GPU.

If the 4080 was cheaper, I would get that. But the 4080 is so expensive itself, I might aswell get the 4090 instead

Honestly I recently purchased a new RTX 4070 TI and it's absolutely dominated everything I've chucked at it. But it was very expensive for what it was and I can completely understand why people have issues with the latest generations

What do you even mean by "dominated everything"? It saved you significant time in your workflow? It made games run extrasupermegagood?
1080p 60fps is plenty prove me wrong.
- Hmmm, your tone is a bit edgy, but perhaps it was unintentional. The difference between 120fps and 60fps is pretty huge to me. I once had a 4k monitor (on 1440p now), and played on my other 1080p one instead, just for more FPS. Isn't it a question of preference? Some people prioritise image quality over FPS, some do the opposite. Either is fine, no need to 'prove anyone wrong'...

Just in time