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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?
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.
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 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
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…
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
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.
Not surprising since the last gen was impossible to find due to crypto and the current gen is overpriced.
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.
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.
I absolutely love raytracing… and on my 3080 it just doesn’t look good enough yet to justify turning it on for most games. Maybe they just haven’t implemented it well yet, but the reduced framerate in most games just isn’t worth it, and I’ve hated effects like screen-space reflections since more or less they came out.
I think by the time we have a 50X0 or a 60X0 that raytracing will finally be fast enough to have it look good AND perform well. But for now it’s mostly just a gimmick I turn on to appreciate, and then turn back off so I can actually play the game smoothly.
It might be that they’ll put more time and effort into getting it looking right once more people can run it at all, too. I’m not sure what percentage of PC gamers have sufficiently new/powerful GPU’s to run it, but I’d suspect it’s still small, and I’d think there’s only so much time and effort that devs will want to put into something that most people won’t see at all, when they could spend those resources for other aspects of the game (including other aspects of graphics) instead.
The one thing I would really like now is better audio. Both stuff like better 3D positional audio (e.g. Deathloop if you turn that setting on - although the setting kept turning itself off for me, which was maddening) and more varied and complex sound effects and music. It can make a huge difference, even when people don’t consciously notice.
I didn’t know that about raytracing as a developer convenience - that’s really funny.
I do think raytracing is really cool, and when it’s available I think I’d rather have it than not, all else being equal. But… it seems like the kind of thing that I’d notice and appreciate when it’s there, but I don’t notice its absence, either, and can enjoy my games overall just the same without it.
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.
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.
For budget builds the 6600, 6600 xt and 6650 xt are some other good choices. 6600 seems like the best value (price/performance) GPU right now for ~$180 USD.
