The good games don't need a high end GPU.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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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"
Problem is preordering has been normalized, as has releasing games in pre-alpha state.
When did it just become expected that everybody would upgrade GPU’s every year and that’s suppose to be normal? I don’t understand people upgraded phones every year either. Both of those things are high cost for minimal gains between years. You really need 3+ years for any meaningful gains. Especially over the last few years.
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
Not to mention the cards have gotten huge and you just about need a nuclear reactor to power them. Melting cables and all.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
And still have your house burn down due to it just being a 2080 that has 9.8 jiggawats pushed into it.
There isn't a single reason to get any of the 5 series imo, they don't offer anything. And i say that as a 3d artist for games.
Edit: nevermind i remember some idiots got roped into 4k for gaming and are now paying the price like marketing wanted them to.
What's wrong with 4k gaming? Just curious
You pay ton more money for a screen thats ppi is too dense to matter only to to pay ton more money for a pc to still run it at terrible framerate with lowered settings and fake frames.
4k is a pure scam.
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unless they're rich or actually need it for something important
Fucking youtubers and crypto miners.
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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.
1000W PSU for theoretical maximum draw of all components at once with a good safety margin. But even when running a render I've never seen it break 500W.
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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.
Colour me surprised
Resumes gaming with a 1000-series card
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
Rimworld doesn't need a new gpu
What it needs is a new multi-threaded engine so I can actually use all these extra cores. XD
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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.
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I stopped maintaining a AAA-capable rig in 2016. I've been playing indies since and haven't felt left out whatsoever.
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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.
I am tired of be treated like a fool. No more money for them.
It seems like gamers have finally realized that the newest GPUs by NVIDIA and AMD are getting out of reach, as a new survey shows that many of them are skipping upgrades this year.
Data on GPU shipments and/or POS sales showing a decline would be much more reliable than a survey.
Surveys can at times suffer from showing what the respondents want to reply as opposed to what they do.
I mean, as written the headline statement is always true.
I am horrified by some of the other takeaways, though:
Nearly 3 in 4 gamers (73%) would choose NVIDIA if all GPU brands performed equally. 57% of gamers have been blocked from buying a GPU due to price hikes or scalping, and 43% have delayed or canceled purchases due to other life expenses like rent and bills. Over 1 in 4 gamers (25%) say $500 is their maximum budget for a GPU today. Nearly 2 in 3 gamers (62%) would switch to cloud gaming full-time if latency were eliminated, and 42% would skip future GPU upgrades entirely if AI upscaling or cloud services met their performance needs.
if latency were eliminated
I'm sure we'd all switch to room temperature fusion for power if we could, too, or use superconductors in our electronics.
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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.
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.
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I downgraded from a gtx1060 to a ryzen 5000g igpu terraria & factorio don’t need much.
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.
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