PC Gaming

The good games don't need a high end GPU.

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.

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.

Paying Bills Takes Priority Over Chasing NVIDIA’s RTX 5090

Yeah no shit, what a weird fucking take

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.

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.

I stopped maintaining a AAA-capable rig in 2016. I've been playing indies since and haven't felt left out whatsoever.

My new gpu was a steam deck.

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 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

I have a 3080 and am surviving lol. never had an issue

I am tired of be treated like a fool. No more money for them.

Rimworld doesn't need a new gpu

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

GTX 1060 6Gb still going strong!

I remember when High-end-GPUs were around 500 €.

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.

Fuck Nvidia anyways. #teamred

All I want is more VRAM, it can already play all the games I want.

Don't think I'll be moving on from my 7900XTX for a long while. Quite pleased with it.