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.

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?

Not only that, but the used market is skyrocketing, which is just gonna push these numbers even lower.

Yeah, aren't they the highest ever, even accounting for inflation?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

HEY I HAD NOTHING ELSE TO DO OKAY

2060 is more than enough for 1080p gamers

I get 75fps on iRacing with triple 1080 screens

love this card!

I wonder to what extent the lower tier cards are just under performers from the same high tier process.

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.

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.

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.