PC Gaming

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

Oh totes. NVIDIA continuing to lie even more blatantly to their face, driver bricking issues on updates, missing GPU ROPS performance, even more burn problems with a connector they knew continued to be problematic and lied about it, they and their retail partners releasing very limited inventory and then serving internal scalping while also being increasingly hostile to the rest of their consumers, ray tracing performance improvements they have to exclusive push in certain games and the newest most expensive hardware to actually get any benefit from their cards, false MSRP pricing and no recourse for long time loyal customers except a lottery in the US while the rest of the regions get screwed. Totes just that it's "too expensive", because when have gamers ever splurged on their hobby?

I'm sitting on a 3060 TI and waiting for the 40-series prices to drop further. Ain't no universe where I would pay full price for the newest gens. I don't need to render anything for work with my PC, so a 2-3 year old GPU will do just fine

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.

The progress is just not there.

I've got RX 6800 XT for €400 in May 2023 which was at that point almost a 3y old card. Fastforward to today, the RX 9060 XT 16GB costs more and is still slower in raster. Only thing going for it is FSR4, better encoder and a bit better RT performance about which I couldn't care less about.

I'm still using my GTX 1070. There just aren't enough new high-spec games that I'm interested in to justify paying the outrageous prices that NVIDIA is demanding and that AMD follows too closely behind on. Even if there were enough games, I'd refuse to upgrade out of principle, I will not reward price gouging. There are so many older/lower-spec games that I haven't yet played that run perfectly for me to care. So many games, in fact, that I couldn't get through all of them in my lifetime.

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

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

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.

I'm still surviving on my RX580 4GB. Limping along these days, but no way I can justify the price of a new GPU.

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

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.

Bought a 5700xt on release for £400, ran that til last year when the 7900gre released in the UK. Can't remember what I paid but it was a lot less than the flagship 7900 and I forsee lasting many years as I have no desire to go above 2K.

AMD GPUs have been pretty great value compared to nvidia recently as long as you're not tying your self worth to your average FPS figures.

GTX 1060 6Gb still going strong!

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.

My new gpu was a steam deck.

Paying Bills Takes Priority Over Chasing NVIDIA’s RTX 5090

Yeah no shit, what a weird fucking take

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.