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.

Same, but the 8GB edition.
UE5 runs like a tragedy

Indies are great. I can play AAA titles but don’t really ever… It seems like that is where the folks with the most creativity are focusing their energy anyways.

R9 380x does more than I need it too.

So is AMD with their availability of literally three video cards in stock for all of North America at launch. Which in turn just fuels the scalpers. Downvote this all you want guys, AMD is just as complicit in all of this, they’ve fuelled this bullshit just as much.

I’m enjoying the fact that I haven’t played video games in about 20 years now. The last one I played regularly was Quake II for Super Nintendo (and that was a few years old even then). If I ever get back into gaming, I can just pick up where I left off and play a bunch of new-to-me games on ancient, cheap technology. Like, were gamers less happy in 2005 than they are today? I don’t think so.

Shit, I still play Civilization III from time to time and it’s fine.

If it wasn’t for video format compatibility (av1 mostly) then I would still some R9 fury coil whine as background noise.

The R9’s were really something.

That you misremembered the generation of Nintendo console that Quake 2 was on makes this the perfect chefs kiss millennial boomer comment, lol.

Have you tried 4k? The difference is definitely noticeable unless you play on like a 20" screen

Don’t worry, you haven’t missed anything. Sure, the games are prettier, but most of them are designed and written more poorly than 99% of indie titles…

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

You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about here. Ray tracing has nothing to do with textures and very few games force you to use RT. What is “allowing” devs to skimp on optimization (which is also questionable, older games weren’t perfect either) is DLSS and other dynamic resolution + upscaling tech

It’s never been normal to upgrade every year, and it still isn’t. Every three years is probably still more frequent than normal. The issue is there haven’t been reasonable prices for cards for like 8 years, and it’s worse more recently. People who are “due” for an upgrade aren’t because it’s unaffordable.

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.

I meant they also just don’t bother to optimize texture sizes, didn’t mean to imply they are directly related to ray tracing issues.

Also… more and more games are clearly being designed, and marketed, with ray tracing in mind.

Sure, its not absolutely forced on in too many games… but TAA often is forced on, because no one can run raytracing without temporal intelligent upscsling and frame gen…

…and a lot of games just feed the pixel motion vectors from their older TAA implementations into the DLSS / FSR implementations, and don’t bother to recode the TAA into just giving the motion vectors as an optional API that doesn’t actually do AA…

… and they often don’t do that because they designed their entire render pipeline to only work with TAA on, and half the games post procrssing effects would have to be recoded to work without TAA.

So if you summarize all that: the ‘design for raytracing support’ standard is why many games do not let you turn off TAA.

…

That being said: Ray tracing absolutely does only really make a significant visual difference in many (not all, but many) situations… if you have very high res textures.

If you don’t, older light rendering methods work almost as well, and run much, much faster.

Ray tracing involves… you know, light rays, bouncing off of models, with textures on them.

Like… if you have a car with a glossy finish, that is reflecting in its paint the entire scene around it… well, if that reflect map that is being added to the base car texture… if that reflect map is very low res, if it is generating it from a world of low res textures… you might as well just use the old cube map method, or other methods, and not bother turning every reflective surface into a ray traced mirror.

Or, if you’re doing accumulated lighting in a scene with different colors of lights… that effect is going to be more dramatic, more detailed, more noticable in a scene with higher res textures on everything being lit.

…

I could write a 60 page report on this topic, but no one is paying me to, so I’m not going to bother.

Also built a dream machine in 2022. I have a 4090, a 7700X, 32GB of DDR5 6000, and 8TB of NVME storage. It’s got plenty of power for my needs; as long as I keep getting 90+ FPS @ 4K and programs keep opening instantly, I’m happy. And since I bought into the AM5 platform right at the beginning of it, I can still upgrade my CPU in a few years and have a brand new, high end PC again for just a few hundred bucks.

I have a 3080 also. It’s only just starting to show it’s age with some of these new UE5 games. A couple weeks ago discovered dlssg-to-fsr3 and honestly i’ll take the little bit of latency for some smoother gameplay

RX580 remains a power efficient champ. The old hot hatch of the GPU world.

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.