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.

Absolute numbers/POS is just going to tell you if supply is matching demand(it isn’t). The survey is telling us that demand is dropping off too. They’re losing from both sides. With the number of AI cards they’re selling by the pallet to data centers I don’t think they really care that much though.

Colour me surprised

Resumes gaming with a 1000-series card

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 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.

I bought a secondhand 3090 when the 40 series came out for £750. I really don’t need to upgrade. I can even run the bigger AI models locally as I have a huge amount of VRAM.

Games run great and look great. Why would I upgrade?

I’m waiting to see if Intel or AMD come out with something awesome over the next few years. I’m in no rush.

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.

Shipment/POS do not telling you anything about unfulfilled demand or “unrealized supply”.

It’s just how unit were shipped into the channel and sales at retail respectively.

These are the best data points that we have to understand demand dynamic.

Gamers are also a notoriously dramatic demography that often don’t go through on what they say.

“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

What’s wrong with 4k gaming? Just curious

Still rocking an EVGA 980 here.

Somehow 4k resolution got a bad rep in the computing world, with people opposing it for both play and productivity.

“You can’t see the difference at 50cm away!” or something like that. Must be bad eyesight I guess.

Akschually, Doom DA needs to have raytracing enabled at all times, and your vcard is in the first nvidia gen that has it. While 10xx and 20xx haven’t shown much of a difference, and both series are still okay for average gaming, there’s the planned divide vcard producers wanted. RTX IS ON ads visuals were fancy at best (imho) while consuming too much resources, and now there’s the first game that doesn’t function without it, pushing consumers to either updgrade their hardware or miss out on big hits. Not the first time it happened, but it gives a sense why there were a lot of media noise about that technology in the beginning.

Fuck Nvidia anyways. #teamred

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.

unless they’re rich or actually need it for something important

Fucking youtubers and crypto miners.

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’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.

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.

But then the Nvidia xx90 series have never been for the average consumer and I dont know what gave you that idea.