What about the used market? The Nvidia 1080/1080 TI or AMD 6000/7000 series is not too bad.

I was gifted a 2080Ti about a year or so ago and I have no intention on upgrading anytime soon. The former owner of my card is a friend who had it in their primary gaming rig, back when SLI wasn’t dead, he had two.

So when he built a new main rig with a single 4090 a few years back he gifted me one and the other one he left in his old system and started using that as a spare/guest computer for having impromptu LANs. It’s still a decent system, so I don’t blame him.

In any case, that upgraded my primary computer from a 1060 3G… So it was a welcome change to have sufficient video memory again.

The cards keep getting more and more power hungry and I don’t see any benefit in upgrading… Not that I can afford it… I haven’t been in school for a long time, and lately, I barely have time to enjoy YouTube videos, nevermind a full assed game. I literally have to walk away from a game for so long between sessions that I forget the controls. So either I can beat the game in one sitting, or the controls are similar enough to the defaults I’m used to (left click to fire, right click to ADS, WASD for movement, ctrl or C for crouch, space to jump, E to interact, F for flashlight, etc etc…); that way I don’t really need to relearn anything.

This is a big reason why I haven’t finished some titles that I really wanted to, like TLoU, or Doom Eternal… Too many buttons to remember. It’s especially bad with doom, since if you don’t remember how, and when to use your specials, you’ll run out of life, armor, ammo, etc pretty fast. Remembering which special gives what and how to trigger it… Uhhh … Is it this button? Gets slaughtered by an imp … Okay, not that button. Reload let’s try this… Killed by the same imp not that either… Hmmm. Goes and looks at the key mapping ohhhhhh. Okay. Reload I got it this time… Dies anyways due to other reasons

Whelp. Quit maybe later.

You can always side-grade to AMD. I was using a 3070 and ditched Windows for Kubuntu and while it was very usable, I would get the slightest input lag and had to make sure the compositor (desktop effects) was turned off when playing a game.

After some research I decided to side-grade to the 6800 and it’s a night and day difference. Buttery smooth gaming. It performs better with compositor on than Nvidia did with it off. I know 6800 isn’t high end but it’s no slouch either. AMD is king on Linux.

Ah capitalism…

Endless infinite growth forever on a fragile and very much finite planet where wages are suppressed and most money is intentionally funneled into the coffers of a small handful of people who are already so wealthy that their descendants 5 generations down the line will still be some of the richest people on the planet.

When a new gpu was 500-900 usd it was fine.

But yeah, 2070rtx keeps chugging on

the most i use my gpu for at this point is minecraft shaders, i dont plan on upgrading in 10+ years

But I wouldnt turn it on and actually play with it even if I could because I will always take the better performance.

I’ve actually tried Path Tracing in CP2077 running at native Steam Deck resolution streamed to my Steam Deck OLED from my PC at max settings and it could do 30FPS locked fairly well (overlocked by 20% though). But the game looks absolutelly horrible in motion with it’s terrible LOD so no amount of RT or PT can save it. It looks dope for screenshots though. But that’s PT, RT is basically almost indistinguishable. And PT is many, many years away for it to be viable for majority of people to use.

(The game reports W10 but it was Fedora42 actually)

I am just using my GTX 1650 4GB VRAM (GDDR6) and it works fine for most of the things i do I can use Linux + FSR Hack to squeeze framerates out of games that perform poorly
and it runs my SCP:SL and tf2 fine
SCP:SL am using FSR HACK To squeeze more framerate until Nvidia fixes VKD3D
Maybe my next card is RX 6650 XT/AMD but still i might stick with my GTX 1650

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.

Clair obscur runs like shit on my 3090 at 4k

Been hearing this for the past 3 years

Well that depends on your definition of significant. Don’t get me wrong, the state of the GPU market is not consumer friendly, but even an RX 9070 provides over a 50% performance uplift over the RX 6800.

I’m pretty sure that production of the 40 series has stopped. The 50 series uses the same node.

I don’t buy every generation and skip 1 if not 2. I have a 40xx series and will probably wait until the 70xx (I’m assumimg series naming here) before upgrading.

IT litterally costs $3000

Thats almost 4 time the cost of my 3090.

There’s major issues with those GPUs in some commonplace use cases and they have major scalping issues. Sure in some use cases there’s zero issues, but this aint like the early 2000s when there were many brands that all basically worked.

Now you’re either nvidia with every feature, amd with most features (kinda like a store brand), or intel with major compatibility flaws with specific games because it’s technically a GPU.

But I wouldnt turn it on and actually play with it even if I could because I will always take the better performance.

Depends. In Cyberpunk I can get 90-100fps on 1440p on ultra with raytracing on and FSR4 Quality (via Optiscaler). That is a very good experience IMO, to the point that I forget about “framerate” while playing.

That’s Windows though, in Linux the raytracing performance is rather worse for some reason and it slips below the threshold of what I find noticeable, so I go for 1440p native.

even the RX9070 is running around $900 USD, I cannot fathom affording even state-of-the-art gaming from years ago at this point. I am still using a GTX1660 and playing games from years ago I never got around to and having a grand time. Most adults I know are in the same boat and either not even considering upgrading their PC or they’re playing their kid’s console games.

Every year we say “Gonna look into upgrading” but every year prices go up and wages stay the same (or disappear entirely as private-equity ravages the business world, digesting every company that isn’t also a private equity predator) and the prices of just living and eating are insane, so at this rate, a lot of us might start reading again.

I think patent laws and proprietary software supported by major OS have always had some impact, even the 90s, but yeah it’s definitely a poor state for the market to be this concentrated.

Thats almost a year of work on my country lol…