Gamers Are Reportedly Skipping GPU Upgrades Due to Soaring Prices — Paying Bills Takes Priority Over Chasing NVIDIA’s RTX 5090
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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.
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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.
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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.
Saved up for a couple of years and built the best (consumer grade) non nvidia PC I could, 9070XT, 9950X3D, 64gig of RAM. Pretty much top end everything that isn’t Nvidia or just spamming redundant RAM for no reason. The whole thing still costs less than a single RTX 5090 and on average draws less power too.
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Well I am shocked, SHOCKED I say! Well, not that shocked.
Still rocking my 3060 ti since launch. Thinking of getting a 9060 XT.
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Well I am shocked, SHOCKED I say! Well, not that shocked.
The PC industry has turned into a scuzzy hellscape for average joes that just want to have decent options at realistic prices. They don’t even care about gaming anymore, it’s about YouTube and BitcoinBruhzz now.
I’ve still got a still pretty decent setup (5800x3d 4070ti), but it’s the last stand for this guy I’m afraid. Looking over the past decade or so, I’ve honestly had better gaming experiences on consoles for mere fractions of the price of a PC build. Mods and PC master race nonsense aside. Sure you don’t need a subscription for online PC playing (I rarely play online), but you can barely get a processor for what a PS5 costs anymore. Let alone a video card, which is upwards of a lot of people’s take home pay for a month, the way things are going.
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Fuck Nvidia anyways. #teamred
Fuck those guys too honestly. AMD is fueling this bullshit just as much as Nvidia.
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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.
Those cards were like what though, $199?
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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.
Not to mention the cards have gotten huge and you just about need a nuclear reactor to power them. Melting cables and all.
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The good games don’t need a high end GPU.
Terraria minimum specs: “don’t worry bro”
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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.
It’s just kind of unnecessary. Gaming in 1440p on something the size of your average computer monitor, hell even just good ol’ 1080 HD, is more than sufficient. I mean 1080 to 4k sure there’s a difference, but 1440p it’s a lot harder to tell. Nobody cares about your mud puddle reflections cranking along in a game at 120 fps. At least not the normies.
Putting on my dinosaur hat for a second, I spent the first decade of my life gaming in 8/16 bit and 4 color CGA, and I’ve probably spent the last thirty years and god only knows how much money trying to replicate those experiences.
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The good games don’t need a high end GPU.
Problem is preordering has been normalized, as has releasing games in pre-alpha state.
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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.That last one is especially horrifying. You don’t own games when you cloud game, you simply lease them. We all know what that’s done for the preservation of games. Not to mention encouraging the massive amounts of shovel ware that we get flooded with.
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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.
Hey, I’m also on a 1060 still! Admittedly I hardly game anymore, although I am considering another Skyrim playthrough.
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That last one is especially horrifying. You don’t own games when you cloud game, you simply lease them. We all know what that’s done for the preservation of games. Not to mention encouraging the massive amounts of shovel ware that we get flooded with.
You don’t own games when you cloud game, you simply lease them.
That’s also how it is with a game you purchased to play on your own PC, though. Unless you have it on physical media, your access could be revoked at any time.
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Well I am shocked, SHOCKED I say! Well, not that shocked.
Paying Bills Takes Priority Over Chasing NVIDIA’s RTX 5090
Yeah no shit, what a weird fucking take
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Fuck those guys too honestly. AMD is fueling this bullshit just as much as Nvidia.
Nvidia is one of the most evil companies out there, responsible for killing nearly all other GPU producers destroying the market.
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Well I am shocked, SHOCKED I say! Well, not that shocked.
I’m on a 2080 or 2090 (I forget which). I thought I’d upgrade to the 40xx now that 5090s are out. I looked at the prices and absolutely not. The 5090s are around 500k JPY, and ordering from the US would work out to about the same with exchange, tax, and any possible tariff that exists this week. Salaries here are also much lower than in the west as well on average even for those of us in software.
4070s are still around 100k which is cheaper than last time I looked at 250k ish.
Price aggregator site in Japan if you want to play around: https://kakaku.com/pc/videocard/itemlist.aspx?pdf_Spec103=500 On the left, you’ll see the cards to select and the prices are obvious on the screen.
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Well I am shocked, SHOCKED I say! Well, not that shocked.
I downgraded from a gtx1060 to a ryzen 5000g igpu terraria & factorio don’t need much.
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Those cards were like what though, $199?
That’s still not cheap when you account for inflation. Of course there’s a world of difference between “not cheap” and what they charge these days.
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Saved up for a couple of years and built the best (consumer grade) non nvidia PC I could, 9070XT, 9950X3D, 64gig of RAM. Pretty much top end everything that isn’t Nvidia or just spamming redundant RAM for no reason. The whole thing still costs less than a single RTX 5090 and on average draws less power too.
Yep, thats gonna be significantly more powerful than my planned build… and likely somewhere between 500 to 1000 more expensive… but yep, that is how absurd this is, that all of that is still less expensive than a 5090 RTX.
I’m guessing you could get all of that to work with a 750 W PSU, 850 W if you also want to have a bunch of storage drives or a lot of cooling, but yeah, you’d only need that much for running raytracing in 4k.
Does that sound about right?
Eitherway… yeah… imagine an alternate timeline where marketing and industry direction isn’t bullshit, where people actually admit things like:
Consoles cannot really do what they claim to do at 4K… at actual 4K.
They use checkerboard upscaling, so basically they’re actually running at 2K and scaling up, and its actually less than 2K in demanding raytraced games, because they’re actually using FSR or DLSS as well, oh and the base graphics settings are a mix of what PC gamers would call medium and high, but they don’t show console gamers real graphics settings menus, so they don’t know that.
Maybe, maybe we could have tried to focus on just perfecting frame per watt and frame per $ efficiency at 2K instead of baffling us with marketing bs and claiming we can just leapfrog to 4K, and more recently, telling people 8K displays make any goddamned sense at all, when in 95% of home setup situations, of any kind, they have no physically possible perceptible gains.
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Yep, thats gonna be significantly more powerful than my planned build… and likely somewhere between 500 to 1000 more expensive… but yep, that is how absurd this is, that all of that is still less expensive than a 5090 RTX.
I’m guessing you could get all of that to work with a 750 W PSU, 850 W if you also want to have a bunch of storage drives or a lot of cooling, but yeah, you’d only need that much for running raytracing in 4k.
Does that sound about right?
Eitherway… yeah… imagine an alternate timeline where marketing and industry direction isn’t bullshit, where people actually admit things like:
Consoles cannot really do what they claim to do at 4K… at actual 4K.
They use checkerboard upscaling, so basically they’re actually running at 2K and scaling up, and its actually less than 2K in demanding raytraced games, because they’re actually using FSR or DLSS as well, oh and the base graphics settings are a mix of what PC gamers would call medium and high, but they don’t show console gamers real graphics settings menus, so they don’t know that.
Maybe, maybe we could have tried to focus on just perfecting frame per watt and frame per $ efficiency at 2K instead of baffling us with marketing bs and claiming we can just leapfrog to 4K, and more recently, telling people 8K displays make any goddamned sense at all, when in 95% of home setup situations, of any kind, they have no physically possible perceptible gains.
1000W PSU for theoretical maximum draw of all components at once with a good safety margin. But even when running a render I’ve never seen it break 500W.
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Well I am shocked, SHOCKED I say! Well, not that shocked.
Rimworld doesn’t need a new gpu
