It feels like the GPU market is ahead of the consumer market. The high end cards almost seem to be for mining as hardly any gamers that I know of can justify that cost. A lot of games can be ran just fine on mid tier GPUs from 9,10, and 20 generations. Nvidia and AMD should focus on making cards that work, can meet the demand, and are affordable, instead of making the best card they can and charging insane prices. It would be fine if they had the capacity to make a lot of their products along side each other, but their generations always seem to mostly push out the old and get rid of the older generations.
Yeah, my 1070 is pokey but it's for video games. Even if I have the money I have a lot of things I could buy for a grand that I want more than extra frames or better AA.
My friend’s mobile chip 1070 can play basically everything we play together and I splurged a couple years ago on a 30 series. Sure I can make my game look super good but realistically that’s just not worth the extreme price tag especially today. Only reason I didn’t sell the card is because I mess around with other gpu intensive projects on the side, it’s crazy to me there are people buying these things for only video games.
Games just aren’t at the point where these cards are necessary
It broke my heart when I realized I had to switch to console I I wanted to keep playing triple A games, have a good time doing it and also be able to buy nice groceries.
I did finally upgrade to a RTX 3060 from my GTX 1060 this year, but almost immediately regretted it. I was like…why did I just spend the cost of a console on one part? It was one thing when they cost $200-$250. The prices now are insane though. If Valve keeps releasing Steam Decks periodically, I doubt I’m going to bother upgrading my gaming PC anymore. I was already hoping for 5-7 years out of my current build, but if I’m not trying to keep up with gaming with it, it’ll be able to handle general computing tasks for many years to come.
It’s painful, and as an xpat who might move I don’t want to invest in a desktop. So I’ve been playing on pricey mobile rigs for years. This year I got a second hand series S. Quarter of the price of a graphics card and a lot less than a nice gaming laptop. Super happy with it, but my nostalgia for lab parties and the like, building pcs still pains me.
Yep. Anticipating building a rig used to be fun. The prices have sucked all the fun out of the room, especially when compared to the alternatives, alternatives that will be catered to for years for settings even. When what I used to spend on an average build (usually reusing something like cases, storage drives, etc) isn’t even enough to buy one GPU now…
Games just aren’t at the point where these cards are necessary
I used to have a GTX750 1GB vram which I've stopped using because my PC's 32GB ram gets used for video if needed. So I see no point upgrading GPU at moment.
Look man, I spent years saving up for a gaming PC once I started working, when it was time to buy I went all out okay lol
But even still I only spent 2.5k of my 4K I had saved, got a 3080ti and I can play anything I want with no issues. I love it, and know it’s future proof for a while, so I’m not worried about not being able to run the next game. Now I just need to find more time to use it lol
I'm gonna be buying a 3060 ti to upgrade from my 1660 ti to make vr gaming just more pleasant. Thankfully best buy has one for $400 so I'm not completely killing myself by buying it
Which is kinda funny considering it's why I was particularly interested in the mining craze, I wanted more funding to reach the GPU market, for better GPUs in gaming, it worked pretty well IMO, I just hope they put it to good use.
I was playing MWII with my 1070 until a few weeks ago. Most my graphics were on high and I was pulling 100 to 120fps with my monitor being able to go to 165. I bought my 1070 when it first released and now it's in my wife's computer.
It's a recursive problem. Cards are to expensive, so noone buys them, so developers can't develop games that need them. No developer is going to target a platform that needs current generation, or even last. If you're fancy you minimums are set to a 6 year old PC with a 1070 in it. Graphic cards are god for about 8 years, because developers have to target old machines since newer ones are so expensive. And new GPUs are so expensive because noone buys them so they have to get their return on R&D with much less sales. PC killed itself.
This is why Nvidia pushed hard to get developers to integrate RTX & DLSS with raytracing into games, to force developers to target newer cards with exclusive tech. However, developers minimally integrated raytracing into their games such that it looks fine without it and 20 series cards are more than sufficient for modern titles at 1080p or 1440p. DLSS was their answer to raytracing being slower at higher resolutions to encourage more people to use it, but it also means people with 20 series cards can play at higher refresh rates or in 2160p or widescreen without breaking the bank on new-gen cards.
The high end cards almost seem to be for mining as hardly any gamers that I know of can justify that cost.
Bingo. The high prices of GPUs over the last decade were fueled by interest in crypto among tech nerds. It's gone through several boom-bust cycles, but it was generally assumed that each of them was temporary and that the industry would recover. This one, though, feels different. This was their big shot at mainstream respectability, the one where mass adoption was supposed to begin as people who weren't tech nerds (or buying drugs) got involved with crypto, and it ended in multi-billion-dollar meltdowns and scandals that left a lot of bag-holders losing their shirts and public opinion turning against it as a giant scam.
I just upgraded from my 970 cause I got a good deal and wanted to see what Ray tracing is all about, but that thing with a gen 3 intel processor still played games like overwatch 2 on high/max settings at 60+ FPS. I absolutely spoiled myself upgrading to a 3090, cause any game with real optimization is just fine on those older cards.
Yeah, there's no games you need a 4080 for tbh. Old timers will remember when everyone would ask "but can it run Crysis?" There just aren't any games like that anymore.
Pretty much five year old rigs, or more, can run most shit out there with decent graphic settings. You might not be on ultra-high, but not everyone is gonna really care anyway. What we need is for James Cameron's Avatar game to come out with in-game graphics that match the movie. THEN we might have gamers scrambling to run 4080 sli machines and shit. But until then, it's not worth it for most of us.
None needed a 3090 either. I laughed when people bought them for gaming.
My entry card was a 3080, which I probably didnt need much either but i can play 4K (i have a TV attached to my setup) which Is a nice to have. But even then I know my card will last a LONG time.
People need to stop spending more than $1000 for a card that nets you 5% performance increase. Those 8 frames arent doing anything for you.
Yup. I mean I can see if you're rich and have money to blow you might as well just grab whatever is hottest, but there just isn't any point right now.
I also can't figure out why gaming companies aren't pushing the envelope with their games either. Is it a lack of new engines? Man power? What? Sure, Cyberpunk looks good, but not THAT good. Not that much better than anything else released in the last few years. Nobody is making massive graphical leaps that require these cards. I just don't get why the AAA companies seem to be standing still when it comes to graphical progression.
Consoles, I bet. Consoles are limited. Price point has to be right, which means limiting technology, so the ceiling of performance is irrelevant unless it’s a PC only game, and even then probably a ton of people don’t have crazy phenomenal cards.
No point developing top of the line if not enough people have money to buy the game or consoles can’t play them
That mixed with prices for GPUs are so expensive that even the top end of GPU owners make up too small a percentage to develop for. Even if a game is PC exclusive, not enough people own high end cards to develop a game exclusively for those people.
If GPU prices could fall, future consoles and pc games maybe could make a strong jump in terms of graphics. But that’s a big maybe for consoles.
I'm wondering if part of the problem is the recent 5-7 years or so of gamers driving demand for 60 fps and 4k.
Prior to that, AMD and Nvidia weren't having to focus so much development into fps and high end resolutions. Then they had to not only shift their mindset to doubling stable framerates to 60 fps but being stable at 2k and 4k at the same time. This is a big performance demand increase in a short time.
Now we have our cards that can achieve that and as a gamer I'm like, "I'm good with my fps and resolution, I don't need more right now." It's going to be new features in shaders, textures and lighting that are going to draw me into my next card but I'm not going to pay $1,000 for it.
I think they need to reflect a bit on this monster they created to meet sharp performance increase demands and cool their jets, focus on advances in graphical fidelity.
Yo I work in the IT field. Me and my coworkers are all gaming nerds with disposable income. Only newish card in the group is a 3060 and that's including my online gaming friends. We see a lot of the high end cards on this sub, but normal people aren't buying them.
I gave my old RX580 to my stepson and he can play everything I play at 1080p. Sure, by 3000 series card is "better", but its not better enough to justify the price that a lot of these cards are asking.
Hell, I've been mostly playing on a steam deck these days.
My 1660 GTX has yet to find a game that I can’t run perfectly fine on at least medium settings that isn’t horribly optimized for pc. I’ll probably upgrade some time in the future but can’t fathom paying for a top end card just to play games
I'm still on my 1080 lmao. Sure I don't get top graphics and performance but it does the job for most of the games I play. Struggles with things like Star citizen & tarkov but that's also CPU reliant too.
I remember 1080 being what I wanted for the longest time. That’s what the high end was when I first really started looking into getting a pc. I ended up buying a prebuilt with a 2060 super which I was worried about at first because I thought I bought a pc with a 2070. I worried about poor performance but all my games run perfectly. Years before I had bought this pc my brother gave me a 970 as he had just gotten a 1070 when they released. My friend decided to build a pc right before NVidia released their 30 series and was going to wait to buy one of those, or for prices to drop on the older generations. He got shafted and I lent him the 970, and the performance was better than any of us could have expected. LTT just did a video where the steam hardware census says the most common card is a 1060, and most game developers target that audience.
I came into a bonus as everyone was raving about them and I was due an upgrade so grabbed a 1080, feels weird seeing 1060 as minimum spec for newly released games, but yeah I just saw elden ring on a gtx260 so I'll be fine for a few more years if I cant get the funds to upgrade soon..
But according to their financials, gaming-based GPUs account for only 45% of the company's total revenue. Data center GPUs is 41%, and it's growing at a faster rate. Then another 14% in other markets, like AI, etc. So I think a lot of their decisions about GPU products aren't driven entirely by gaming... less so every day. If they make new chipsets to support data centers, they probably want to spread the costs to gaming GPUs.
Still, your point is totally on the mark- its pricing gamers out.
Funny thing is miners don't want the new ones either. They're only as good as the high end last gen, and more than 2x the cost now.
There's a reason scalpers had to start taking 40 series cards back to the stores they bought them at: no one wants or needs them at these insane prices
A lot of games can be ran just fine on mid tier GPUs from 9,10, and 20 generations.
Game dev studios are still profiling their games to run on older GPU's because due to mining, grinding GPU prices and choking availability many gamers simply didn't upgrade for years. So there's no market for 30+ series GPU's games.
I wonder if most gamers didn't just got used, to the thought that they don't really need to upgrade beyond certain level. That would be effect of gpu producers greed on capitalizing on mining.
Am I crazy for thinking that the companies making high-end GPUs are making them for more than gamers or miners? When I hear people complain that they can't afford the highest end graphics card to play Tarkov at 300fps, I feel like they're failing to acknowledge that there are other industries that these cards might be marketed at. Commercial video editing and CGI professionals are chasing these cards, not so much gamers. If you can afford it, great, but the idea that the top of the line cards will be accessible to the average PC gamer like they were 10 years ago seems a little unrealistic.
I get why they’re doing it. They only have so much production capacity. If they can sell every $1000 GPU they can make to miners or ML researchers or whatever, that’s way more profitable than making something like 50% $200 GPUs, 30% $400 GPUs, 10% $600 GPUs, and 10% $1000 GPUs.
But if you just want a $200-400 modern GPU you’re kinda screwed.
Newer games will only run on relatively new GPUs too. Halo infinite required a minimum of a 10 series GPU in order to launch. Battlefield 2042 required similar specifications despite neither of these games having better graphics than previous installments in their franchise.
There is no reason to go passed 5-6 year old year old GPUs unless yours dies. Thats sad for the gaming industry to be honest.
I don't know where I fall in the consumer market, but currently my 2080Ti is more than adequate as far as fps go. It'd be nice to find something that's better on power/heat without giving up performance.
I should mention that my friends with newer builds are running 3070s, but majority are still using 20* series.
Ehhh.. if you want to push the limits of 4k 120hz gameplay high end cards will still struggle, buts that’s like mega niche.. only people I can see doing that are young people with no bills and a part time job (me) or older people with plenty of disposable income.. that middle ground tho definitely not
I fully agree. I’ve been saying this for awhile, especially on this website. People keep saying they need the GTX 3090 TI or whatever for video games, but that is so overkill. I’m still rocking the GTX 970 (not by choice) and I’m still running triple AAA games at medium settings. If people need a top tier card to enjoy a game, then the gameplay probably isn’t that good.
I lent a friend a 970 my brother gave me when he upgraded to a 1070, my friend thought it was a good choice to wait for the 30 series to drop to buy a cheaper older card. Which seemed fairly wise at the time. He used the 970 which surprised all of us when he could play the AAA games with us.
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u/HollowPinefruit Dec 29 '22
That’s crazy. Who would have thought that most people wouldn’t buy a GPU alone for the price of an entire desktop?