Born 1983 - Right Handed02/23/2025
This is a Rant, as well as an examination of the PC space right now. Bear with me.
Bruh as i am working on piecing together a new PC for someone on PCPartPicker - they don't even have the prices listed for video cards. You know why? BECAUSE EVEN LAST GEN CARDS ARE GOING FOR $200-400 over MSRP!! I could sell my 4080 Super right now, and it could fund my "upgrade" (I use that term lightly) to a 50 Series card, if ever I found one at MSRP - which seems absolutely impossible right now. This is like the opposite of the Covid GPU shortage, because newer gen cards are providing smaller performance gains over last generation, while charging either the same amount of money, OR GREATER.
Two things are driving that right now:
- AI: the buzzword of the decade right now. If your SOC/GPU/APU/CPU does not have any AI capabilities, you might as well be hammering words into stone.
- Software: Have you noticed that the software is not scaling with the amount of hardware? For example - capabilities like DLSS are helping older cards achieve better performance at the cost of a little latency. For games like Cyberpunk that's cool, but for e-sports titles where the millisecond does matter a bit, the gaps become more apparent.
So with better capabilities, older cards are able to do more in the gamer space, meaning people aren't spending - or better yet, do NOT have to spend - top dollar on cards with the newest tech, if software has 1: enabled capabilities on their old GPUs, and 2: if games have not scaled up in their graphics engineering. Why would someone spend money on the newest gen graphics on a game that is not well optimized to begin with? If games better optimized for a wider gamut of GPU solutions, for example - if Starfield optimized better for all cards and not just AMD, then more people would be able to enjoy those games. Conversely, if game developers are not properly optimizing their games, then why should gamers buy higher end cards and do the work, client-side, using AI, to upscale the visual quality of their game? AI, as it pertains to cards like NVIDIA RTX GPUs, IS NOTHING MORE THAN A LAZY GRAPHICS SOLUTION TO GAIN MORE FPS OUT OF A GAME THAN WITH RASTERIZATION, WHICH MAY TAKE MORE WORK. And to take more advantage of AI enhancements, you gotta buy that new-new. This is a ridiculous strategy from the company that branded their GPU solutions as "The Way Games Are Meant To Be Played", and provided multiple solutions across the price spectrum.
AMD, less so - but not by much. They're not starting to figure out that they can better package their chips to create better efficiency, which is the good stuff you want to see from a Chip Maker.
Intel, is quietly working in the background. I like that, because their first offering in the Arc Alchemist series of GPUs was surprising.
I still cannot fathom the engineered shortage of these video cards, resulting in much higher than MSRP on midrange offerings like the 5070 Ti. Sure, there are those that are 2 or 3, maybe even 4 generations behind in GPU, and for those, a bump to the mid-level 50 series is indeed an upgrade for them. But gen-on-gen, improvements in performance are much leaner than upgrades from prior generations, while increasing in price, and that's BAD. YOU SHOULD NOT BUY AND CATER TO THIS KIND OF MARKETING STRATEGY. In the end, it is only saying to the manufacturer that "yes you can shortchange us in the next generation and we will still buy your stuff". You have to speak with your wallet and stand fast, even if that means you're not pushing 120 FPS.
