this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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Well I am shocked, SHOCKED I say! Well, not that shocked.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 minutes ago

GPU prices are what drove me back to consoles. It was time to overhaul my PC as it was getting painfully out of date. Video card alone was gonna be 700. Meanwhile a whole ass PS5 that plays the same games was 500.

It's been 2 years since and I don't regret it. I miss mods, but not nearly as much as I thought. It also SOOO nice to play multiplayer games without cheaters everywhere. I actually used to be one of those people who thought controllers gave an unfair advantage but... you can use a M/KB on PS5 and guess what? I do just fine! Turns out that the problem was never controllers, it was the cheaters.

But then there is that. The controller. Oh my lord it's so much more comfortable than even the best gaming mouse. I've done a complete 180 on this. So many game genres are just so terrible to play with M/KB that I now tell people whining about controller players this:

Use gaming equipment for gaming and leave office equipment in the office.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 hours ago

For me it's the GPU prices, stagnation of the technology (most performance gains come at the cost of stupid power draw) and importantly being fed up with AAA games. Most games I played recently were a couple years old, indie titles or a couple years old indie titles. And I don't need a high powered graphics card for that. I've been playing far more on my steam deck than my desktop PC, despite the latter having significantly more powerful hardware. You can't force fun through sheer hardware performance

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

IT litterally costs $3000

Thats almost 4 time the cost of my 3090.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

Thats almost a year of work on my country lol...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

There’s so many games out there I’d like to play, but I’m an adult with responsibilities. I don’t need the newest game or gaming hardware because no matter how hard I try to catch up I never will, so I don’t bother to try and I always have something to play on my hardware.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

It makes me wonder if this will bring more people back to consoles. The library may be more limiting, but when a console costs less than just a gpu, itll be more tempting.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

The GTX1660 I bought in 2023 for $300 is still running fine.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

I just looked up the price and I was "Yikes!". You can get a PS5 Pro + optional Blu-ray drive, Steam Deck OLED, Nintendo Switch 2 and still have plenty of money left to spend on games.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

First: Nobody gives a shit about the ray tracing craze, like not really. It applies to a thin margin of games, and is an option easily turned off or avoided. Seeing as AAA games are most of the ones developing for it anyway, and seeing as most of those are utter shit, yeah I'm not buying into the craze and spending obnoxious amounts of money on it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

Bah, AAA games aren't interesting for me anymore. I like more indies nowadays, specially I am a fan of Doom-like games, I liked Selaco, Turbo-Overkill, I liked ghostrunner as well...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago

Been hearing this for the past 3 years

[–] [email protected] 4 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I'm ngl, finances had no impact on my decisions to stay at 3080. Performance and support did. Everything I want to play runs at least 60 to 180 fps with my current loadout. I'm also afraid once Windows 10 LTSC dies I won't be able to use a high end GPU with Linux anyways.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

I have a 4090. I don't see any reason to pay $4K+ for fake frames and a few % better performance. Maybe post Trump next gen and/or if prices become reasonable and cables stop melting.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

I don't think the 5090 has been 4k in months in terms of average sale price. 4k was basically March. 3k is pretty common now as a listed scalp price, and completed sales on fleabay seem to be 2600-2800 commonly now.

The problem is that 2k was too much to begin with though. It should be cheaper, but they are selling ML cards at such a markup with true literal endless demand currently, there's zero reason to put any focus at all on the gaming segment beyond a token offering that raises the margin for them, so business wise they are doing great I guess?

As a 9070xt and 6800xt owner, it feels like AMD is practically done with the gpu market. It just sucks for everyone that the gpu monopoly is here, presumably to stay. Feels like backroom deals creating a noncompetitive landscape must be prevalent, plus a total stranglehold with artificial monopoly of code compatibility from nvidia's side make hardware irrelevant.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

One issue is everyone is supply constrained by TSMC. Even Arc Battlemage is OOS at MSRP.

I bet Intel is kicking themselves for using TSMC. It kinda made sense when they decided years ago, but holy heck, they'd be swimming in market share if they used their own fabs instead (and kept the bigger die).

I feel like another is... marketing?

Like, many buyers just impulse buy, or go with what some shill recommended in a feed. Doesn't matter how competitive anything is anymore.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Technically Intel is also releasing some cheapo GPUs in similar capability to nVidia but they all have the same manufacturers anyways.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

fake frames

And that's my main problem with what the industry has become. Nvidia always had sizable jumps generation to generation, in raw performance. They STILL get better raw performance, but now it's nowhere near impressive enough and they have to add their fake frame technologies into their graphs. Don't get me wrong, they always had questionable marketing tactics, but now it's getting even worse.

No idea when I'm replacing my 3060ti, but it won't be nVidia.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 17 hours ago

I remember when High-end-GPUs were around 500 €.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago

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

But yeah, 2070rtx keeps chugging on

[–] [email protected] 7 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

I am still on my GTX 1060 3 GB, probably worth about $50 at this point lol

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

Food, not ROBLOX.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

Uhhh, I went from a Radeon 1090 (or whatever they're called, it's an older numbering scheme from ~2010) to a Nvidia 780 to an Nvidia 3070 TI. Skipping upgrades is normal. Console games effectively do that as well. It's normal to not buy a GPU every year.

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