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Yep, this basically sums up my experiences a couple months ago. I’ve been telling myself since about 2016 that I would save up to go all in and build a solid gaming desktop.
But then there were floods in southeast Asia hindering supplies where I lived. No biggie, they’d recover quick.
Then crypto took off and GPUs and some other hardware tripled or quadrupled in price. No biggie, it’s a fad that will go away quick.
Then COVID destroyed production and distribution of computer hardware. No biggie, gives me time to save up more to afford these new crazy prices.
Then everyone needs GPUs for the AI craze, and prices went up even more. No biggie, I’ll just…cope?
Finally, I was at the point of “Fuck it, I’m tired of waiting. I’m buying a 5080, even if it costs as much as 2 PS5s.”
So I planned it out, made sure I had everything lined up to immediately snag one once they were available. And then day of:
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Nvidia’s store: Never had any in stock at any point.
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Microcenter: In-store purchases only, and stores were given single-digit stock while hundreds of people queued up for days.
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Newegg: Never loaded until their stock was all gone.
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Best Buy: Had a very attractive “Add to Cart” button display for a period of about 10 minutes at random intervals throughout the day, which placed me into queues that all ended with me getting kicked out after a few minutes.
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Amazon: Well, fuck Amazon, but they didn’t have any either.
So then I thought, forget Nvidia. Just because their cards are dropping earlier in the year doesn’t mean it’s them or nothing. I’ll just get an AMD card if Nvidia doesn’t have stock by then.
And, well…here we are in this article.
PC gaming is the best deal, eh?
Consider buying a previous generation card. You can sometimes find good deals on used ones.
For years now the prices on this year’s latest cards are so high that I don’t know who buys them. I can afford to spend $1000 but I never would when I can probably get 85% of the performance for $250.
Out of curiosity, what GPU is getting 85% of a 5080’s performance at $250? Genuine question.
That was genuinely pulled out of my ass. Not a benchmark comparison. It’s just my perception that cards only get incrementally better each year, but “this year’s card” is always proportionally much more expensive for what you get. Few games actually demand the very latest and greatest, so I don’t know why people would ever pay the premium for the latest and greatest.
Ah, gotcha. I haven’t been looking for GPUs for a few years now, so I was low-key excited that there was actually a deal that good.
But yeah, I agree that the last couple gens of flagship GPUs are vastly overkill for 95% of games.
What games are the 5% that need a 5090 to enjoy? I can run any game on the market right now at a minimum 1080p 60fps on my 3060.
I didn’t say you “need a 5090 enjoy the other 5% of games,” the implication is performance. And no, I highly doubt your 3060 is not doing that. With lowered settings and no ray tracing on some games, sure. When we’re talking about flagship GPUs, the idea is that people buy them to be able to run at 1440p/4k, higher graphics settings, and maintain at least stable 60+fps.
There’s games right now that even a 4090 struggles to run on maxed settings at 4k and stay above 60fps at all times. However, DLSS 3+ and similar tech saves the day with frame gen and upscaling. Developers just need to optimize their shit.
And if you don’t care about graphics at all, then of course this is all irrelevant and participating in this discussion is completely pointless.
And the same applies to smartphones since a while ago.
I actually had thought of that too, but see my reply to someone else further below:
This is what I got from the article as well. Jesus, buy a previous gen GPU and fiddle a bit with your graphic settings, it’s just games, not life or death.
Good luck finding a used one that isn’t barely on its last legs from being poorly OC’d/cooled, or is just an outright brick that burned out in a crypto mining farm and is now being resold by a shell entity of a shell entity of a shell entity on Amazon or Ebay.
Yeah. I bought a 3060 on eBay for $240 a few weeks ago. Works great.
Brand new Intel ARC B580 puts up numbers in the 4060 range and only costs around $250
I usually buy AMD for their open-source support. I wanted nvidia this time around to fiddle with AI stuff, which is better-supported on nvidia right now.
fiddle with AI stuff
I.e. one of the same things that causing gouging on GPUs and the market to be pushed out of gamers hands.
People at home using their gpus for a mix of gaming and local ai are not really the source of that issue
This person is a consumer, just like you. Your gaming is no more important than their fiddling. Your angst is pointed in the wrong direction.
I was upgrading anyway. My RX 580 wasn’t cutting it for games any more.
if you have been waiting since 2016, why do you want an 5080, though? 2-3 gens earlier will be a large improvement too, with half or even lower a price.
I did the same, but with AMD. I’m going Linux, and everything is good except nvidia’s utterly broken drivers. I mean, they always improve, today it’s usable if you don’t want to sleep/hibernate your PC, if you are sure you won’t run out of video memory (nvidia drivers are the only one in linux that can’t transfer some memory to system ram when it’s really needed), if you don’t need gamescope, and so on…
I expanded elsewhere in this post, but basically it’s a combination of:
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I do own a laptop I bought in the pandemic which has a 2070 mobile GPU, and between that and my PS5, I am not truly in a rush.
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Older hardware is also being price gouged. If I do buy something, I don’t want it to be more than 1 gen old, but at current prices I’d be paying more than the new stuff goes for at MSRP.
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I budgeted to be able to buy something good, not just good enough. Since I’m not in a rush, I’m willing to wait and keep trying to buy something closer to top-of-the-line. I can afford scalper prices, but I just refuse to support scalping out of principle.
Aren’t you letting perfect be the enemy of good here? You are looking for a unicorn and likely will never find it.
I mean, I already have good. I just don’t need to waste money on something I don’t need if it’s not worth it.
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I was in the same boat. Then I decided that the 50x0 was a paper launch and the leaks told me that the 9070XT would lower or have the same performance as the 7900xtx.
Then the 7900xtx dropped in price, clearing the channel for the new gen.
Then I bought that.
Ever since I’ve been wondering… Why didn’t I buy this thing earlier?
It’s more then fast enough. The RT performance is above the 3080.
Every 9070XT I can buy now is almost 200 euro more then what i payed for the 7900xtx.
What I learned? Buy previous gen in it’s “dying” weeks.
Same strategy here. I’m in the U.S. and tariffs were my big concern. In December, I waited for the Sapphire Nitro+ 7900 XTX to go on sale and I paid less than MSRP for it brand new. Having experienced both the disasters of the previous two GPU gens, I had the foresight that the launch of the next gen cards would also be a disaster, and here we are.
PC Gaming has become a rich person’s hobby.
Buy current gen right before the next gen launches, and you’ll be set. I expect to get 10 years out of my card, with the incredible performance, build quality, and 24 GB VRAM.
There was a window where the AMD 6000 series were cheap and readily available, which was probably your best bet. Now we have to wait the AI bubble to burst. Hopefully.
get an used one, why make it hard. nobody needs the latest and greatest at launch and they clearly cant/dont want to keep up.
i play me bideogames and be happy that it works well until it doesnt.
Previous gen is going for 1.5-2x as much as current gen due to shortages, even for used cards. They are at least available if someone has a dire need for a replacement GPU, but I am patient, not willing to pay current gen prices for older hardware, and not willing to pay more than MSRP at that.
holy shit the situation is dire, i just looked at the price of my card and it costs just as much as it did a few years ago when i bought it used. i guess GPUs are not for us anymore, its for AI slop and surveillance now.
I’ve been telling myself since about 2016 that I would save up to go all in and build a solid gaming desktop.
Finally, I was at the point of “Fuck it, I’m tired of waiting. I’m buying a 5080, even if it costs as much as 2 PS5s.”
I assume that whatever you’re running right now isn’t terribly new if you’ve been thinking about upgrading for nine years.
The 5080 is a 16GB card. A quick skim on Amazon suggests that 16GB Nvidia cards are in short supply, but that you can get a 16GB AMD GPU without problems.
They aren’t quite as fast on the Passmark benchmark as the 5080, but they also cost a lot less (even if the 5080 were available), and I assume that they’d be a lot faster than whatever you’re running now.
Could go with that (or something less-fancy) and then if you felt that you wanted to spend more for more performance, do so when GPUs become available.
To add a bit to the story, I did spring for a gaming laptop in 2021 because my 2013 MacBook was starting to show its age, and the model I bought came with a 2070 mobile GPU which has been fine playing newer games at modest settings at 1080p.
Laptops and prebuilts were basically the only affordable option in the pandemic, and I had a laptop need at the time. But for a while now it has still been a goal of mine to put together a good desktop. The last desktop I built was in 2010 (I snagged a GTX 580 GPU and felt like such hot shit then).
I’m so glad I built a high end computer last fall because I was lucky to afford it. Now my 4080 S used is now worth 600 dollars more than what I paid for it at MSRP.
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At least you can still use your older hardware, and at least Radeon cards as old as GCN1 are still actively supported outside of Windows.
Also, old games still exist and will continue to exist in some form into the foreseeable future, legitimately or not.
Like, if you’re not into multiplayer games, the Mesa drivers last time I thought still work well, great even, on Polaris and Vega cards as well as even legacy GCN on the Linux side of things, you can still use your RX 580 or 590 with full support going that route, for example.
In a way, we brought this on ourselves by tolerating scalpers. Gamers made it known that they’ll go hysterical and pay any price to have it now. If enough of us don’t do that, scalping video cards won’t be a lucrative business and the fuckers will be forced to give up. I guarantee you the reason the stock is disappearing so fast is because resellers have their fucking bots set up to spam all the retailer web sites, and the rest is people trying to compete with them.
What a rat race. Fuck the entire thing.
We have it better than we’ve ever had it at any point in the past, also: Broad PCI-E backwards compatibility means you can stick your old card in your new board and tough it out for a few months until the fervor dies down and/or the scalpers lose their shirts sitting on their inventory.
For me, I haven’t bought a new graphics card in a long time. I have a RX 580 that I bought used for $200 CAD. My next upgrade will be my motherboard since I’m still using a 1150 socket and I’m stuck using DDR3 RAM and an outdated CPU (Intel i5-4460).
I can still play newish games at low settings and that’s fine for me right now. I’m not buying a GPU at current retail price, fuck that. It’s crazy that the best time to build a PC was 2015.
$200 CAD is about double the price of a used 580
…Looking at my specs, do you really believe that I paid it recently? This was many years ago.
Well, it is now. They’re running an i5-4460, though, so they probably didn’t buy the 580 recently.
Same, I rocked a second hand GTx 680 from 2012-2013, which I upgraded to a second hand RTX 3060 12GB for a fantastic price, in 2024. Still rocking a DDR3 platform with the intel i7 4400K. And that’s more than enough for most games with nice graphics on 1680x1050 :) (display probably 15 years old too). Eventually, I will be looking for some other second hand components to upgrade the rest of the system, but it does everything more than well enough.
The sad part is that in Europe on Amazon the Gigabyte store sells RX 9070 XT for 1150€. That’s absolutely grotesque. Mind you this card is supposed to be 550$ before tax, after tax it shouldn’t be more expensive than 650€ and Gigabyte is charging 80% on top of that. Who needs scalpers with businesses like that.
The GPU market is a goddamn disaster. Nvidia can’t even put the right amount of ROPs on a card or back up their “5070 is a 4090 hurr durr” claims, AMD ditching higher end GPUs, melting connectors, AI, AI, AI!!, etc. Even with Intel’s Arc GPUs it’s not enough to compete when Nvidia has all the market share in consumer cards.
I’ve got a 7800xt, a few 3090s in various gaming/video editing systems and a RX 6400 for a backup card. I’m not buying any more until this AI bubble bursts and cards start having actual amounts of uplift from generation to generation and when I can buy one without them getting botted to hell and back.
You should sell the 3090s now. Prices for them are freaking nuts, probably as high as they’ll ever be.
I’m using them lol I know I could sell all 3 for a good price, 2 are EVGA K|ngP|n cards and one is a FE that has a very good overclock potential. I’m not looking to upgrade now, they still work fine.
Oh yeah, you could swap a kingpin for a 4080 if you wanted, lol. Everyone wants 24GB for local AI.
But honestly they will still probably be expensive if/when you sell them, so no rush I guess :P
Renpy becoming popular means there are tons of indie games, visual novella genre, with which you don’t need a beefy graphics card.
I’d also argue that nice graphics is only one component of a good game, and “nice” is very loosely tied to computing power here.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Nobody deserves anything
So Amazon has no limit on how much of the same produce you can buy, against scalpers? Make it percentage based for all i care.
They are just price raping us now on very GPU release.
That’s true but it’s a race to the top. Resellers selling cards at a price that is twice or more the MSRP. Meaning that these companies have to jump through hoops not to sell to them or raise prices to make it less likely they’ll buy them if they can’t profit. And everybody else loses.
The entire GPU market has gone to shit.
It’s unacceptable that there’s new cards for sale (if you can even find one) that cost more than I paid for my 1080 Ti 8 years ago and have essentially the same amount of VRAM (12 GB vs 11 GB).
I thought that maybe the 9070 XT would be at least a reasonable option if I could get it for MSRP. Of course that launch ended up being another farce.
At this point it looks like I’m going to be riding my 1080 Ti until the bitter end. Sure, newer cards will wipe the floor with it, but I can’t justify the current prices.
You can always buy used. Even a 2080 TI would be a big step since you can use dlss with it, and prices for them are better now.
Yeah, I bought my 3090 used in 2022 for $600USD. It hasn’t had a single issue yet. Knock on wood
People really shouldn’t sleep on buying used. I know it can be risky, but if you do it through platforms that offer some amount of buyer protection for the first 30-90 days, I think the risk is greatly reduced. If your card doesn’t die in that early window, the chances of it dying in the next year or so are pretty low.
Look at it this way:
Many (most?) defective GPUs ship that way, and fail early. If you buy used, it’s already lasted that long.
I would look for a used 3060 ti because it has 12 gb and has about the same performance as a 2080 ti or 1080 ti.
The 3060 TI is 8GB IIRC, the base 3060 is 12 but somewhat slower, probably not a worthy upgrade over a 1080 TI.
I forgot nvm
The 1080 Ti was GOAT’d.
Mine was first in my PC, then it moved into my wife’s PC, and now it sits happily in a Jellyfin server. That lad has served me thoroughly.
I’m in this boat. I’ll ride my 1080 ti until it becomes unrepairable and dies. 🚀
How was that launch a farce? I went with my friend to MicroCenter on launch day and he got one without any problems. They had over 500 cards in stock. We just made a line to get in, picked out the model and made another line at the cashier. Easy.
He paid MSRP.
That only works if you live near a micro center.
It wasn’t the same experience over here. All MSRP cards sold out instantly on all stores. Whatever was actually in stock were all at least £100 over MSRP, and they quickly sold out too.
I’m sure it doesn’t help that Nvidia also runs Geforce Now - the higher they price their cards the more it can make their streaming GPU rental solution look like a better deal by comparison… (also since nobody can compete against GFN as Nvidia controls the pricing there as well and also blocks use of Geforce cards in datacenters).
I should look hard and long at Intel Arc if i was you. Those are nice and a clear move up the ladder from where you are at. And they are reasonably priced.
ARC unfortunately still has a few driver problems. While it’s infinitely better than when it launched, if you went with it most of the time you’d have to wait a few weeks before new games are playable.
a good reason not to buy just released beta software the devs are still debugging.
And some people wonder why I have near homicidal tendencies towards cryptobros and/or AI evangelist. This pretty much sums it up.
Why is your hobby more important than their hobby?
I consider myself an “AI evangelist,” but I hate Altman with a burning passion, probably more than you do, and hate data centers burning the planet.
I think running models locally, as hackable tools you understand, trained on very modest hardware (as Chinese companies are doing by necessity with the import restrictions), is a distinct thing. Doubly so if bitnet takes off and running stuff on-device becomes super cheap.
I feel like there’s even a smaller group of programmers that used blockchain for utilitarian purposes, and not pyramid schemes, but TBH it seems vanishingly small.
What I’m saying is… the problem is not AI, it’s billionaires.
It’s always billionaires.
Most of my hatred for it (if you can call it that) has to do with putting AI in everything. Blockchain makes sense in certain instances. I wouldn’t say for money, but for information tracking etc. AI LLM’s make sense in certain instances. But it’s everywhere and it’s taking the place of tech I use daily but doing a worse job overall by a wide enough margin that I just can’t stand it. And I don’t understand why companies want to put it in everything except that they don’t want to be the only ones not shilling it.
There are always people who come out of the woodwork to claim it works for them but half of them don’t even have a good understanding of how or why it works for them, and a lot of them are just lazy. I look at AI as a bandaid type tech in most of its applications right now and I’m tired of fighting to opt out of it.
It’s just corporations being shitty and cultish, no different than usual.
The sad thing in LLMs can be quite cool with the right implementations (like structured output to force correct syntax, complex grounding, and so on) but the sea of garbage floods any possibility of that.
Everyone deserves more choices. We need European gpus now!
The golden ticket for me is buying previous gen. Used.
I picked up a 7950 during the crypto crash. A 980 TI when everyone was doing exactly this and jumping on new stuff. My used 3090 is like $200 more than when I bought it, last I checked.
And the risk of it being faulty? Heck, I could’ve bought two of them and still come out ahead of these stupid new card prices.
This gen is still pretty screwed, though. 7900 prices may drop some with this, but still…
I had thought of that, but the 4080’s/4090’s were going for significantly more than the next gen cards were going for at MSRP.
I mean, look at this, the 5080 is MSRP $999 but here’s Newegg’s 4080s:
And looking at the “Buy it Now” prices for used models on eBay isn’t much better:
Where I live Nvidia GPUs are insanely priced or nonexistent while AMD sans 9070 has decent prices, check AMD cards too.
Absolutely, I have been. I was looking at some last-gen AMD cards, but used 7900 GREs and XTs are going for almost as much as an MSRP 5080, and unopened ones are going for the same or more.
If I had an immediate need for a card, I’d likely settle for that, but I’m still willing to be patient while keeping an eye on in-stock listings. I’m fortunate enough to at least have a PS5 and a decent laptop that can run newer PC games on modest settings, so I’m not in a rush.
7900s aren’t as outrageous:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=amd+7900&_odkw=rtx+4080&_udhi=1000
You are not wrong though, those 4080 prices are messed up.
It is very tempting. Would definitely recommend for anyone who needs something.
My current laptop that I bought during the pandemic shortages has a 2070 mobile chip which still works fine-ish for newer games. I’m tempted to look at basically anything better, but I’m not truly in a rush to upgrade just yet and want to make sure whatever I upgrade to is worth the price.
The main reason for my impetus at present was to try to get ahead of the Trump tariff price hikes, but I’ve basically accepted that as unavoidable at this point.
Insane
Hard to justify blowing a couple grand on a card when 5 years of GeForce Now costs well under half that amount. I normally dislike subscriptions but this one is solid IMO
That’s how subscription services get you. Why buy DVDs when you can stream all day long on Netflix? Suddenly, DVDs are no longer for sale and streaming services take down content for one reason or another. Then you have no other legal alternative but to pay whatever they ask, be shown whatever they want and continue to own none of it.
