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9 hoursI was momentarily confused that this article is pretty much the script of a YT video by Hardware Unboxed I saw recently, but then I noticed that he is literally the author.
While all these developments point in a very worrying direction, I think there are some positives to this: Fewer performance gains means longer upgrade cycles, longer support windows and less pressure on consumers to keep soending money on upgrades (although the eventual upgrade is now way more expensive).
- mursejoy@lemmy.zipEnglish28 minutes
I’d rather shell out of a 9070XT/5080 type card once every 5-6 years instead of a 3060 tier card once a generation.
I hope longer upgrade cycles for both companies will force more game optimizations and less ewaste over time.
Fewer performance gains means longer upgrade cycles, longer support windows and less pressure on consumers to keep soending money on upgrades (although the eventual upgrade is now way more expensive).
You have more faith in billion dollar companies than I do, if you think its gonna lead to more support and less pressure to keep spending.
I have no doubt that the companies will keep high margins and incentivize people to keep spending, but the customers have a choice when to upgrade their hardware and I believe based on these developments that they will choose to upgrade less frequently than they used to.
- popcar2@piefed.caEnglish1 day
TL;DR:
But really, I don’t buy that Nvidia can’t regularly release improved GPUs for consumers. Consumer hardware is reaching a peak but there’s still a lot more that can be done in terms of efficiency. Just look at how great modern flagship phone chips are. The M5 Max macbook pro for example is sooooooooo much more efficient than a typical gaming laptops, and it’s in a slim chassis.
Nvidia just stopped caring because they make too much money selling to data centers now, and they are releasing regular improvements for their high end server hardware. Consumer GPUs are just pocket money to them now, and there’s practically no competition so why would they bother releasing something new?
You can’t really blame a shortage of DRAM without acknowledging that you caused the shortage by pre-ordering two years worth, and allocating it only to data center customers. Louis Rossman has a few good takes on it. One is the, “I’m suing Samsung” video. The recent Gamer’s Nexus piece where he’s talking with that unboxing YouTuber is pretty spot on too.
- DougPiranha42@lemmy.worldEnglish1 day
Unrelated to the topic of the article, looking at the graph made me realize that GPUs didn’t use to be so expensive, and the change is not so recent.
I have been gaming on PCs since I was a kid, first on a 286 in DOS. I don’t remember what were the first games, but I think it was ASCII graphics. Sprites were of course even better.https://cdn.mobygames.com/screenshots/2255336-prehistorik-dos-level-1-begins.png
I have been building my own computers for decades. I never wanted to spend more than necessary, so I only updated things every now and then, and I always picked a good value GPU from the budget to mid tier. I always understood that PC gaming has a niche where people build monster configurations with powerful GPUs to run games at max settings with unnecessary high resolution and frame rates. It makes sense for a hobby, it’s cool. But you don’t actually need that much power to enjoy games, right?
What I just realized is that the slice of people who look for high performance GPUs for games is likely much bigger than I thought. At some point the industry made consumers believe that you need 4k and 120 fps (or maybe more). That the point of PC gaming is to beat the specs of consoles. But that’s so not true. A PC is great because it’s a general purpose open platform to run whatever software you want. If a game is not fun at mid setting full HD 30 fps, it’s not fun. How many of the people dishing out north of $300 on a GPU are competitive e sports players or popular streamers? Probably most of them are not. 90% of the progress in GPU hardware is likely spent on generating frames that are not perceived at resolutions that are not seen.
- carmo55@lemmy.zipEnglish3 hours
1440p 170hz is an enormous difference compared to 1080p 60hz. Especially in something like Path of Exile, where you’re reading a lot of small text, the resolution is very meaningful. If you’ve tried high refresh rate, 60hz feels unbearable afterwards, it’s massive.
The problem lies moreso in unoptimised AAA slop games which use all your GPU for shitty graphics.
- 1 day
You just accurately spelled out what my intuition was yelling, but I lacked the contextual vocabulary to describe. Thank you! (Adventure on my dad’s Leading Edge 286 was a blast!)
That means you remember the thrill of getting the Diamond Multimedia Viper SVGA card (or similar)and being able to “crank up” the resolution beyond 800x600.
Or:
Set Blaster= A220 I5 D9Enjoy your day, fellow vintage builder.
- 21 hours
This is essentially why I’ve bought consoles for decades. GPU prices just reached remarkably stupid territory way too fast.
- cecilkorik@piefed.caEnglish24 hours
250W and $1000 is plenty for a GPU and I am willing to die on this hill, apparently with an AMD card in my hand.
- MuttMutt@lemmy.worldEnglish22 hours
Companies chase the money. Nvidia was never for gamers, it was for investors and gaming just happened to be where the money was. Now it’s not and people are realizing the truth of it all. To corporations we are nothing other than disposable profit margins. If the corporations can find a better profit elsewhere they will gladly do so. It’s been that way for a while.
- MonkderVierte@lemmy.zipEnglish4 hours
It’s not a field where you can startup with a few millions investment, that’s the problem.
- 4am@lemmy.zipEnglish23 hours
The real reason
NVIDIAbig tech has abandonedgamersall personal computing - NauticalNoodle@lemmy.mlEnglish22 hours
"For the first time, the price increase was larger than the performance uplift.
Nvidia tried to sweep this issue under the rug with promised technologies such as ray tracing and upscaling. We all know how well that played out for the GeForce 20 series."
Is there somebody here that know’s what they’re talking about because I very much do not know “how well that played out?”
- Nerdulous@lemmy.zipEnglish21 hours
Nvidia focused more on the ability to perform real time ray tracing (RTX) than on the raw performance of the cards. At the time the RTX performance of the cards was hardly passable and the amount of games that even supported the technically was VERY limited but the fact that they could perform ray tracing in real time at all was a bit of a marvel.
Nvidia leaned hard into this and tried very hard to get everyone on board with this paradigm shift. As reviewers tested these cards and found out that this technology is still very immature, most of them decided to highlight the performance per dollar instead of the new technology. This meant that informed gamers didn’t really consider RTX part of the equation when buying the 2000 series cards.
When you looked at it from a pure rasterization perspective the massive increase in price for the marginal increase in gains made these cards really unappealing. Especially to those who already had 1000 and even 900 series cards. As a result this was a generation a lot of gamers skipped or instead choose to go with 1600 series cards later on. These were basically 2000 series cards without the ray tracing and a cheaper price point making them more appealing.
