Technology

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:

• Nvidia's store: Never had any in stock at any point.

• Microcenter: In-store purchases only, and stores were given single-digit stock while hundreds of people queued up for days.

• Newegg: Never loaded until their stock was all gone.

• 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.

• 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?

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.

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.

Ya I get the hype and the desire to get these cards but do you really NEED it? This is like waiting in line for days to buy the newest iPhone.

You can play all the latest games on the highest setting with the previous generation cards, and they are in stock too.

At this point buying the card isn’t about need. It’s just purely status symbol and people in this article are complaining like spoiled children that they can’t get exactly what they want the SECOND the card hits the market. Jfc.

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.

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.

Everyone deserves more choices. We need European gpus now!

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.

I stood in line at Microcenter Thursday morning to get a 9070 XT. I arrived at about 8AM (an hour before they opened), and the line was already wrapped around the side of the building. They let people in slowly after opening (apparently so as not to overwhelm the sales staff), and I got near the front door by about 10. They were handing out vouchers, and they actually still had quite a few left, with almost all the different models available when they got to me. After I got my card and left, I looked back at the store and the line still wrapped around the side of the building.

Frankly, from my perspective, I'd say the availability of cards was "surprisingly good." It's just that there was so much pent-up demand, even "surprisingly good" supply wasn't good enough.

You want to know what the punchline is, though? Not expecting to have much choice in cards, and not having had time to research the differences between the ones made by different board partners, I ended up getting the "Gigabyte Gaming OC" version, which sounded good because it had a slightly higher max clock speed but was still $600. In retrospect, I should've gotten the PowerColor "Reaper" version because every other version is too wide to fit in my ITX computer case. [Womp, womp.] So now I have to decide between paying extra to replace a case that I otherwise like, or try to hope the cards actually do get restocked in a timely fashion (and still at MSRP) so I can attempt an exchange? I guess the moral of the story is, even if you "win" it's still a fucking pain in the ass.

The last card I bought was a Radeon Vega 56, also on launch day (7.5 years ago!) and I was also damn lucky to get it. I cannot believe that the GPU market has been continuously fucked up since then!

In EU basically the retailers were using on the fly price adjustment to gauge their own customers. There were several models at MSRP but all models that were AIB OC versions started at 749-799€ and were dynamically adjusted upwards. I know personally of several cases where people bought and were charged for the early cheaper price and the etailer cancelled their order to fulfill 100€ more expensive prices they were practicing post hoc. We need to amend legislation to make any sale binding from the moment you're charged any amount. In CZ the seller Alza was doing this.

Honestly, I'm just keeping my money in my saving account. No way I'm spending my hard-earned money on overpriced stuff, I can wait a while longer, and I'm considering a Steam Deck as my daily driver. Not a beast, but not excessively priced either.

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.

Also, I must say AMD makes great hardware, and tries as hard as it can to price/sell them uncompetitively.

The MI300X? Better than the H100, yet no one bought them because they priced gouge them, and priced gouged any sane lesser GPU for a dev machines. People would have worked around the funky software stack, but no.

Pro cards? Total joke. Gaming? See the article.

Even Strix Halo, the framework APU, is price gouged to hell. A cheap 32/40CU config with one cut-down CCD would be killer, but no, it’s mega expensive or a completely neutered integrated GPU, your choice.

I really don’t get it. The only explanation I can think of the Nvidia/AMD CEOs are colluding because they are second cousins (and they are actually second cousins).

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 just got the sole rx7900xtx I could find in the state last week.

Glad I didn't wait for this :/

I mean, as much as I like to criticize chip companies, it’s across the board.

In most industries, the owners are sticking it extra hard to the consumer.

All this article does is say tsk tsk instead of recognizing the late stage capitalism and pointing out our few options.