Too bad I can’t fucking buy one in EU. And those that appear to be in stock, I sure as hell am not paying 1200+ € for this.
Buying graphic cards has become total bullshit and I’ve been buying them for over 20 years now. And not only 1 every 5+ years. I’ve bought a lot of them. The shit that’s happening now is total BS and this is what’s actually killing PC gaming. It’s not game services or consoles. It’s this fuckery with BS imaginary MSRP prices and corporate greed from start to end.
In the end consoles will kill the PC because there you get entire functioning gaming system for half the price of just motherfucking graphic card.
I agree the new graphics cards market is a mess, but thats because they’re being bought for AI and crypto which is inflating prices.
However its not killing PC gaming. PC gaming is the single biggest platform, and in reality for most gamers the latest generation of cards are way over powered for most games. In a way we’ve never seen before.
The AAA part of the games industry is in crisis, because we’re now well beyond the point of diminishing returns for graphics. Graphics quality is already very high and each innovation is now having minimal impact on game quality. Its hard to innovate when you’re near photo realism - you just get closer and closer. The last generation of cards are already above what is needed to run new games well. And people arent buying $70+ games when all they offer is graphics boosts and crap gameplay - thats breaking the business model of the big publishers who lazily relied on graphics to drive sales.
The PC market has fragmented into lots of smaller indie games. Its big enough overall that a small game targeted at fans of specific genres can be high quality and successful enough. There are so many games being released all the time now that the market may even be saturated - its an amazing time for player choice.
Personally I’m in no rush to upgrade my 3070. Probably won’t until something like Witcher 4 comes out and even then maybe I won’t need to go to the highest end. Witcher 3 is 10 years old and still looks spectacular to me, Cyberpunk 2077 is 5 years old and I play it on my 3070 card and a separate PC with an integrated gpu. I barely notice the graphic quality difference between the 2 devices even though the 3070 is running at the highest settings while the iGPU PC is running at mid settings.
They are not really bought for crypto. The energy cost to mine shitcoins is so high that you don’t make any money unless you live in a country with cheap electricity. Even then, who wants a multiple year pay-off on the card at MSRP and even longer getting scalped?
At that point it’s better to order a proper bitcoin miner
the latest generation of cards are way over powered for most games
And then we have Monster Hunter Wilds
I stopped at Worlds. A second iteration is rarely better than the first in AAA.
I maxed out all graphics, with DLSS set to quality, and it rarely drops frames on my 3080 Ti (and 99% of the time, it happens at base camp, after I’ve had the game running for hours). Just don’t aim for 4K 144fps or you’re gonna have a bad time. In my experience, fill rate is a huge bottleneck in modern games (which is why upscalers work so well)
I’m on a 4090+9800x3d. I’m capping it at 60 with DLSS Quality and kept textures on High and It’s still sluggish and stuttery (mostly at camp like you said).
Too bad I can’t fucking buy one in EU.
The RDNA-4-based cards just started coming out.
I pointed this out in a comment yesterday, where someone was looking for a latest-model Nvidia card: last-gen AMD RDNA 3-based cards are pretty readily available.
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/4917vs5956/Radeon-RX-7800-XT-vs-Radeon-RX-9070-XT
A Radeon RX 7800 XT doesn’t score far off a Radeon RX 9070 XT on Passmark. Both have 16GB of VRAM.
It doesn’t trace rays that well. There are games out there that require it now.
Passmark is not a tool to compare graphic cards. RX 9070 XT compares to RX 7900 XTX and RTX 5070Ti. RX 7800 XT is not even a competition. It’s not a bad card, but isn’t close at all. Just 16GB memory tells nothing really.
I just buy second hand ones now, got a 3050 last year for £110. I don’t really think there’s ever a reason to buy a gpu day one unless it somehow helps your job, but the improvements with each release are less and less each year so you’re often just better getting the previous gen second hand.
110 quid for a used 3050 is borderline highway robbery. 50-60 is already paying too much for that card, especially used.
In the UK right now I can only find a single eBay auction under 100 and everywhere else now has them at about 150+ most at 200 at the moment. I’d say I got a good timely deal.
My brother in Christ, you can get, right now, RX 5600 XTs in the UK for 70 to 80 quid. 110£ for a 3050 is absolutely a terrible deal, it’s purposefully paying more, for less.
It’s equivalent to paying 3k quid for a 5090 in the used market.
I was making sure to get a short card too by the way, not just any old gpu. I would’ve preferred an amd card bit like cause I’m planning on moving to bazzite. I’ll probably get one of those now cheaper rx cards, if size permits, and I’ll just be passing on my 3050 to my partner.
To be honest the 3050 has been more than enough for me. I’ve not come across a game I care about that it can’t run at a decent quality though.
Console prices are also rising and the old hardware subsidy model is becoming less viable (largely due to broader increases in price for components). With the exception being Nintendo since they always use hardware that several generations behind the current state of the art.
Gamers Nexus went over some available numbers and the 9070 is small scale compared to others. It is also massively overpriced relative to MSRP numbers. I wouldn’t touch anything under 16GB now if you want to play around with AI more seriously. I have 16 and it is capable, but I really wish I had more and can only barely run the ones that are both good enough to be broadly useful and have source I can hack around with a lot. I almost got a machine with a 12gb GPU and am very happy I did not.
It’s also depends on your use cases. I have 10 GB VRAM and local LLMs work ok for spell/style checking, idea generation and name generation (naming planert clusters thematically in Star Ruler 2).
I get functional code snippets for around 3 of 4 questions in any major or most minor languages from a local model. I also get good summarized information about code functionality if I paste up to around 1k lines into the context. I also get fun collaborative story writing in different formats using unique themes from my own science fiction universe. I have explored smaller models in hopes of fine tuning before I discovered the utility of a much larger but quantized model. I never use anything smaller than a 70B or 8×7B because there is no real comparison in my experience and uses. On my hardware, these generate a text stream close to my reading pace.
Image and video generation is where you see that VRAM bottleneck. I have a 12GB 4070 and it cannot generate any video despite my best efforts/tweaks.
