This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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:
7900s aren’t as outrageous:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=amd+7900&_trksid=p2334524.m4084.l1313&_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.
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.
Insane
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.
And some people wonder why I have near homicidal tendencies towards cryptobros and/or AI evangelist. This pretty much sums it up.
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.
Why is your hobby more important than their hobby?
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.
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.
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 ͡°)
