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Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

arstechnica.com

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Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#111

Post by Simon_says »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #92
jakebasile wrote: post #15

I'm legitimately worried about the long term future of my hobby (PC gaming) at this point. Prices like this have a cascade effect because when less people can afford to build a PC and/or upgrade there's less incentive for developers and publishers to spend time on the platform. Consoles are shielded by the ability of Sony and Microsoft to take losses which will be absorbed by online fees and higher game prices but no…

Why do people still think you need a high-end rig updated every year or two just to be a PC gamer? Almost every game I want to play runs satisfactorily on a five-year-old machine. This is bad for the tech-obsessed top 10% of PC gamers. For the rest of us it's meaningless, and it's not going to last in any case.

You should be glad those people exist, because they subsidize the R&D for people who buy older/cheaper cards.

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#112

Post by jpatte »

Interestingly the French market (and more generally the European Market?) seems to have been spared from that trend, at least for now. The prices have remained steady during the last year and there is still stock available for a large choice of card flavors. See for example https://www.materiel.net/achat/gtx-1080/catNom-cartes+graphi...

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#113

Post by Simon_says »

icelancer wrote: post #79
csours wrote: post #7

Sell pickaxes (during a gold rush).

What, in your definition, are the pickaxes?

About two years ago, I bought significant amounts (for me) of stock in both AMD and Nvidia on the selling pickaxes theory. I'm quite happy with my choice.

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#114

Post by hyperpallium »

gaius wrote: post #93
jakebasile wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gamers are complaining about why can't nVidia just ramp up their production. I don't see too much of that in gaming circles. It's understood that it would be risky as crypto will crash sooner than later. The anger in the PC community is almost exclusively directed at miners. Threads about it pop up on the daily, but what can we do? We could lobby NVIDIA/AMD to somehow implement restrictions on what the Gaming SKUs…

could lobby NVIDIA/AMD to somehow implement restrictions on what the Gaming SKUs Infact the opposite has happened. NVidia has restricted consumer cards from DCs with an exception for blockchains! They are very much making hay while the sun shines

I think something interesting will happen with TPU's.

nvidia's titan v has a 110 TFLOPS TPU (and only 12 TF GPU iirc). Ir's $3000, but that seems not reflect costs, but avoid cannablizing their even higher-end scientific computing offerings... so price could come down (to forestall competition).

Can TPUs give better ROI than GPUs? Conversely, will games end up exploiting TPUs?

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#115

Post by acoye »

wmf wrote: post #32
jakebasile wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gamers are complaining about why can't nVidia just ramp up their production. I don't see too much of that in gaming circles. It's understood that it would be risky as crypto will crash sooner than later. The anger in the PC community is almost exclusively directed at miners. Threads about it pop up on the daily, but what can we do? We could lobby NVIDIA/AMD to somehow implement restrictions on what the Gaming SKUs…

I wonder if they could cripple integer performance; this would prevent mining while probably not hurting gaming performance.

That may not impact the mining speeds that much as most integer operations would then be done using floats.

Also mining speeds are way more bottlenecked by memory speeds than GPU speeds these days.

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#116

Post by tedunangst »

jdietrich wrote: post #110
jakebasile wrote: post #15

I'm legitimately worried about the long term future of my hobby (PC gaming) at this point. Prices like this have a cascade effect because when less people can afford to build a PC and/or upgrade there's less incentive for developers and publishers to spend time on the platform. Consoles are shielded by the ability of Sony and Microsoft to take losses which will be absorbed by online fees and higher game prices but no…

Most PC gamers aren't using high-end machines and don't upgrade very often. The Steam Hardware Survey shows that the majority (74%) of PC gamers have a 1080p monitor and a plurality (37%) have a video card with 2GB of VRAM and 8GB of system RAM (47%). The GTX 1060 only recently overtook the GTX 750 Ti as the single most popular video card. Pricing of high-end hardware is largely irrelevant to the success of PC gaming…

Are those stats normalized for game purchases?

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#118

Post by cm2187 »

segmondy wrote: post #31

I wanted to buy 2 1080 for deep learning experiments, but that's going to have to wait. I picked up a used 32core 128gb server for $1000 recently... It's only a matter of time before these 1080 will be sold for pennies on the dollar. If your lively hood doesn't depend on it, wait.

Because of the spectre/meltdown mitigation, I would expect that we would see a sharp fall in price of used servers that use the 6th generation and before.

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#119

Post by PhasmaFelis »

Simon_says wrote: post #111
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people still think you need a high-end rig updated every year or two just to be a PC gamer? Almost every game I want to play runs satisfactorily on a five-year-old machine. This is bad for the tech-obsessed top 10% of PC gamers. For the rest of us it's meaningless, and it's not going to last in any case.

You should be glad those people exist, because they subsidize the R&D for people who buy older/cheaper cards.

Enh, honestly, if graphics somehow stopped advancing forever right now, it wouldn't bother me that much as a gamer. The era where good game concepts just couldn't be made because the hardware couldn't handle it are long over. We're just adding successive layers of polish now. That's nice, but it doesn't add much to gameplay or fun.

Re: Why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

#120

Post by baldfat »

jdietrich wrote: post #110
jakebasile wrote: post #15

I'm legitimately worried about the long term future of my hobby (PC gaming) at this point. Prices like this have a cascade effect because when less people can afford to build a PC and/or upgrade there's less incentive for developers and publishers to spend time on the platform. Consoles are shielded by the ability of Sony and Microsoft to take losses which will be absorbed by online fees and higher game prices but no…

Most PC gamers aren't using high-end machines and don't upgrade very often. The Steam Hardware Survey shows that the majority (74%) of PC gamers have a 1080p monitor and a plurality (37%) have a video card with 2GB of VRAM and 8GB of system RAM (47%). The GTX 1060 only recently overtook the GTX 750 Ti as the single most popular video card. Pricing of high-end hardware is largely irrelevant to the success of PC gaming…

I can't get a mid level graphics card either. These cards in the article are $200 and $250 cards from AMD. They are going for over $400.

I am the person that buys $200 graphic cards and high end is $500+ like a 1080ti or some sort of Titan. I always thought that $200 was the sweet spot with the best price to performance ratio. I can't buy a $200 card now.

I was lucky and got a new AMD 480 last year for $220. It sadly has an issue and needs to go in for warranty (3 years). It can only handle the simplest of graphics or it hangs and freezes the computer. No big deal, I wanted to make my kids a Minecraft and coding computer and I can't buy a decent $150 card either.

RAM is also sky high and I do video editing from time to time an want at least 16 GB in my rig. That would cost $100 18 months ago and now thats $225+ also due to the miners.

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