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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

• icelancer 9y ago
  The 1050 and the 1060 3GB GPUs are more than good enough to run any tier one game on nearly the highest graphics on a 24" monitor. Everything above it is just ridiculousness for the sake of being absurd in the gaming industry, and for benchmarks that don't reflect real usage - unlike GPU mining, where the cards are actually pushed to their maximums.
  • pcr0 9y ago
    I have the 1060 6GB. It can max out any game on my 1080p 60hz 24" monitor. However, that's table stakes these days. 1440p monitors are gaining ground as people realize the DPI difference between their PC monitor and their smartphone. Moreover, most people can also notice the difference between 60hz and 100hz monitors.
    • icelancer 9y ago
      So now we're talking about bleeding-edge technology in the 1440p / 100hz realm. I don't feel really bad that gamers can't readily get access to the technologies that drive the 0.0001% of gamers to these settings, no more than I feel bad for cryptocurrency miners who spend $1200 on a 1080ti and configure it like an idiot and get half the earning potential they should.
      • arvinsim 9y ago
        1440p is hardly bleeding edge in the productivity end. If you already have that kind of monitor, why not reuse it for gaming?
      • stordoff 9y ago
        ~4% of people are on 1440p or high monitors according to the Steam hardware survey - http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ It's high-end, but not exactly what I'd call bleeding-edge / 0.0001% of gamers.
    • skybrian 9y ago
      Why is a noticeable difference considered meaningful? It won't make the gameplay any better. (Asking as a Luddite who doesn't see the point of Retina displays.)
      • jakebasile 9y ago
        Gameplay is only part of what a game offers. Increased realism or visual acuity from higher resolutions, larger textures, higher framerates, better anti-aliasing, better shadow rendering, and so on can contribute to feeling more immersed in the world of the game. Many gamers, myself included, use gaming as an escape from the world - it is helpful that the "world" I escape to look and feel real within the context of the fictional world.
      • pcr0 9y ago
        I don't have a strong argument for DPI in gaming, I find DPI to be more noticeable when watching movies/reading text. Going from 60 => 100 fps on the other hand makes fast-paced games feel much more fluid and responsive.
  • usaar333 9y ago
    1060 3GB cards are also going through price shocks. I bought a 6GB Geforce 1060 for $250 in Oct, 2016. Even the 3GB version is going for $450+ now
• _coldfire 9y ago
  >I'm legitimately worried about the long term future of my hobby (PC gaming) The equipment required for gaming loses value very quickly. Old 7970's released in 2012 command amazing resale prices in 2018. Everything else in a rig back then is now worthless apart from scrap metal. GPU's are one of the biggest expenses for gaming, as a hobby it got far cheaper. The fear is unfounded and this is typical alarm-journalism. Now if only CPU's held value 6 years from now.
  • bo1024 9y ago
    My i7 2600k from 2011 is still doing great now, even not overclocked. Maybe not much resale, but I would guess it would play almost all games today fine (not much of a gamer myself). Actually, the upgrade from DDR3 to DDR4 is probably as much of a factor.
    • freeflight 9y ago
      As an avid gamer, with an i7 2600k@5GHZ I can confirm that it's still up to the task with anything I've thrown at it so far, the bottleneck is pretty much always the GPU, and it's not looking like that will be changing anytime soon. And I'm still sticking with DDR3, which runs with way sharper timings compared to DDR4.
  • gspetr 9y ago
    Monetary value, perhaps. Gaming value? Actually the reverse is true - everything in my i5-3570K's rig is from 2012, except for the GTX 1080 and it ran everything 2017 @1440p very well. Admittedly no BF1 or PUBG as I grew tired of the FPS genre a long time ago.
  • distances 9y ago
    > Old 7970's released in 2012 command amazing resale prices in 2018. Everything else in a rig back then is now worthless apart from scrap metal. RAM is much more expensive and keeps resale value well. I could sell my 16GB from 2012 now almost for twice the price (!!), which is also keeping me from upgrading to 32GB.
• stordoff 9y ago
  > Consoles are shielded by the ability of Sony and Microsoft to take losses which will be absorbed by online fees and higher game prices I imagine they are also shielded to some extent by being AMD APU-based, so the market for discrete GPUs has less of an effect.
  • jagger27 9y ago
    AMD APUs (and Intel+AMD Graphics APUs) might be what keep PC gaming alive for the time being. If AMD can pack a chip that can match an RX 460 onto a single die for something like $200 it'd be the goto chip for an entry level system.
• fermienrico 9y ago
  Gamers are complaining about why can't nVidia just ramp up their production. Having worked in a Fab and an assembly factory, there is a tremendous amount of coordination that needs to happen. Let's forget the business aspects for a moment - in order to ramp up production, it is not just building more lines. Silicon industry supply chains are mind bogglingly complex from oil-free-air supply hardware, etching chemicals supplier, automation equipment all the way to the copper mine. All of these interdependent supply chains have to scale in perfect coordination without an exception to be able to scale production. Then there is the business side - building more lines could be foolish investment if the LRP (long range projections) is weak. nVidia fabs their chips at TSMC. Say, TSMC has wafers ready but the assembly houses are struggling to keep up - the entire supply chain is broken and demand cannot be met.
  • jakebasile 9y ago
    > 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 can be used for as they do with the Quadro/FirePro workstation cards, but it's unclear if that would work let alone if it's technically/legally possible. It's a bad time to be a PC gamer, and just months ago it was a great time to be a PC gamer.
    • wmf 9y ago
      I wonder if they could cripple integer performance; this would prevent mining while probably not hurting gaming performance.
      • acoye 9y ago
        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.
• nefitty 9y ago
  "... ML is at least useful to humanity (sometimes), smartphones and tablets are tangible products, and price fixing can be investigated and punished." I'm amused that you're qualifying the worthiness of a project by its usefulness to humanity. In comparison to PC gaming, to me, revolutionizing the financial world seems a lot more "useful to humanity".
  • jakebasile 9y ago
    > revolutionizing the financial world seems a lot more "useful to humanity". 1. Citation needed. 2. Revolutions aren't always positive changes.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  Are there any non-VR games that even push the 1080ti? It seems like you'd need some giant 4k monitor to make it sweat. But also Steam doesn't seem to be releasing a ton of graphics-intensive games. It seems much more cost effective to get away with a lower price and less intensive art requirements and focus on gameplay. And less graphics puts you in a safer place as far as ports to consoles and tablets/mobile (e.g. Stardew Valley). The Vive HD upgrade will push the envelope further, but I don't think VR has great success. (Elite Dangerous in particular gets boring because it's rather easy to make a ton of credits to afford everything)
  • sgtmas2006 9y ago
    1080TI can take heavy hits at 2560x1080 even, Battlefield 1 max settings can see 90 FPS at times. 2560x1080 @ 200hz it can't even come close to consistently with high-end games and settings. PUBG? frames are meh. Even with an overclocked card it can be rough sometimes in my experience. Personally i'll be upgrading to the next card that trumps the 1080 ti and moving from 2560x1080 200hz (for all but CS, cs is 1280x960 @ 144 on another monitor) and going back to 1080p @ 250hz. ultrawide is god-tier for movies and productivity work, though.
    • chrisper 9y ago
      I just upgraded to 2560x1080 and was wondering if 3440x1440 is worth it. But just the idea of having to push that many pixel made me decide that 1080p is enough. I also have a 200Hz Monitor, but I do not mind if I do not get 200Fps.
    • domsl 9y ago
      And here I set in front of 1680x1050 with an ATI Radeon HD 5770 playing Rocket League on Minecraft like graphics so the the splitscreen with a friend does not stutter noticeably. :D
    • Retric 9y ago
      90 vs 200 FPS is meaningless on it's own. If it feels off something else on your rig I'd messed up. Check latency on your keyboard / monitor etc.
• bufferoverflow 9y ago
  Long term is not a problem actually, with high demand more factories will be built, but it takes time. Short-term, we're stuck with high prices.
• fellellor 9y ago
  I remember when the PS3 and Xbox360 had just come out, and everyone was screaming from the rooftops about how PC gaming will just crash and burn. Not for a week or two, but for years after those boxes had been released. So you're saying PC gaming survived that sustained direct threat only to be wiped out by cryptocurrency mining that isn't even concerned with gaming? This is a silly exaggeration. In the long term, if the crypto market collapses the prices will come back to normal. If it thrives instead, the GPU manufacturers will probably scale up their production lines to meet demand. Or maybe a miracle will happen and we'll see some really good GPU manufacturers pop up who'll make the market more competitive.
  • freeflight 9y ago
    > I remember when the PS3 and Xbox360 had just come out, and everyone was screaming from the rooftops about how PC gaming will just crash and burn. Not for a week or two, but for years after those boxes had been released. This still lead to the situation that, for years, AAA publishers wouldn't touch the PC gaming market with a ten-foot pole and focused pretty much all of their efforts on the 7. console generation, this was additionally compounded by the "piracy factor". During that time PC gaming pretty much only had MMORPG's (which made the big bucks due to subscription-based payment), some RTS and a couple of rare exceptions in the FPS genre going for it while Steam was still busy establishing itself and the indie scene was nowhere to be found yet. It was a rather boring time to be a PC gamer as you'd miss out on many of the interesting and unique releases due to them being only released on consoles.
    • Fnoord 9y ago
      PC as in Windows, or Linux/Mac? Big titles like Quake and Unreal were available on PC (meaning x86-32 plus Windows or x86-64 plus Windows in my post though things like Wine have been amazing for me). There's always been an ample amount of games available on PC. Whether they were boring or not is a matter of opinion (I wouldn't say missing out on say Resident Evil is any issue). I am entirely positive all these games had recent equivalents in their genres. I said recent because else the comparison is too broad. Even Rez is just a newer version of Space Harrier, or compare first Doom or Quake VS last. Also, some game vendors sign exclusive deals with a console vendor where they initially only release the game for that specific console. Then you have to buy the console, or wait. So yeah curious what you felt you were missing out on. Personally, I don't like consoles because I got nothing with this whole Trusted Computing thing. Instead I got a Steam Link for 5 EUR during Black Friday.
• yuhong 9y ago
  There is a side effect in that the margins of prebuilt PCs should rise.
• PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  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.
  • usaar333 9y ago
    Depends on how quality your five-year old machine is. Graphics matter, less CPUs these days. e.g. I found I could play high-end games (Deus Ex: MD for instance) fine on my rig with a Core i7-3770 (almost 6 years old!). However, it lagged on my original Geforce GTX 650 (~4.5 years old at that time), prompting an upgrade to a Geforce 1060 (an upper-mid end card that is now super expensive)
  • lithos 9y ago
    Games I shove the most time at aren't even that intensive. Klei, and Zachtronic games.
    • reificator 9y ago
      If those games are your thing, you'd probably love Factorio.
    • rwmj 9y ago
      We've had the most fun recently with one of those "Pandora's Box" pirate 1980s arcade simulators. I believe internally it runs on a 32 bit ARM chip.
  • Simon_says 9y ago
    You should be glad those people exist, because they subsidize the R&D for people who buy older/cheaper cards.
    • PhasmaFelis 9y ago
      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.
• jmull 9y ago
  Don’t worry. This kind of supply constraint is an intrinsically short-term thing. Either... * crypto mining will crash (in which case you’ll be able to get powerful cards for cheap since the secondhand market will be flooded) * or crypto mining will move on from the stop-gap measure of using gaming cards (more sophisticated setups will be more efficient and everyone is competing) * or — in the highly unlikely event the current situation proves to be stable — card manufacturers will ramp up production
  • bootlooped 9y ago
    I agree with all of these. I think the biggest worry is that graphics cards manufacturers will be, justifiably, very reluctant to ramp up production due to the how volatile the crypto currency ecosystem is. If they first ramped up production to meet increased demand, your scenario 1 (crypto market crashes) would hit them double hard since not only will they not be able to sell lots of cards to miners, but the miners will be selling their used cards for cut-rate prices.
• jdietrich 9y ago
  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 as a platform. The majority of users have always opted for value-oriented hardware. http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
  • tedunangst 9y ago
    Are those stats normalized for game purchases?
  • baldfat 9y ago
    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.
    • hanbura 9y ago
      The effects on prices are quite bad, but the pendulum always comes back in the other direction two. Every GPU shortage leads to the second hand market getting flooded a few years later with used mining GPUs. So in effect we get short term problems, but if you time your purchases correctly you can get deals too.
      • dogma1138 9y ago
• jrs95 9y ago
  I had no issues at all getting a 1080 when those were new. I don’t think the next generation will really be that bad either. Even with what happened with the Vega release, it was easier to find a Vega GPU than it was to find a Nintendo Switch when those were just coming out.
• Joeri 9y ago
  Let’s add some perspective. The average price of a PC in 1995, right in the middle of PC gaming’s glory years, was $1500 which is $2500 in today’s currency. That’s an average pc, not top of the line, which went a multiple of that. Unless average graphics cards start costing $1000 we’re nowhere near 90’s prices. PC gaming will do fine. Don’t worry. Maybe game makers will be a little slower to move to higher end specs, and that’s about all it will amount to.