4 ms·

Could it be related to world-wide inflation and decreasing real wages? Salaries have not kept up, hence people can't afford as powerful hardware as they used to

Could it be related to world-wide inflation and decreasing real wages? Salaries have not kept up, hence people can't afford as powerful hardware as they used to. It also seems that top-of-the-line hardware don't depreciate as fast as it used to. Many several year's old GPUs are still expensive, for example.

ekianjo 2y ago
> Many several year's old GPUs are still expensive, They are propped up by demand and the fact that most of the new GPUs are marginally better than previous ones.
- ttt3ts 2y ago
  New GPUs are quite a bit better than previous ones but perf oer dollar has been flat for a while now. Also, if you're talking gaming GPUs old ones work fine given there has not been a new PlayStation or Xbox in many years. Min spec for many games is 5 years old tech
  - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
    For gaming GPUs the 5090 is something like 20-50% better than the 4090 in raster performance.
    - blangk 2y ago
      Yep. The whole fake frames thing seems like a witch hunt to me. If you can actually get a 5090 and were previously fully utilising a 3090 or 4090, it is a significant upgrade, as long as it doesn't burn your house down.
      - 7speter 2y ago
        I just don't think the 5090 is for gamers; it's for hobbyist AI people who want to buy multiple to run high parameter LLMs. Fake frames are irrelevant to this crowd, even if they take one of their 5090s aside to game once in a while.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        In situations where the budget matters, you need to take that 20-50% better performance and drop it by the 25% higher launch price. And the generated frames are misleading because they don't work very well if your source framerate is low.
        keyringlight 2y ago
        The generated frames thing is interesting as it's an obvious example of the whole discussion around halo products (the x080 or x090 cards), "the rich get richer", it takes up a lot of air in the room but is only appropriate for a small vocal proportion of the market. As you say you need a good framerate to start with before generated frames make sense so either you're already running well with a high tier card and are further able to show off the combination of framerate/resolution/detail level, or running a lower tier card at lower settings turning the graphics down further which can be a very obvious trade off. Less demanding games which are generally online competitive usually wouldn't do as well with any extra latency introduced, and the situation where I've heard it would be a good fit is emulators or any kind of game where the CPU is the limiting factor
    - m4rtink 2y ago
      Apparently also 50% more likely to make things catch on fire! ;-)
    - ekianjo 2y ago
      thats the only GPU that is worth the upgrade. All the other ones are meh.
  - Rury 2y ago
    Sure they are better... but once you factor for die size, core count, wattage and so on... the improvements being made are less impressive than they first seem.
lolinder 2y ago
Someone already gave the answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43030465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43030465 It's caused by people failing to read the fine print on the graph.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  I had the same instinct as you, but this comment changed my mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43030614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43030614
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Nah, I read that but I'm not convinced. The reply to them from palijer is correct: inaccurate does not mean lower, it just means inaccurate. Fewer samples means less data means more room for weird sampling errors skewing the data. There's nothing inherent in that that suggests we ought to assume an upward skew. The best we can say is that the sampling skew this month is different than the sampling skew in past Januaries. That could be due to some interesting cause, it could be totally random, and there's zero point in speculating about it until we have more data.
epolanski 2y ago
That would not change the expectation of having faster hardware with time at the same/lower price.

ekianjo 2y ago

> Many several year's old GPUs are still expensive, They are propped up by demand and the fact that most of the new GPUs are marginally better than previous ones.

ttt3ts 2y ago
New GPUs are quite a bit better than previous ones but perf oer dollar has been flat for a while now. Also, if you're talking gaming GPUs old ones work fine given there has not been a new PlayStation or Xbox in many years. Min spec for many games is 5 years old tech
- teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  For gaming GPUs the 5090 is something like 20-50% better than the 4090 in raster performance.
  - blangk 2y ago
    Yep. The whole fake frames thing seems like a witch hunt to me. If you can actually get a 5090 and were previously fully utilising a 3090 or 4090, it is a significant upgrade, as long as it doesn't burn your house down.
    - 7speter 2y ago
      I just don't think the 5090 is for gamers; it's for hobbyist AI people who want to buy multiple to run high parameter LLMs. Fake frames are irrelevant to this crowd, even if they take one of their 5090s aside to game once in a while.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      In situations where the budget matters, you need to take that 20-50% better performance and drop it by the 25% higher launch price. And the generated frames are misleading because they don't work very well if your source framerate is low.
      - keyringlight 2y ago
        The generated frames thing is interesting as it's an obvious example of the whole discussion around halo products (the x080 or x090 cards), "the rich get richer", it takes up a lot of air in the room but is only appropriate for a small vocal proportion of the market. As you say you need a good framerate to start with before generated frames make sense so either you're already running well with a high tier card and are further able to show off the combination of framerate/resolution/detail level, or running a lower tier card at lower settings turning the graphics down further which can be a very obvious trade off. Less demanding games which are generally online competitive usually wouldn't do as well with any extra latency introduced, and the situation where I've heard it would be a good fit is emulators or any kind of game where the CPU is the limiting factor
  - m4rtink 2y ago
    Apparently also 50% more likely to make things catch on fire! ;-)
  - ekianjo 2y ago
    thats the only GPU that is worth the upgrade. All the other ones are meh.
- Rury 2y ago
  Sure they are better... but once you factor for die size, core count, wattage and so on... the improvements being made are less impressive than they first seem.

lolinder 2y ago

Someone already gave the answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43030465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43030465 It's caused by people failing to read the fine print on the graph.

rahimnathwani 2y ago
I had the same instinct as you, but this comment changed my mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43030614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43030614
- lolinder 2y ago
  Nah, I read that but I'm not convinced. The reply to them from palijer is correct: inaccurate does not mean lower, it just means inaccurate. Fewer samples means less data means more room for weird sampling errors skewing the data. There's nothing inherent in that that suggests we ought to assume an upward skew. The best we can say is that the sampling skew this month is different than the sampling skew in past Januaries. That could be due to some interesting cause, it could be totally random, and there's zero point in speculating about it until we have more data.

epolanski 2y ago

That would not change the expectation of having faster hardware with time at the same/lower price.