Technology

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.

In a way, we brought this on ourselves by tolerating scalpers. Gamers made it known that they'll go hysterical and pay any price to have it now. If enough of us don't do that, scalping video cards won't be a lucrative business and the fuckers will be forced to give up. I guarantee you the reason the stock is disappearing so fast is because resellers have their fucking bots set up to spam all the retailer web sites, and the rest is people trying to compete with them.

What a rat race. Fuck the entire thing.

We have it better than we've ever had it at any point in the past, also: Broad PCI-E backwards compatibility means you can stick your old card in your new board and tough it out for a few months until the fervor dies down and/or the scalpers lose their shirts sitting on their inventory.

Also, I must say AMD makes great hardware, and tries as hard as it can to price/sell them uncompetitively.

The MI300X? Better than the H100, yet no one bought them because they priced gouge them, and priced gouged any sane lesser GPU for a dev machines. People would have worked around the funky software stack, but no.

Pro cards? Total joke. Gaming? See the article.

Even Strix Halo, the framework APU, is price gouged to hell. A cheap 32/40CU config with one cut-down CCD would be killer, but no, it’s mega expensive or a completely neutered integrated GPU, your choice.

I really don’t get it. The only explanation I can think of the Nvidia/AMD CEOs are colluding because they are second cousins (and they are actually second cousins).

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…

They are just price raping us now on very GPU release.

Yep, this basically sums up my experiences a couple months ago. I've been telling myself since about 2016 that I would save up to go all in and build a solid gaming desktop.

But then there were floods in southeast Asia hindering supplies where I lived. No biggie, they'd recover quick.

Then crypto took off and GPUs and some other hardware tripled or quadrupled in price. No biggie, it's a fad that will go away quick.

Then COVID destroyed production and distribution of computer hardware. No biggie, gives me time to save up more to afford these new crazy prices.

Then everyone needs GPUs for the AI craze, and prices went up even more. No biggie, I'll just...cope?

Finally, I was at the point of "Fuck it, I'm tired of waiting. I'm buying a 5080, even if it costs as much as 2 PS5s."

So I planned it out, made sure I had everything lined up to immediately snag one once they were available. And then day of:

• Nvidia's store: Never had any in stock at any point.

• Microcenter: In-store purchases only, and stores were given single-digit stock while hundreds of people queued up for days.

• Newegg: Never loaded until their stock was all gone.

• Best Buy: Had a very attractive "Add to Cart" button display for a period of about 10 minutes at random intervals throughout the day, which placed me into queues that all ended with me getting kicked out after a few minutes.

• Amazon: Well, fuck Amazon, but they didn't have any either.

So then I thought, forget Nvidia. Just because their cards are dropping earlier in the year doesn't mean it's them or nothing. I'll just get an AMD card if Nvidia doesn't have stock by then.

And, well...here we are in this article.

PC gaming is the best deal, eh?

The GPU market is a goddamn disaster. Nvidia can't even put the right amount of ROPs on a card or back up their "5070 is a 4090 hurr durr" claims, AMD ditching higher end GPUs, melting connectors, AI, AI, AI!!, etc. Even with Intel's Arc GPUs it's not enough to compete when Nvidia has all the market share in consumer cards.

I've got a 7800xt, a few 3090s in various gaming/video editing systems and a RX 6400 for a backup card. I'm not buying any more until this AI bubble bursts and cards start having actual amounts of uplift from generation to generation and when I can buy one without them getting botted to hell and back.