Thing is: there is always the “next better thing” around the corner. That’s what progress is about. The only thing you can do is choose the best available option for you when you need new hardware and be done with it until you need another upgrade.
Exactly. The best time to buy a graphics card is never
really my rule of thumb has always been when it’s a significant upgrade.
for a long time i didn’t really upgrade until it was a 4x increase over my old. certain exceptions were occasionally made. nowadays i’m a bit more opportunistic in my upgrades. but i still seek out ‘meaningful’ upgrades. upgrades that are a decent jump over the old. typically 50% improvement in performance, or upgrades i can get for really cheap.
4x…? Even in older cards that’s more than a decade between cards.
A 4080 is only 2.5x as powerful as a 1080ti, those are 5 years apart.
What’s wrong with upgrading once every 5-10 years? Not everyone plays the latest games on 4k Ultra
Admittedly 4x is a bit steep, more like 3-4x
Starfield requires a minimum 1070ti to play. It’s not just about fidelity, you just wouldn’t be able to play any newer games.
I had a 1080ti and the only game that really gave me grief playing on high settings was Starfield. I’m not saying older cards won’t have problems playing newer games but I am saying all cards have problems playing Starfield.
Cry’s in 970
Dude, there’s dozens of us!
It depends on what you need. I think usually you can get the best bang for buck by buying the now previous generation when the new one is released.
Yup just picked up a whole PC with rtx3090 for $800.
New or used?
Used
On what platform? eBay?
Best Buy has refurbished PC’s with 4070s for under a grand right now.
Yeah eBay Canada, was a great deal
Graphics card. Not even once.
Real gamers use ayahuasca.
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Is it compound or straight percentage?
Cuz if it’s just straight percentage then it’s $20 a year, whereas if it is compound then it’s a 2X multiplier every three and a half years roughly.
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So if I waited roughly 35 years then I would get $1 million…
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I think I got about 77 years left in me, unless somebody comes along and kills me that is.
That at least would be $125 million which isn’t too shabby. I find it hard to believe that anybody would say that $125 million 77 years from now would not be a considerable amount of money.
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Once you need it, or, alternatively, once you have enough to live comfortably for the rest of your life. It’s exponential growth, you only get one chance, just gotta decide what your goal with the money actually is.
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Press it before you retire
Same with graphics cards
Yeah it’s always that: “I want to buy the new shiny thing! But it’s expensive, so I’ll wait for a while for its price to come down.” You wait for a while, the price comes down, you buy the new shiny thing and then comes out the newest shiny thing.
Yep. There will always be “just wait N months and there will be the bestest thing that beats the old bestest thing”. You are guaranteed to get buyers remorse when shopping for hardware. Just buy what best suits you or needs and budget at the time you decided is the best.time for you (or at the time your old component bites the dust) and then stop looking at any development on those components for at least a year. Just ignore any deals, new releases, whatever and be happy with the component you bought.
I bought a 1080 for my last PC build, downloaded the driver installer and ran the setup. There were ads in the setup for the 2k series that had launched the day before. FML
Yep. I bought a 4080 just a few weeks ago. Now there is ads for the refresh all over… Thing is: you card didn’t get any worse. You thought the card was a good value proposition for you when you bought it and it hasn’t lost any of that.
choose the best available option
“The” point. Which is the best available option?
The simplest answer would be “price per fps”.
Not always. I’m doing a lot of rendering and such. So FPS aren’t my primary concern.
I’m so sick of Nvidia’s bullshit. My next system will be AMD just out of spite. That’s goes for processors as well
only thing keeping me is CUDA and there’s no replacement for it. I know AMD has I-forgot-what-it’s-called but it is not a realistic option for many machine learning tasks.
That’s exactly why I’ve been using AMD for the past 2 years. Fuck Nvidia
The only thing giving me pause about ATI cards is their ray tracing is allegedly visibly worse. They say next gen will be much better, but we shall see. I love my current non ray tracing card, an rx590, but she’s getting a bit long in the tooth for some games.
ATI
“Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time”
Not since, oh before most of Lemmy was born. I’m old enough to remember when Nvidia were the anti-monopoly good guys fighting the evil Voodoo stranglehold on the industry. You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
yeah, that’s pretty much why I stopped buying Nvidia after GTX 1080. Cuda was bad in terms of their practice, but not that impactful since OpenCL etc can still tune and work properly with similar performance, just software developer/researcher love free support/R&D/money to progress their goal. They are willing to be the minions which I can’t ask them to not take the free money. But RTX and then tensor core is where I draw the line, since their patent and implementation will have actual harm in computer graphic and AI research space but I guess it was a bit too late. We are already seeing the results and Nvidia is making banks with that advantage. They are essentially just applying the Intel playbook but doing it slightly different, they don’t buy the OEM vendors, they “invest” software developers/researcher to use their closed tech. Now everyone is paying the premium if you buy RTX/AI chips from Nvidia and the capital boom from AI will make the gap hard to close for AMD. After all, R&D requires lots of money.
I have to admit I still tend to call them that, too. Oldttimers I guess.
The first GPU I remember being excited to pop into my computer and run was a Matrox G400 Max. Damn I’m old.
I would have been so jealous. Being able to click “3d acceleration” felt so good when I finally upgraded. But I was 12, so my dad was in charge of pc parts. Luckily he was kind of techy, so we got there. Being able to run Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II with max settings is a day I’ll never forget for some reason, lol.
All three cards are rumored to come with the same memory configuration as their base models…
Sigh.
Give us more fucking vram you dicks.
Or ever.
just 10-15 years at least, for smartphones\electronics overall too. Process nodes are now harder to reduce, more than ever. holding up to my 12nm ccp phone like there is no tomorrow …
i saw a 4080 on amazon for 1200, shits crazy
As a Linux gamer, this really wasn’t on the cards anyway
AMD is a better decision, but my nVidia works great with Linux, but I’m on OpenSUSE and nVidia hosts their own OpenSUSE drivers so it works out of the get go once you add the nVidia repo
freezes
stands there with my credit card in my hand while the cashier stares at me awkwardly
It really is a risky bet to make.
I doubt full price RTX 4080 SUPER upgrade will worth it over a discounted regular RTX 4080.
SUPER upgrades never crossed the +10%
I’d rather wait for the Ti version
really the RTX 4080 is going to be a sweet spot in terms of performance envelope. that’s a card you’ll see with some decent longevity, even if it’s not being recognized as such currently.
It will depend on the power upgrade offered by the 50XX and the game development studios appetite for more power.
But TBH I don’t see Nvidia able to massively produce a 2 times faster chip without increasing its price again
Meaning, nobody will get the next gen most powerful chip, game devs will have to take that into account and the RTX 4080 will stay relevant for longer time.
Besides, according to SteamDB, most of gamers still have an RTX 2080 or less powerful GPU. They won’t sell their games if you can play it decently on those cards.
The power gap between high-ends GPUs is growing exponentially. It won’t stay sustainable very long
Meh I’m still gonna buy a 4070 Ti on Black Friday. Wish I could wait but my other half wants a PC for Christmas.
Only slightly related question: is there such a thing as an external nVidia GPU for AI models? I know I can rent cloud GPUs but I am wondering if long-term something like an external GPU might be worth it.
A 3090 (used) is the best bang for your buck for any LLM / StableDiffusion work right now. I’ve seen external GPU enclosures, though they probably cost as much as slapping a used 3090 into a barebones rig and running it headless in a closet.
Generally speaking, buying outright is always cheaper than renting, because you can always continue to run the device potentially for years, or sell it to reclaim some capital.
It would help if they had any competitors. AMD and Intel aren’t cutting it.
My AMD card is great.
Pretty damn happy with my 7900XTX too.
Swapped over to a 7800XT about 3 months ago. Better Linux performance, tested a bit on Windows also and it worked fine, I’m more than satisfied with my decision to hop over from my 3060.
Yeah, same here. I switched from a 3080 to a 7900 XTX and couldn’t be happier. FPS doubled in some games, it only needs two 8 pin connectors and I really like the adrenaline software. Haven’t tested Linux yet but I am going to soon.
The Linux driver isn’t the most straightforward to install but it’s not difficult. You have to install the installer first, then install the driver with the installer.
Only caveat is you don’t get the adrenaline software, but it’s kind of a moot point as it wouldn’t work anyway due to how Linux works.
I’m running Ubuntu 22.04, was using gnome but switched over to KDE and stopped getting crashes in certain games and got a small performance increase. I suppose that would be due to dropping Wayland for X when I moved to KDE.
AMD is definitely pulling their load, but more competitors are always better.
Intel is definitely catching up.
For the vast majority of customers that aren’t looking to spend close to a grand for a card that is infinitesimally better than a card for half the price, AMD has plenty to offer.
