The thing to understand is there is no GPU reasonably priced, for you to turn around and buy. Once you sell them, that’s it, until prices come down. So, you really will be gaming elsewhere, for awhile.
I have a 5 year old Radeon HD 7870 i’d like to upgrade (which I paid $210 for, in 2012). But, all the cards which should be $180 - $250 and make sense as an upgrade, are $350 - $500.
I think I’m gonna buy a monitor though. And have a monitor, for the first time in…many years. I’ve been PC gaming on HDTVs exclusively, since 2008.
This is some text I saw in another forum, which sort of focuses down on something I was illuding to above:
…Like me for instance, I’m looking forward to playing the latest Metro game this year, but if prices remain like this I can’t afford to buy a graphics card to max out the settings I want to play it at. So I simply wont buy the game. You’re going to start seeing a lot of that I’m afraid.
on the one hand I don’t feel that badly for this poor put-upon dude who just wants the satisfaction of being able to benchmark his game at 120FPS on his expensive but not that expensive consumer technology; on the other I think Nvidia is pretty invested in keeping this market happy, and fair enough. something will probably give.
they could just cripple FP64 in their next batch of consumer focused GPUs like they did with Maxwell, that’s win-win for everyone who just wants to play games
I doubt they actually wanted to design Volta that way (it was a compromise that they were happy to ditch for Pascal after the shrink gained them more die space since it let them harmonize their compute designs), but to the extent that Volta exists (see my musing above about how it’s effectively not more than a refinement of the Pascal process), it may already be finalized.
To be honest there’s a strong argument that GPUs had been sort of underpriced since Maxwell purely in terms of how damn good they’d gotten for HPC workloads (dumb crypto wastes of energy notwithstanding), the problem is that the people who just want to play vidcons as a hobby shouldn’t have to bear that cost. But remember how no one expected single GPU designs to scale this far a few years ago.
grabbed a 980 Ti around the end of November, I’m more than good enough to ride out the current bit of market stupidity and then some. I just have a 290 sitting in backup/TV computer doing its thing, which is being loud and hot and crashing in Unity games, silently awaiting for the Linux kernel to move Sea Island GPUs over to the open source AMDGPU driver officially
I think its a really complex thing to unpack. The primary and by far most mainstream reason to buy powerful dedicated GPUs: has been gaming. GPU makers exist as they are, because of and for the gaming market. And the gaming industry depends upon GPU makers to create and deliver products so that creators can make games and gamers can play them. and there is a certain balance to that relationship, so that gamers can afford hardware which allows them to experience games the way they are meant to be. (Nvidia is famous for a marketing campaign which says as much). I dunno about underpriced. The gaming market can’t really bare pricing, past a certain point.
We see it all the time, strain and criticisms on pricing. Now, there is certainly a strange and extreme situation happening right now, with GPUs and mining. Of course, GPUs should be able to expand into other markets. But, it is incredibly frustrating for gamers. and I don’t doubt it could become frustrating for developers and publishers. And this isn’t a trivial industry. Gaming is worth more than popular movies and music, combined. Its about to be tax season and we can’t go and get a videocard at any relevant performance level, for less than 150-200% of the standard price. Not even a deal. Regular every day price. That’s an insane thing to be happening to such an important market. and we are hitting a sort of refresh on graphics demand from games. 4K is just becoming doable on the best of the best. and 1080p is demanding double what it did, 4 years ago. PC gaming is enjoying a small renaissance right now, but GPUs are not available.
Maybe its temporary, but what if it isn’t? Its already been happening for long enough that its clear Nvidia and AMD can’t simply increase production. What if this lasts for the year? how might that affect the shape of the industry? The product roadmaps in the computer hardware industry are typically set a couple of years in advance. What if mining doesn’t completely burst and is still demanding GPUs next year? What can be done now, to account for that possibility? Indeed, something has to give. and I don’t think the right answer would be for Nvidia or AMD to break mining compatibility.
GPUs are indeed, very powerful and can do other stuff now, besides gaming. But, those markets often are not large enough and/or lasting enough, to sell them dedicated products. So, should we increase prices and strain gamers----in order to sell a product which does more than one thing? Should we keep prices realistic for gamers, but allow other market segments a relatively low cost of entry? is it really that (relatively) low cost? Have gamers actually been getting off easy? or do we just expect other segments to classically pay huge amounts to get stuff done?
I don’t think GPUs have actually scaled all that well. The hardware is more amazing than ever. But software is still pretty similar in the way it takes advantage of hardware. So we are in this weird spot where, yeah, GPUs aren’t really exactly for games software, as it still exists. I’m not sure if we should blame developers and publishers, or AMD and Nvidia.
We’ve only just now doubled performance in the mid-range/mid-price, compared to 4 years ago. Only just now gotten a truly meaningful boost, for the same money, in one of the most important segments. and its kinda only in reaction to the software. I mean, you NEED double performance from 4 years ago, to still do maxed 1080p in current games. The last 4 years has been repackaging and renaming the same base products over and over. The market has been flooded with tiny variations to try and entice a purchase at every single level of financial opportunity. Rather than offering a few distinct products and then clearly upgrade them. It doesn’t seem as ingenuous or enthusiastic, as it once was.
But software development, has also stagnated. I saw 4 years ago, how new APIs and ways of programming games, could pull quite a bit more performance from these GPUs. AMD’s Mantle API in BF4, was amazing. I was getting significantly better framerates (average of 15fps more) and smoother frame times, from the same hardware. Performance which would otherwise have cost me another $100 in GPU power, as far as the Direct X codepath is concerned. And that was from one game (battlefield 4) giving it a wild try, by retrofitting their engine into the alternate API. Imagine if we were playing games now, which were developed from scratch, on Mantle!!! Direct X 12 was supposed to be that. But so far, it hasn’t panned out. Vulkan is similarly amazing. But only one 2 year old game, has given it a serious chance.
GPUs have been done the path of general purpose compute for a while now, since at least Fermi nearly a decade ago
Nvidia has already diversified, which is why Volta has launched in a professional capacity, why they’re targetting smart cars and why CUDA is widely supported by a number of non-gaming applications, nevermind AMD’s contributions to OpenCL and their positioning of Vega in the professional space first and foremost
Wolf:TNC is Vulkan-only on PC, a step up from Doom’s patched-in support
Indeed. But at the general consumer level, its only ever been a curiosity. Even as GPU compute matured and showed real promise for games, the original use for these GPUs; It had remained a curiosity. The most prominent use for gaming so far, has been to record gameplay. That’s cool, but hardly scratches the surface. Now, we have a financial market being born from these extra GPU features, using products meant for the general gaming consumer. Current production methods aren’t meant to handle such demand.
Indeed. But none of that negatively affected gaming. Partially because separate products are offered for some of those segments.
I forgot about that! But at this point, every game should be on newer APIs like Mantle and Vulkan (which was derived from Mantle). Direct X still isn’t getting it done. I have to wonder if there are some backroom deals being made to restrict the growth of anything not called Direct X. Seems weird to me that 4 years ago, a very popular game from a major publisher (BF4/EA), with an API from AMD (who are literally half the desktop CPU and GPU industry) demonstrated the benefits. And here we are, not reaping them.
I think it’s fair to suggest you have a bit of a block about Nvidia here because they have had two 60%+ jumps in performance across their entire lineup over this time period
yeah the best feature of that Dell 1440p Gsync display is that it’s made by Dell, which makes it more professional-looking than any other product with that feature set and also provides lots of opportunities to get it cheaper if you know one of Dell’s many employees.
It’s not the best price or panel but it’s very decent all around and all the rest are REPUBLIC OF GAMERS nonsense. and Dell’s build quality has been exceptionally high since 2012 or so.
If you are looking for a monitor with a stand which allows you to swivel the thing to vertical, for cheap, good luck!
IPS panels are so cheap nowadays, TN should only be purchased if you NEED the super low response of the better models. A cheap IPS will have decent response time, but waaaay better viewing angles and at least decent color.
Personally, I like VA panels. Many of them offer a true 3000:1 contrast ratio. Which makes the overall image quality more like a decent HDTV, compared to a lot of monitors. Colors tend to have more saturation, too. But are also usually pretty accurate. Benq makes affordable options which still deliver all the goodness of VA. Samsung and Acer have good VA options, too. But they can be tough to get without a curve.
As far as specifically buying for color: from what I have seen in reviews, if a monitor claims higher than 75% golor gamut----its probably true.
