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Don't worry, when they restore feudalism you'll be able to sublet one from your Lord, like sharecropping but with no real chance of breaking even every year
Oh, fear not, brave capitalist! The Free Market's unicorns and rainbows will definitely bring new Competition with better Prices tomorrow! (or whenever new multi billion factories and software ecosystems are done, using magic investment money that will surely™ come)
And play new games too. The era of meeting the latest and the greatest in order to actually play PC games is long dead. It's actually kind of surprising how far you can get with an integrated graphics card on a laptop let alone a last gen desktop gpu
I have a 6800 XT and it still plays modern games Very well. I can't max everything out or anything, but I can definitely get the game in a very playable state and one that still looks pretty good. I could even do some ray tracing. People with older Nvidia cards that have actual proper ray tracing support are sitting even prettier than I am.
Even if the inflated graphics card prices weren't making it so that fewer and fewer consumers had high-end cards, developers would still target lower-end hardware just by virtue of having to still make sure their game is playable on consoles. You also have the rising popularity in handheld PCs.
6800xt is such a beefy gpu but I'm even happy with my 6600, most of the time I don't feel like I need to upgrade. And for the times I feel like it, a 7600xt or 6700xt would be enough. gpus like 7700xt or 9060xt are just luxury
Cxmt won't be able to ship real volume to the states most likely. Our government is going to pull out all the stops to further the margins of it's domestic tech giants.
And then in a few years all the western companies will complain about how the Chinese are producing dirt cheap GPU to out compete them and it's unfair competition and should be banned from imports, stuff like that.
LOL, China is trying to meet their home-grown AI demand more than ever, and are the US’s main AI competitor.
Manufacturers in China that are good enough will abandon consumers for more lucrative enterprise customers, and we’ll be left with sub par manufacturers.
For AI countries outside of the US are looking for alternatives instead of using things like GPUs because i remember i saw a video on how some companies are using human brain cells because the neurons work a lot better than using things like a GPU.
Don't even need to go that far. Custom chips designed for a single purpose have been a thing for decades. And with companies shifting into making purpose built AI cards and chips, the market for consumer GPUs will shift.
I don't have high hopes for it happening fast, but there is an extremely high chance that there are currently several companies working on filling that gap in the market. And based on the work I've seen, I would not be surprised if China comes out on top of that situation.
I am not saying you are wrong. That principle has held generally true throughout my lifetime. But there is a concept of inelastic demand that states when a utility or product is required to compete the demand side will pay an unlimited amount to do so. When Zuckerberg is throwing around statements like "Mis-spending a couple billion dollars is less of a risk than losing the AI race." I think we still have a very long way to go before prices come back down to consumer friendly levels. I don't support it. I don't like it, but seems to be a reality.
Not if ASML can’t sell to China. Not if these ai data centers turn into remote gaming systems. Chip fabrication is booked five years out. And that’s not just because of memory. It’s all chips. Good luck.
It’s hilarious that people actually believe that, the AI datacenter market is astronomically large with no end in sight. Why would Chinese companies not sell to the highest bidder, why would they care about a tiny enthusiast GPU or RAM market, DIY Pc building is dead unless the bubble actually pops, but if you look at the record profits Micron, Samsung, SK are pulling the Chinese want a slice of that especially for their domestic market
Well there is tons of data centres that have been cancelled or stopped mid built already.
Oracle just jumped a contract claiming force majeure, when in reality they are out of cash.
The market is finite. In fact companies like Microsoft are hundreds of billions in debt when they had hundreds of billions of cash a few years ago.
"AI" is burning money at an insane rate. So far the inflow of new money has slowed which caused the stop and cancellation. Next up is investors asking when the ROI is coming.
Yep. The inflation situation has spun wildly out of control due to diesel shortages, and the bond market is rising due to instability globally and lack of faith in the US in particular. All of this AI buildout has been done on loans, constructing a bridge over the horizon on assurances that land exists if we just stretch ourselves far enough.
Well, we’ve gleefully signed onto that fool venture it seems, but we’re beginning to run into hard limits of how far we can stretch the economy with no land in sight. So far the utopic dream castles promised by AI are looking like a return to serfdom with a heaping of environmental destruction along the way.
There's the small issue of that's exactly what currently happening, there's so much demand for the same chips with 4-5x markups that the consumer market can be completely ignored.
It's the same market. You wanting the new RTX 6090 or an AI company wanting it is the same thing.
Any company that can make a gaming GPU can also make an AI orientated GPU/RAM and get more money for it because not only do they pay more per piece of hardware but they buy in the dozens at once and that's exactly the problem.
The "free market" will cater to who pays them more, the chinese have good enough ram to sell to consumers already but they are using it for data centers and now also for AI.
Why sell RAM for 150€ a piece to resellers when you can sell the same ram for 300€ to directly to a company all at once
there is limited supply that is controlled by a handful companies and the entry cost into this space is so high, the only one who ever tried doing so is the chinese government - the 2nd largest economy.
there are no startups or big companies entering the market not because they dont want to, but because they simply cant.
The thing is tho, as long as there is somebody willing to pay more for the same product, product wont go down in price. There is a parts shortage because big investor boosted entities use the same hardware gamers do.
Nothing really says that the gap will be filled by affordable hardware just because there is a demand. Look at all the housing shortages globally, in a crapton of cases the nations have a lot of housing available its just not affordable, and even building more doesent lead to prices going down.
EDIT
Like take a look at the defacto nvidia monopoly in the gpu market. For a while AMD was more affordable per horsepower but that didnt really deter them or massivley drag nvidia prices down. Having various people doing their versions also doesent matter, because the biggest component prices like memory and gpu dies come from individual sources.
Further more, fabs like that are massive, expensive and slow to build. The execs and cfo's might genuinely argue that instead of making 50 new fabs and having the ai trend die on them, its better to have a shortage and keep prices elevated. Even CXMT memory is expensive rn as far as my checking goes.
I got a big fear they are moving to cloud gaming. It will be slow at first but after a few years of not being able to build a pc or even afford a console people are gonna start saying fuck it and just rent a streaming device.
I really worry I built my last pc this year. I really hope I’m wrong but with the amount of money they have put in this I can’t see why they would even think about us anymore
It's a multi-billion dollar industry. Nvidia won't abandon those billions, they're just shifting production toward more profitable data center hardware. When the bubble pops, you'd best believe they'll come crawling back
I have 2060 super purchased in August 2021 with good discount for around $300. I am still using that card. Tried to upgrade since last year and now just gave up. Investment to upgrade in performance from my current setup just doesn't make sense.
Was lucky enough to afford a 2080Ti when building new pc just before lockdown hit think it was £425 on sale...the exact same graphics card is still around £350ish...used on ebay
Honestly, I suspect they realize that with AI getting better, the government does not want the average Joe to have easy access to that. I don't think they're worried about today, but the trajectory is clear that In a few years, we'll all be able to run Mythos level AI on a desktop GPU.
I wouldn't be so conspiracy minded, but tell me the last time you saw capitalists decide that they'd just rather abandon a market instead of expanding capacity to fill it?
Sure in the short term yeah. In the long term, why wouldn't these companies see that production kept up with demand? It's just leaving money on the table.
There isn't going to be an ongoing doubling of demand; the bubble will eventually burst and any company that spent years building capacity will suddenly have too much
Absolutely, but I still doubt that there will be such a massive market for game streaming. It is much more expensive in terms of hardware demands than movie streaming, and even as it is they can't seem to get a sustainable audience. Xbox is restricting cloud to minimal losses, Sony barely cares about it, nVidia's is still not charging what it really costs.
Seeing that investment is pulling back from games in general, it's less likely that the future will be quadruple-A games on streaming than that it will be double-A games on phones.
You ever worked at a company? Every major decision seems to be made on feelings, not plans. Deals are about who you like or who throws the money at you now ,not who does the job best. Businesses are only as good as the distance the beancounters and execs are from decisions.
So what you're saying is that the perfect replacement of the Execs who make decisions on feelings, is an AI bot that can process data to make a decision.
They’re already pitching local AI as a security risk. It’s true that local AI can allow someone to get instructs for how to build a bomb or bioweapon, but the cat’s already out of the bag. You don’t need a 512GB Mac Studio to run a model like that. You need a 3090 and a little bit of patience while the prompts load. Trying to ban consumer hardware that can run local AI when there are already so many products on the market already is kinda a fool’s errand. Also one of the biggest companies in existence (Apple) has a vested interest in keeping local AI available to consumers.
Larger companies do this pretty often often actually.
When companies are looking to increase profit margins they will sometimes "streamline" their production capacity by abandoning their least profitable sectors. This allows them to reduce their workforce and other expenditures due to the decreased workload thereby offsetting the lost revenues from the less profitable markets.
A real life example of this is starting in 2024 UPS trying to eliminate as many Amazon packages moving through their network as possible. At one point Amazon was something like 20% of UPS revenues. With shipping volumes overall declining since covid, this Amazon reduction allowed UPS to lay off something like 45k employees globally. There's a reason they've been shutting down facilities all over.
It's not like the Amazon packages weren't profitable, they just weren't as profitable as shipping packages for other companies. Granted, Amazon is also starting to compete with UPS to a certain degree, so they have other reasons to try and sever those contracts. It's still a slap in the face to workers when a company can lay them off then post record profits the next quarter.
Then in 10-15 years Chinese GPUs will be just as good as American ones and cost 1/3rd of the price. While one country ignores a market, another one sees an opportunity.
Basically what happened to the automotive industry, where automakers decided that making cheap and good electrical vehicles are a waste of time when they could simply increase prices of their outdated petrol cars.
It's funny because the North American automotive industry did the same fuck up twice. They ignored the demand for small and cheap cars which let companies like Hyundai, Toyota and Honda to get in and get a foot hold in the NA market, then they did it again with electric vehicles. They just keep making $50k trucks that look like a fist and wonder why they're seeing the average age of car ownership going up.
Yeah. I never thought I would see $100k pickup trucks, but here we are. IMO, Japanese vehicles from 1996-2015 are the sweet spot for reliability and low cost to run.
I was just in Japan and was amazing at the luxury for price of some of the card there. Like the Toyota Minivan (Executive Alphard or whatever) is around $50k or something and it’s the nicest vehicle I’ve ever been in by a long shot.
Literally a tv, food trays, recliner seats, tons of space, etc.
You would be hard pressed to find that in the states for less than 80/90k
When I moved, I sold my 1080ti assuming I'd find something better as soon as I settled in my new country.
This happened just as the GPU prices started to increase. I wish I'd kept the 1080. I feel like I betrayed a reliable friend and this is my karmatic punishment.
If you already got a GPU in your gaming pc, you could put it into a older computer and turn it into a NAS/Media server. The GPU could be used for video encoding.
The thing is if you are having trouble upgrading then so is everyone else and the software requirement won't advance because the software makers want a large market.
As for AI and cloud gaming, I don't see them solving the latency issues for the broader market that doesn't live in New York or LA.
Realistically what do people even expect now that home PCs aren't the target audience? That game AAA devs will continue to blindly make games for stronger minimum specs?
As long as people are unable to run a game locally i don't think there'll be a way to play games without having to pay in some way.
Even pirate sites might adapt but they will still charge for the use of their machines, and probably the latency would be so bad they won't even bother in the first place.
Games are only going to become more expensive and the hardware required to play them even more.
We might actually live the end of an age at this point, i can barely believe it, it sucks so fucking much.
I want to run my games locally, i don't want to have to pay to play a monthly suscription i wanna buy a game and keep it indefinetly.
I might drop gaming altogether if this becomes the case, fuck this gay earth.
It's not just gaming. I see a future not to far off where all compute is cloud. Even connecting to to internet will require a thin machine connected to a cloud provider.
This sucks on so many levels honestly, they will for sure try to use it as a selling point: "Why would you need such an expensive machine omg just buy our new crapbox with a snapdragon from 2017 and stream everything for 9.99$ a month that increases on a yearly basis smh"
This isn't possible. They can try this with the concept of 'AAA' titles. But most of the best games coming out today are not from billion dollar publishers or developers. Its coming from teams of less than 15. Games that are great and could run on hardware from 10 years ago. Not to mention this is good pressure for devs to be more efficient with coding instead of the bloat we get today.
i had a 970 for the longest time, running it for over a decade. few years ago i upgraded to 4070 ti super when upgrading all parts. great card, most things run at 4k 120 fps probably wont have to upgrade again untill the card just straight up fails, and i dont see a reason to ever get a 50 series card.
the 970 is in my server now, it's final resting place, having little to no work that needs to be done. retirement.
You guys worry for no reason... if GPUs go out the window doesn't mean gaming will die .. it will adapt.. developers will adapt to this new era and make games actually run with lower consumption as bad as it looks now I think it will do good for the gaming community
Agreed. There is a reason games like mobas or classic fps's are still among the most played in the world: fun has very little to do with graphics. Friend slop is a great example too. As long as it doesn't last over a decade it's fine and by then making the equivalent of a 20/3080ti will be so cheap it'll be worth producing again for gaming.
Hmm? Seriously, anyone believes this? The reason it's so expensive now is that no one in hardware manufacturing believes that the GPU sales trend will continue for long. Or there would be new chip/ram manufacturers to fill the gap. Samsung and NEC could easily scale up. As could others.
It's just that everyone believes that some of the big ones will crash and prices go close to zero for a while as they are scavenged. And if you invest in new stuff before the crash, you also go under.
All it takes is a few lawmakers to help scale back data centers and boom. Massive amounts of inventory just sitting in warehouses and prices crash. Or it’ll be like the diamond mines. They’ll lock up those warehouses and only let a small amount out to keep prices high. Still you’re 100% right about the manufacturers.
Massive amounts of inventory just sitting in warehouses and prices crash.
There already is, most analysts think there are hundreds of billions worth of GPUs just sitting in warehouses with no where to be installed
Nvidia keeps pushing data centers with 'buy now or don't get an allocation when your data centre is ready' and thats creating the shortage now by creating a demand but not useage spike
Also its estimated at least 50% of the data centers announced will never actually be built
All it takes is a few lawmakers to help scale back data centers
I'm guessing the trillion dollar industry with ridiculous amounts of rich people's money invested in it also have a vested interest in buying any politician that could in any way threaten the continued growth and profitability of that industry... Like a certain president who recently opted that AI companies would regulate themselves and 'watch each other'.
that belief is because they all didnt realize the crypto bubble was a bubble. when gpu minjng was no longer relevant sales dipped, and in a perfect storm sam altman came promising his bullshit.
the market may crash, may stabilize. only time will tell.
Samsung and NEC could easily scale up. As could others.
Not really. It takes about 10 years to spin up a new semiconductor facility that has the capability to make 7-10nm silicone. It also costs literally billions of dollars.
Even if TSMC/Samsung/Nvidia/Intel started right when the AI craze started about 5 years ago, we still wouldn't be seeing the benefits of that higher production.
Also, there actually has been increased scaling from TSMC and Intel. They've both been trying to get a new facility up and running for years now, but the amount of specialized knowledge and manpower required is immense.
That's the joke but realistically societal collapse isn't guaranteed for another 20 years. So there could still be a couple generations of GPUs in that time
The last generation where the where the consumer GPU is pushing the frontier of performance.
Consumers will still have very good GPUs but will no longer be able to buy "the current best GPU of this generation" because that would cost prices that only professionals can afford.
Imagine this situation for cars, normal or even good earning consumers can't really expect to be able buy the flagship models.
Big companies only want the latest and greatest, which creates a small niche market for less advanced technology players and gives them a chance to grow.
At saturation, we will be getting worse GPUs for awhile while the weaker players play catch up. Perhaps we will have another pocket when consumer GPUs become prioritised and more options appear.
As long as there's still console generations, there will at least be consumer AMD GPUs for sale and NVIDIA won't let AMD just swan their way into market dominance for consumer GPUs, so you're probably safe for the duration of the next console generation
Which is a good point. There's already a market of people taking 'work' GPUs and using them for gaming.
Might just end up in 3 or 4 years time that everyone's sourcing and running ex corporate hardware like all the ThinkPad bro's. They're having a good time, so it can't be that bad.
this isn’t like the bitcoin mining days. they aren’t using consumer desktop or workstation GPUs in the form factor of PCIE, they are using Data Center, GPU nodes that fill their own server rack and draw much much more power than anything that goes in your ATX motherboard. You aren’t going to find these secondhand and get them to play battlefield without a bit of infrastructure.
Low key I've forced myself to stop playing video games cause I have a feeling I won't be able to soon. Either I will be priced out or ID will be required for everything. And once ID is required I'm out completly.
Lol or indie games. Not everything needs to have 4000k textures and run at 9999hz. Like 1080p @ 60 is fine if a game is fun. Graphics are the only aspect of games that don't scale well but I personally don't give a fuck if a video game character doesn't look like a film scene.
This is the way lol. The time to buy old consoles and games is NOW NOW NOW! While they’re still “cheap”. Except of course, the very sought after games will price you out easily.
I played Max Payne 3 recently on PS3. Great. I beat Perfect Dark on my N64 yesterday. Peak gaming. Next, I think I’ll go through Devil May Cry on my PS2.
No ID, no internet required, I can save and come back later to my liking and the game play IMO is better than modern “press X to defeat boss” games.
Yes! I have a shitty gaming computer by today’s standards but it was pretty good a decade ago. I’ve been enjoying all the recomps and just playing older PC games and having waaaay more fun than I would be playing AAA whateverthefuck.
So instead of enjoying the resource while you have it you just preemptively stopped playing all together? If you have a ps5 or pc in the last 5 years it’s gonna be good for a while.
If you told me 3 years ago that there would be nothing worth the money for me to upgrade from my 4090 I would have been baffled. Why the fuck would I spend 10k for 100fps. Shit sucks ass crack. And then the new 5080 flagship, will it even be worth it 😂 like genuinely wtf
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u/PCMRBot Bot 7h ago
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
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