Why Nobody Is Buying Graphics Cards Anymore 

When a gpu is nearly a rent payment, it makes it hard to justify. Especially when a new one will be out in 1-2 years.

There was *never* a graphics card more than 500 bucks I was tempted to buy. The companies are nuts!

It's like nVidia and AMD are actively trying to kill PC gaming.

the problem with the high end gpu market, is that you can get an entire desktop PC system (with a good video card) for what they are asking for a single video card.

I remember when the most powerful cards were an eyewatering £400. Now you can pay double that and still be 2 or 3 tiers below the flagship card.

The GPU market is a great lesson on how even if there is a duopoly, the market still has to compete with other products because 1600 dollars used to buy a GPU is 1600 dollars that could be used on a trip, new hobby, fancy dinner, tickets, Steam Deck, console, etc. People only have a certain amount of money and at some point they'll just use that money on something else.

I was an avid hardware guy for years. Now though, once prices exponentially rose, I have tuned out of the hardware scene. I play on 1440p and am content with my old 8700k and 2080Ti. The only concession I took two years ago was to double RAM from 16 to 32 GB. I’m happy and play everything I want to play.

I'm still rocking my 1080 Ti. It works great for 1080p gaming. I would really enjoy an upgrade, but I can't justify the cost because I just dont have much time to play games anymore.

I remember a time where you didn't have to save up for months just to buy a PC component... but now it's insane

I had a 1060 up until a couple of weeks ago. I now have a 3070 that I picked up used for a very reasonable price. It’s quite the difference, but to be honest, the 1060 was still holding its on pretty well. Nvidia and AMD have lost their minds with this pricing.

Blows my mind when you can buy a full rig with a beast graphics card for just slightly more than the card you want on its own. THAT IS INSANE!

Why would I buy a 1200$ gpu to play a 120$ game that is not fun and asks me to spend like, 120$ more every month in microtransactions when I can play a banger 20$ indie game like cosmoteer on my 400$ laptop with 0 gaming hardware ?

During the crypto craze, Nvidia and AMD fell for the illusion that gamers want high end cards. Most don't care as long as your card can pump out more frames than your monitor can handle. Now that mining is dead, the performance/price is simply a massive overkill. I still have a 1650 Super and most games run fine if you compromise on settings. It's a subpar experience for many, but enough for a lot of people who care more about the gameplay than the looks of a game. I don't know, but it feels like GPUs have reached the same kind of product maturity as smartphones.

I'm worried about the very real possibility of getting laid off, and putting food on the table in the face of high inflation. I'm not worried about saving up so I can buy Jensen a new leather jacket. I don't care to run a portable space-heater PC with self-igniting cables and exotic cooling requirements, either. Lots of things pushing me away from upgrading my PC, and honestly, I don't really care anymore.

As someone who is more than overdue an upgrade (still running a 1070), the thing that's putting me off is that many of the AAA titles being benchmarked on a 4070ti or 4080 aren't achieving amazing results and so these cards don't look massively future proof. If I spend £1000-£1200 on a card I want it to last me about 6 years. Plus, a lot of recent games just don't appeal to me so it's hard to justify the purchase. I'll just wait until this thing completely packs up and then get something mid-range.

Got a RTX 2070 super right before the huge spike in prices, it lets me play all the games I enjoy on high or max setting with little to no stuttering for the most part, even 3 years on. I have literally no reason to get a better card.

The prices are just insane for the amount of actual "upgrade" you are getting from version to version. Scalpers and Cryptominers drove the price beyond all reason for most people. It is a price point issue -- you can get people to pop out $400 if you can see a serious visual difference, but the plus $1K market is going to be small.

I got tired of the market manipulation. It made me realize that my need is stronger than my want.

This is the first time in my life I’m actually considering getting a console rather than upgrading my PC. It’s not even an issue of being able to afford it, I just cannot justify the price no matter how I spin it.

It seems to me that the scalpocalypse kept game developers from leveraging the horsepower of the newer GPUs, since to sell games they had to accomodate people with several-year-old hardware. Then the market became flush with last gen's GPUs, those who wanted them went ahead and got them, and now there's no killer apps pushing recently sated gamers to the next generation. Games coming out today can run passably on hardware almost a decade old. And as far as I know there's no experience on PC that requires a 4080 to enjoy.

It's insane how the price of high end gpus doubled and some even tripled since the great crypto rush.

Many creators warned that GPU makers scalping consumers for their stimulus checks during a crisis would have long term negative impact on interest. I understand once a corporation can make quadruple margins its hard to go back but the way they keep trying to artificially stimulate the market to fit that fantasy has only made it worse. Gaming has had total collapse in the past and its certain to occur again. Perhaps its now, and frankly i am glad for it. Its the only hope for a return to quality and value across the gaming industry. Great vid, nailed it!

10 years ago, every new generation of GPUs were huge upgrade. It was always tough to decide whether to buy or wait, since so much progress was happening so fast. Last years, only thing that's been rising fast is prices. Yes, of course performance of new cards is somewhat better, but not at the level you'd really need to buy them or felt forced to buy them. And game devs have to make games mostly to fit what rigs people have so things have stalled a bit. Really, prices should come down or there should be bigger improvements in performance for most looking to get new GPU.

Remember: There are a ton of older games you can play, you don't need a new GPU. Let them choke on their stock. If your old GPU breaks, buy an APU instead of a GPU. Intel Pentium G604+motherboard would be a lot cheaper than even the cheapest first hand GPU, and it can still run old games.

With the current state of economy people are buying less in general so it's hardly a surprise. These new gpu's are luxury items for most of us anyway and those are the first things to take a hit during recessions.

My old 3700k system lasted 8 years with one upgrade to a 1080ti. I built a new PC right before the price boom (cyberpunk 2077 hype was real) and actually was able to buy a 3080 on release day for MSRP. I don't see me upgrading for a long time unless they drop prices down to a reasonable level again.

I still remember buying my first card, a Voodoo 3 2000. This thing was maybe 2 models away from the very top range and only cost maybe 200 bucks, if that. It's really simple. The corporations may say this or that as to why the prices are rising, but the reality is because we only have two companies that make them to any standard, and the CEOs of both are cousins.

I upgraded back in 2018 to a new PC with a RTX2080. Up until then, as far as I knew, the 1080 still was up there as one of the best cards and has been for years. Picture me surprised when NVIDIA released the 3080 just 2 years later.

I upgraded to a 12 GB 3080 last year and it hasn't disappointed. I can probably wait for Nvidia's 80xx cards to come out before I consider upgrading. A video card is a discretionary purchase, and if you think about it, both AMD and Nvidia need us a lot more than we need them. RTX 4090, $2500. Really? They must be smoking some pretty good stuff.

Instead of a new GPU, I got a Steam Deck. It seemed a better fit for how I play. Plus, if AAA games aim to play on portable systems like the Deck, these high end GPUs don't offer that much incentive to developers. I'm also finding indie developers are making the games that I find more interesting anyway.

The biggest challenge for tech channels is that the Great GPU Price Crash that everyone waited for never really happened. I was LUCKY to get a 30-series card at (inflated) MSRP, and that was at the lowest dip possible here in Norway. That sucks. It's nowhere near the reasonable prices people hoped for. Of course that leads to resignation and disinterest. The only GPU news I'm interested in right now is Intel Arc. Where are all the millions of crypto farm GPUs? Where are all the scalped cards people were sitting on? We know they exist. Some of them have turned up in South America, with their chips literally painted over to look new. That explains some of it, but what about the rest? This is the kind of news I would like to see tech channels reporting on right now. Tech channels should give their test rigs some rest and adapt to meet what people want to see.

Problem is also that there are literally no AAA games which are actually good. The most played games are all years old and even run on a potato. There is no real need to upgrade your system every once in a while. I have a 1070ti and can play everything I want with enough fps to enjoy it.

40 series has brought substantial gen on gen performance and feature improvements, it's just the pricing that is out of whack. Crypto blew up GPU values to insane levels and nVidia forgot what the market is like when it's just gamers.

I'm still actively looking to buy a GPU, but get discouraged when I'm faced with buying a "new" GPU that was released almost 3 years ago, or buying one that costs twice as much for a small uplift.

Because my current card, a Radeon RX 570, is still holding up well enough for all the games that I'm interested in. The RX 570 aged surprisingly well even though I think it was considered a budged card even for it's time. It is struggling at the newest games, but I am less and less interested in the big AAA releases anyway. Nowadays I like diving into the past for the old time classics and overlooked titles.

I'd be building a new computer right now if prices weren't so ridiculous.

Have to agree but it is a huge mistake by both AMD and Nvidia as if they lose the interest of the core gamer market that brought them all this success going back so many years, it will be over. Also making a profit is of course the goal but my God, they are just rubbing it in right now and almost laughing at us from on high as they price the most important customer that being the low to mid range gpu buyer out of the market..

The problem Nvidia and AMD had was they expected everyone to continue upgrading. Lots of people only got PC's from covid benefits. And not as many people are still looking.

I'm still using a GTX 1080. For my last few PC builds I've just been getting a lot of use out of my hardware-- I had a Haswell setup for the longest time (until 2021 I think?) and then finally upgraded to an AM4 build (5600X, 32GB ram). I'm way overdue for a GPU upgrade at this point, but first the pandemic / crypto crisis pricing-- and even just the literal time / effort investment required to buy a product at any price due to shortages-- put me off when I did the AM4 upgrade. Then it got close to current-gen GPU launch time, and I didn't want to pay launch-day MSRP for a 30-series card that was on its way out. Then the current gen stuff arrived, the prices for last-gen stayed at full MSRP, and the price of the new hardware was literally ridiculous. Fuck off: I'm not paying over a thousand dollars for a mainstream flagship graphics card. I'm not paying $900 for a gimpy mid-range card that can't even do 4k properly running today's games, let alone have any headroom for future releases. And I'm not paying $1,600-2,000 for a 4090 because low-volume halo / techdemo cards have always been a dumb flex for people with too much money. I feel like GPUs are in a similar situation to where CPUs were during the long-ass stagnation period of Intel Core dominance-- yeah, there were new products every year but they were expensive and they didn't offer any substantial performance improvements in real-world use cases for people who play games as a hobby. It's just not worth spending thousands of dollars to slightly increase a benchmark score each year. The reality is that I can still play all the games I actually want to play-- which is not many these days anyway, since like many of us I'm regrettably a fucking adult now-- on my GTX 1080. I spent a little money this year dropping a 5800X3D into my system because it actually does a lot more for performance in a game I enjoy (Escape from Tarkov) than a GPU upgrade would have. Tarkov is the most demanding title I play (pretty much the only other games I've played in years are EVE Online-- a MMO from 2003-- and Valorant, which I play casually with some friends). I play at 1440p/144hz. Neither of those games needs any more GPU horsepower to be playable in that configuration. My last PC upgrade, I did so that I could get actual playable framerates in CoD: MW. I actually needed more CPU cores, more mhz, and more RAM to make that happen. But now? I didn't even buy the new CoD game because it looks worse to my eye than its predecessor. All the titles I do play are old. Until I decide to switch to 4k displays, or someone drops some must-play title that wrecks PCs, why would I spend extortionate amounts of money on a graphics upgrade that I don't even need?

I'd love to upgrade my 1060, but: 1. Prices these days are still too high for me. 2. What's the point of upgrading when most games these days run/play like absolute dogshite due to horrible optimization/ports. 3. Why should i reward a company like NVIDIA with my money when they've been stubborn on their stock for years now, while trying to squeeze out more and more money out of the consumer with every new GPU that they've released. Not to forget that they release cards every 1/2 years now and that some of their newer cards are a absolute joke compared to previous ones..

I think we also need to consider that the most popular games on PC right now are free-to-play esport games like Fortnite, Valorant, Apex and so on. And all of these run at 200 frames or more on pretty much every modern GPU, even on some APUs. The bigger market has no reason to change.

$300 is my sweet spot. The last card I bought was a $230 Geforc 1050 GTX. I am not a big gamer and if I can't find a good deal, I will stick with what I've got.

My GTX 760 still handles a lot of my 1080p game needs, upgrading to a 2070s at the end of this month. The beauty of running cards until they don't work is it's soo easy and cheap to upgrade to crazy levels.

I think nvidia underestimated how elastic graphics card demand actually is.

The first pc I built back in 2010 had a Radeon HD 4850 512 MB. It was like $140 and my total pc was $512. I cut grass for weeks to raise that money. Those days are over. I would never tell a kid now to get a PC because of how expensive it is.

AMD has already admitted that they're shortdropping shipments intentionally, because the increased prices actually brought them in more profit. So, they are intentionally keeping demand higher than supply now so they can keep the prices jacked up.

I'd been wanting to upgrade my entry level graphics card for something better, now that I've gotten more experience in gaming. But, the high prices kept me playing with the one I had. Recently it started having problems, so I started looking around again. Surprisingly the prices have started going down and I picked up a new 8 gig RX6600 at a decent price. It was already discounted 20% and I added my relative's 10% discount because they work at Amazon, where I bought it. The difference in my gaming experience is HUGE and it I didn't have to mortgage the house to do it!

I've been on a GTX 960 since 2015 and it's gotten to the point where I can't play newer games anymore, but I also can't really upgrade because even the low-end cards have seemed super expensive for what they are. It sucks.

I think one part you haven't mentioned is indie games. They are going strong and run fine on 1080p60 due to the nature of their graphic style or gameplay pace. Whether it's people not upgrading their rigs that are making them popular or they are just getting better quality is up for debate. Another thing affecting prices is the prosumer market. AI, 3D and video rendering, Adobe, all use the graphics cards now. Small businesses and prosumers are buying up the latest Nvidia cards for these. They will drop launch prices to get the 4090 to swap out their 3090 ASAP, because money is made on those machines.

Honestly I've been so happy with my 5900X and 6800XT I decided to go for a custom loop and call it a day for the next 10 years.

I remember scrounging up cheap used parts on ebay to get a decent gaming computer back in 2011-2015 it was super easy and it helped a lot of my friends get into pc gaming. Just something highschoolers could reasonably obtain if they really wanted it. No way this is the case now.

So true. I maintain a PC hardware affiliate website and the sales are incredibly low. It's like 2-3 times less compared to 2021.

My current card is a Radeon RX 580, which I got in late 2020 before the GPU price hike and shortage. It still runs new games just fine. I mostly play indie titles and ports of older games nowadays so there's not much incentive to upgrade other than playing games in native 4K.

People are back at work and money is tight right now with ballooning prices on everything including GPUs. Hopefully nvidia takes a massive hit this generation.

I spent about 2 year thinking about upgrading my RTX2080… but now I'm just sick of the daft prices. So I'm going give Nvidia the finger, and making do with what I've got.

I am still very much into PC gaming (since the 90s) and I would totally buy a 4070/4080. I could afford it I just won't at the prices that are out there so, until the prices drop significantly, I'm happy to wait. If I have to wait until the 5000 series nVidia cards come out and get a 4000 series then I will do that.

Seems that Nvidia's driver updates for older GPUs are deliberately slowing performance down to get customers to buy the new ones...just like Apple was doing with their old iphones to get people to buy their new ones...

games suck now

I recently built a sick gaming PC to play me some games. I had a big backlog that I had been waiting to upgrade my PC to play, so that I could play them on gorgeous settings. I put the computer up for sale two weeks later. Not worth it. Life at 1080p, minimum settings isn't any worse than 4k max settings. Feels the same when you're in the action playing.

the vega, rx 5000 series and rtx 2060/2070 were quite good deals for their time. nowadays theres practically no mid range anymore.

I've been doing tons of research in hopes of educating myself on all the different parts and terms with desktop computers, and now that I've gotten a good grasp on all the different parts I'm mostly just waiting until some stuff releases that's actually worth the price before I make my dream build.

I'm still using my 1070TI. This is the longest I've ever used a video card because an upgrade of the same tier level now is absurdly expensive. I can afford a new one but I can't justify it because my card still gets the job done.

My asus strix 1080ti has lasted 5 years and can still run every current modern game at at least medium graphics.

For me, it's between needing a card that fits under 310 mm (midsized case), doesn't have a crippled memory bus (looking at you 4070 ti), and doesn't spontaneously combust due to "user error".

Looking forward to seeing the sales figures for AMD and Nvidia over the next 6 months.

I honestly think there's also a platou we've reached. We aren't getting as big of leaps any more. Each new series just feels incremental compared to the last so it really is not worth it to upgrade until 3 gens later. That along with better optimized games that still look great on lower settings you can easily wait far longer now between upgrades than ever.

I went from a 1660 super to a 6650 xt and I'm more than happy with it's performance just not so much it's temps under load

Has nothing to do with caring or not caring. Most people just cant afford an upgrade.

You said what I am sure that everyone else is thinking. Some how the manufactures forgot these card are something we play with and they can only get so much for a toy.

I got an RTX 2070 for 150 last week for 150 and I'm super satisfied with the performance. It is so sad what happened to GPU market.

Price are so high that people dont want to buy a gpu that cost 2 full mounths of salary every weeks.

With the insane price gouging and artificial scarcity over the past 3 years, is it really a surprise people aren't in a hurry to buy GPUs?

Greed has destroyed gaming in general. Games are shit, hardware is overpriced.

I play at 1080p on a 60Hz monitor and will continue to do that well into the future. I also don't always play the newest stuff, so my $140 in 2020 RX 570 8GB can usually manage High settings, sometimes even Ultra. GPUs just don't age as fast as they used to in the 00s. As long as I can get 40-60 FPS with at least medium settings, I have zero interest in upgrading. By the time I'll need an upgrade, maybe AMD's APUs will be up to the task of 1080p 60fps High settings, so I'll stop needing a GPU altogether. The Radeon 680M in the newest APUs is matching or beating the laptop GTX 1050 GPUs, so maybe in 3-4 years, we might see iGPUs reaching laptop GTX 1070 level.

its inflation, food or GPU, what's your highest priority?

After waiting forever for prices to calm down etc. I finally bought a second hand 1660ti for 80 dollars, now I have a massive back log of games to play. I'm sticking to 1080 gaming don't have a 4k or hdr display, can wait for that and ray tracing later. It's all about how much cash you are willing to spend and how important gaming is in your life against say buying a car or other living expenses.

Only me who thought he said ” daddy here”💀💀??? 0:28

I got a 3060 at microcenter during the GPU drought. It was an ROG card and it was wayyy overpriced at $550 after tax, but then I turned around and sold my old 1070 for $400 cash, so not bad for a $150 upgrade! No need for me to upgrade again for another few years

there are so many games from 2000 to 2015 on the backlog that i could spend the rest of my life without upgrading my PC and i would never ran out of games, not to mention mods, games like modded daggerfall could last 10k hours easily

Been running this pc for 7 years, didn't start running into performance issues and upgrade bottlenecks until the last couple of years when it comes to running AAA games. Granted, if I had purchased a 4k HDTV/monitor or set up my room for pc-based VR gaming I would have experienced issues a lot sooner. I'm always going to consider a 1000$ or more graphics card as a STUDIO card, not a gamer card. Even though I got a gtx960, I would have to think about upgrading my pc and gpu only after getting a 4k TV to play at 1440 or greater resolution. Newer games running at 1080i resolution, all the old tech still holds up. Every once in a while you get a warming that the highest settings won't be used, or that performance may be impacted soon because your GPU memory is running low, but I've got 16GB of mobo memory, and an 8 core processor, so it's not like games won't run, or that they'll crash the system like they did way back in the day even if you're using an almost 10 year old gaming rig.

I'm really overdue for an upgrade, but prices here is Brazil are really really hard to justify, pouring 3 to 4 months worth of pay for what is considered "budget" out there is just a bad taste in my mouth. I have an ancient Intel from 2013 running a 1060 (the 3gb one cus it was much, much cheaper at the time and a sizeable upgrade from the 660 the pc came with). Which was all bought with mom's money at the time, but even now I'm really struggling to justify buying a whole new PC with my own money, the games I enjoy are mostly indie or are old enough to not need new hardware.

My GPU journey for the last 10 years was going from GTX 560 to a RX 480 to a RTX 2080, which still feels like the smartest thing I've ever did. Bought the 2080 from eBay for ~350€ when the next generation came along, so I've been comfortably looking at all these prices as they went by 😅

When the nvidia 2000 and, not long after, 3000 series were announced (and their equivalents), I bought extras of the GPU I still use which is the gtx 1080 and 1080 TI. Got them before prices spiked. One of the best PC decisions I've ever made.

GPUs have become too expensive. But that isn't the issue. The issue is that the upgrades in GPU technology have not kept up with the price hikes.

I think that upgrading the hardware should not always be limited to the GPU. A new monitor can also greatly improve the visual experience of a computer game. A fast SSD or even just a new case with a more optimal airflow, which makes the computer less noisy, are also important and are always forgotten in the hype that is always made around the latest GPU's.

My system is 7 years old now (Purchased in January 2016) and I have a GTX 1070 graphics card. At the time I got the system I deliberately didn't get the best available graphics card and fully intended to replace it after 3-4 years. The ridiculous cost of graphics cards since then has made that impossible..

I don't know if I will ever build a big rig again. It's mini-ITX or NUCs for me.

I’m still on a 980Ti and was dead set on a 3080 launch. 2 years on and I’m still on the 980Ti as the 3080 is still £700+ even on eBay. The best deal I’ve found so far is an XFX 6800 XT which looks tempting at £570 on Amazon right now, but I’m still paying only £80 below MSRP two years after the card launched and with the new gen being released, and stock is still in limited supply across Scan/Ebuyer/Overclockers. I’m not even considering the new generation cards as the price to performance is just rubbish.

Got my RX 6800 last year to replace a dying RX 480, although the RX 6800 seems like a massive step up from my other card (I'm still only using 1080p and a 60Hz TV), So for me upgrading to something right now just isn't viable and would be a complete waste of money

For the size of monitor that I prefer to use, 1920x1080 resolution is perfectly good, and being happy with 1920x1080 will save me a fortune in the future. Therefore, the 1660 Ti that I bought a few years ago is still fine. I don't buy the latest AAA games anyway because they are always buggy at launch, and most aren't interesting to me anyway. My CPU, on the other hand, is more than ten years old, and it is showing its age, so a CPU/mother board/memory replacement will likely happen before long.

Steam Deck. If you are buying a card I recommend a 3060 for most people. I have a 3090 because I am insane and have the money. My Steam Deck I bought for $400. Installed a 1TB SSD and a 512 SD, got a dock for $40. My total is well under $600. In terms of value it is great considering your pc library comes with.

Price went from £400 to £2000 and then the fuel bills went up 200% when the new cards went 6x more power draw.

this is why i'm thankful that i was able to buy a $100 1660ti back in 2019 where it was not very expensive. still using it until now and i'm not upgrading.

I was and have been happy spending upto £300 or about $350, I've always gone for upper mid range as normally best value, I did spend a lot on a 2080 super when they were at a premium. It was a great overclocker but still not much faster than a way cheaper 2070. I next had a 3070 which was actually great generally a little faster than a 2080ti. I've got to the point now that the graphical quality improvement isn't worth the cost, I'm older and have had cards all the way back to Geforce 2 mx I think my first. I skipped 3dfx,matrox,diamond cards as expensive and no true standard then. My long winded point is just buy what you can afford, honestly honestly paying a fortune doesn't give the results you expect. I've had fast pc's and honestly after a few weeks of thinking how amazing you don't notice the graphical improvement.

upgraded from a 1080ti to a 4080 (both at launch), now im good for another 3-4 years at least. For what games should i even consider upgrading?

Great video! I really have to say, that I’d rather watch a video about an older card and how it performs today than something about a RTX 4090 or so. If I would still regularly game, I would just buy an older card (if not too expensive), go with that and maybe just turn the graphics down. As you said, I just want to play the damn game😂

As a car enthusiast, coming to look at building myself a PC, I kinda found myself not really caring about getting the best of the best, but getting some affordable used parts which I could find that would be just enough for me to work with what I want to, such as creative pursuits and a handful of modded games like BeamNG and Minecraft with plenty of storage

Honestly my 1660S has served me pretty well since I got it in 2020. I'm definitely gonna keep this thing for a while, probably wait until the 30 series or 40 series prices go down more. I do wanna own a ray-tracing machine at some point in my life but right now things are still just too expensive. Unless I want to own a 20 series RTX card (which were notorious for being dog water when it comes to ray-tracing), there is no such thing as a truly "budget" RTX card. But despite that, if/when I do upgrade my GPU, I'm gonna go with the 3060 TI. I'm a 1080p gamer and that's the most I'm ever gonna need for the next decade when it comes to the mid-tier type of gaming I partake in

My GTX 1060 I bought seven years ago still runs everything, so why would I upgrade?

I spend $300.00 a week for groceries, sticking with my 3060 and 3070 for the foreseeable future.