Unpopular opinion: GPU shortage is actually a good time

[The red spirit]

Hardly an awful card......when my main rig is down for whatever reason, I'd love to have RX580/GTX1060-level performance in a 75W low profile card.

Well RX 580 core itself isn't bad at all, but what Powercolor did with cooler is awful. Imagine playing Tomb Raider and hearing two fans wooshing at 3k rpm, becasue some bloke at PowerColor thought it was a good idea to set temperature target at 70C.

And RX 580 performance at 75 watts is sort of possible now. RX 5500 XT was RX 580 fast and at lower wattage. 1650 Super performed a bit better than RX 580, but it also was lower wattage then RX 580. With minimal TDP tuning and undervolting, it might be doable to make it into 75 watt card, but there's nothing that you can do about low profile form factor. 1650 was the best bet, but it wasn't as fast as RX 580.

If you had a regular 10400 and had to make do with UHD 630, I'm sure you would have a very different opinion lol.

I doubt it. It has rather okay graphics, that are sort of on par with GT 730 DDR3. It may be okay at 720p. I helped some other person to build a PC on other forum and that person used some old Windows XP era laptop, he built a machine with i7 9700K and decided to not buy graphics card, because integrated graphics were good enough for him. So, I would be pretty excited to try out the regular 10400. That's not really all that low end. I have used nVidia FX 5200 128MB card and I was happy that it ran Far Cry at 800x600 minimum settings with maxed out textures and it got 30-40 fps (it's slower than GeForce 2 GTS). The only thing that I truly fear is nVidia 6150 Go. That's the first GPU that is literally so bad that it's unusable. The only notable thing that it can do is run UT 2004 at 640x480 with minimum settings and get 40 fps and score really low in 3DMark 2001 SE, which is 1300 points. That's like literally slower than Radeon 7000 SDR. It's probably the only thing on Earth that I could never recommend to anyone.

I have a less well-off friend who had the misfortune of finally pulling the trigger on getting into PC gaming, on the eve of the GPU shortage. Man's stuck with a physically questionable GTX 650 Ti - if it kicks the bucket, the entire PC is unusable, because he's on a second-hand X99 that he got for cheap. He doesn't have the resources to get a scalper card or a scalped 2nd hand card, and doesn't have the money to buy/resell an OEM PC for the GPU. His line of work also doesn't afford him the opportunity to work from home, or have time to go out and explore, or honestly other hobbies of any kind. In light of current financial pressures and stresses from other life events for him, gaming is proving quite a bit more important than just a privileged side hobby that he should put down in favour of going outside for a walk.

By the time I knew of his intentions, I had already sold the 1070 to my other friend. Had I known, I would've told had him get a 1660 Super (available at the time) so the 1070 could go to someone who actually really needs it.

Oh well, that's quite sad, but physically questionable bit is so oddly familiar. My GTX 650 Ti has one resistor (I guess it is a resistor, but I'm not sure) missing after accident. I thought that card was toast, but it works just fine without it, so . If you want to help him and don't spend a lot of money, you could get him Ryzen APU with board and RAM. 10 year old hardware is certainly questionable and you never know when it will fail and Ryzen APU should be somewhat faster than GTX 650 Ti or maybe i3 10100 with RX 560 4GB.

 

[wolf]

I like your attitude, but on a balance I wouldn't call it a good time, so much money has gone to the 'wong' people, depending on your perspective. I'd probably do a few of your suggestions if I missed out, but that's just making the best of a bad situation.

I count myself exceptionally lucky (despite putting in the 'work' at launch time) to have gotten a launch 3080, especially with the insane market and now 3080Ti being abysmal value even if you compare MSRP vs MSRP. In Australia, we always get hit with higher prices, but even my $1399 AUD TUF 3080, is not only perpetually out of stock, but is listed at $2049 AUD straight from the retailer.

I suppose I'd have been fine on my GTX1080 still if I hadn't gotten so lucky, but I skipped a gen waiting for this series, I can readily admit I wouldn't have your rosy attitude if I missed out, and still didn't have one. Power to you.

 

[80251]

Aside from how the play ended how did you enjoy the rest of the performance Ms. Lincoln?

 

[64K]

I don't really have to but I've gone back and playing my backlog of old games. I just started Duke Nukem 3D. I started it years and years ago but never finished it. There are a lot of games that are fun to play that you don't need a modern GPU. GOG is hosting a sale now if anyone wants to look around.

 

[The red spirit]

I don't really have to but I've gone back and playing my backlog of old games. I just started Duke Nukem 3D. I started it years and years ago but never finished it. There are a lot of games that are fun to play that you don't need a modern GPU. GOG is hosting a sale now if anyone wants to look around.

I play a lot of Victoria 2, which runs on anything that renders 3D and on anything that's X86 compatible.

 

[birdie]

...

Looks like you're new here. According to Steam HW Survey over 70% of people run by today's standard low-end GPUs and never leave comments on any of major tech websites. What you see on TPU/LTT/Hardware Unboxxed/etc. are computer enthusiasts who are ready to throw thousands of dollars just to get the best experience money can buy.

Even here on TPU most people run 1440p HRR monitors, not 4K most reviewers are so obsessed with. ~25% of TPU users still run 1080p monitors for which the likes of RTX 3080 are just a bloody overkill, nothing less, nothing more. 4K users on the other hand? Around 12%.

I'd really be glad if tech reviewers paid more attention to average people who can barely afford RTX 2060 and they certainly don't pair it with the Ryzen 9 5950X or Intel Core i9 11900K.

 

[The red spirit]

Looks like you're new here. According to Steam HW Survey over 70% of people run by today's standard low-end GPUs and never leave comments on any of major tech websites. What you see on TPU/LTT/Hardware Unboxxed/etc. are computer enthusiasts who are ready to throw thousands of dollars just to get the best experience money can buy.

Even here on TPU most people run 1440p HRR monitors, not 4K most reviewers are so obsessed with. ~25% of TPU users still run 1080p monitors for which the likes of RTX 3080 are just a bloody overkill, nothing less, nothing more. 4K users on the other hand? Around 12%.

I'd really be glad if tech reviewers paid more attention to average people who can barely afford RTX 2060 and they certainly don't pair it with the Ryzen 9 5950X or Intel Core i9 11900K.

But isn't 1440p monitor at 120Hz kinda the same same as 4K in power you need to drive one? 1440p is half of 4K, but you need twice the fps, so in the end it would be the same granted that there aren't any card bottlenecks like inadequate memory bandwidth or slow core. And you still can get like 70-80 fps with RX 580 at 1440p at medium-high settings. Take a look at performance graphs:

As long as you don't play games at Ultra, RX 580 should be fine for 70-80 fps at 1440p. That's not weak at all. And there are settings that don't affect performance like texture quality and anisotropic filtering. You likely can set textures to max and anisotropic to 16X and have a nice graphics boost. Also not all settings in game impact performance the same. And if you tweak all those things, you end up with mixture of settings and games looking fine at 1440p and 70-80 fps.

But here's another thing, people at TPU for some reason are all so obsessed with latest titles and that's one thing that I feel isn't entirely right as games like entertainment, a form of media and as long as they run, they don't really become obsolete. There are a lot of old titles that were much more fun to play than new ones and if game is truly good, then it's timeless. And some people also enjoy emulators, for which you don't need much GPU power, but instead need a lot of CPU power. And there might be some random indie titles that you found and liked too. I think that in the end you simply end up with mixture of old, new, emulated and indie titles. In terms of graphics hardware, only new games are very taxing and if you have a weak GPU, well, there's still a lot of stuff that you can enjoy. Something like RX 550 might not be great at latest games, but it can run them all at low settings and on top of that basically 75% of your game library will be the games that don't require nearly as much graphics power and you can run them really well.

Assuming that you spend some time tweaking settings, for 1440p 120 Hz gaming you need only one step above RX 580, which is Vega 56 or GTX1070, which converted to never cards is GTX 1660 Super or RX 5600 XT and that's way below anything RTX 3000 series. According to TPU's relative performance graph, RTX 3080 is 272% faster than 1660 Super. And going by my logic that end sup way overkill for just 1440p 120 Hz. Perhaps that's what you need to get all those fps and play at Ultra settings, I admit I don't know, because I never bought hardware with intentions to max out games. I can understand wanting more, but ever so often there's not much difference graphically in games that would make Ultra settings worth the performance hit. I really relate a lot to this video:

And here's a little bonus, RX 550 can achieve 50 fps in pretty much any modern title. Sure at potato settings, but at least it runs them all well:

 

[outpt]

got blender doing some rendering as i react to this post. it is something different and fun if not difficult to learn. not everything has to be about gaming. try something different. it just might be fun and a welcome distraction. my 2 cents

 

[arni-gx]

today.........in my city, the price of gainward GeForce RTX™ 3070 Phantom "GS" is US$ 1600-1660, since the last Q1 2021...........

 

[Vayra86]

This isn't a troll thread, but for real not everything is bad during GPU shortage. There are some great things about it:
1) It's the best time to appreciate low end hardware
2) It forces people to know which settings to adjust in order to get a better experience
3) It forces people to be more creative, when it comes to graphics card buying
4) It's the best time to revisit classic PC games
5) It's a good time to just appreciate what you already have
6) It certainly helps to reduce conspicuous consumerism
7) If GPU shortage lasts a long time, then PC game makers will be forced to make games that run on lower end specs and that's good news for low end gamers (also FSR)

Frankly those threads about "oh no, RTX 3080 isn't available" are getting annoying. And to be honest, I never liked high end hardware. This GPU shortage just uncovered how much snobbism there is and it seems that most people that are into PC gaming aren't in PC gaming at all, but instead are just into buying high end shit and anything that isn't running at Ultra settings at 4K and at least 60 fps is literally unplayable to them. Thankfully, these times are doing a good job of getting rid of such people. And that said, in long term PC gaming may get cheaper and more accessible, that is if GPU shortage lasts long enough and instead of going bankrupt, game makers will make games that run on lower end hardware.

Spot on.

Small caveat, youre not playing much if your GPU somehow finds the render retirement home.

Other than that yeah, we are not missing much not having high end hardware really. A small handful of new games actually worth playing can also run fine on a 2016 GPU and no RT. Games run fine at 50-70 FPS on decent monitors and variable refresh options are also an option.

And yes... retro gaming ftw. Im 35 hours in Shin megami tensei Nocturne with pcsx2.. Best game I have already played but it still works better than many newer iterations of (j)RPG. Also not being in snowflake land or kiddie /fortnite game land copies is refreshing in a great way. Shows of real creativity instead of a tightly managed PR story infecting the game. And the apprecation of talent involved in making older games as they are with limited tools and hardware. Some stuff is truly brilliant in its simplicity.

Yep. We're old

 

[The red spirit]

Yep. We're old

Oh well, I'm the oldest 21 year old now.

 

[64K]

Marketing pressures gamers to think that they need the latest and greatest GPU around or your missing out. Some games I can't even see a difference in picture quality going from Ultra Settings to High Settings.

 

[The red spirit]

Marketing pressures gamers to think that they need the latest and greatest GPU around or your missing out. Some games I can't even see a difference in picture quality going from Ultra Settings to High Settings.

Oh and AMD finally rolled out FSR. I watched some reviews about it and it looks really good and gives a massive performance boost. That and if you have Radeon, then you can use Radeon sharpening on top of it and you can make games look great. I personally found out that games that look blurry with FXAA look better with some sharpening. And if FSR works great during motion, then that pretty much means that AMD just killed DLSS, as FSR seems to be far better than DLSS 2.0.

Oh and yeah, there's a lot of marketing and social pressure for gamers to want way better hardware than they actually need. It's one of the most sensitive markets to various marketing nonsense.

 

[claes]

There’s a difference between making practical purchases and glorifying poverty. Poverty is awful, even if it hypothetically helps you enjoy the little things.

 

[The red spirit]

There’s a difference between making practical purchases and glorifying poverty. Poverty is awful, even if it hypothetically helps you enjoy the little things.

We aren't anywhere close to poverty and graphics cards shortage doesn't lead to poverty. Your analogy doesn't work.

 

[claes]

We aren't anywhere close to poverty and graphics cards shortage doesn't lead to poverty. Your analogy doesn't work.

What are you talking about lol? I wasn’t trying to make an analogy at all...

Some are discussing having the privilege of being able to afford the inflated prices, and some others are talking about how the feeling of not being able to afford things has afforded them a new humility/appreciation for the things they have. That’s fine, but it sometimes shifts into glorifying poverty as something that teaches you values that you can’t develop with financial freedom which risks obfuscating how terrible not being able to afford things actually is.

I’m not sure what analogy you think I’m trying to draw, it was just a soliloquy you on some of the moral claims being drawn from characterizations or “have and have nots” at play in this thread.

 

[Mescalamba]

People will buy consoles and PC gaming will die, along with companies that depend on it.

 

[Soulander]

This isn't a troll thread, but for real not everything is bad during GPU shortage. There are some great things about it:
1) It's the best time to appreciate low end hardware
2) It forces people to know which settings to adjust in order to get a better experience
3) It forces people to be more creative, when it comes to graphics card buying
4) It's the best time to revisit classic PC games
5) It's a good time to just appreciate what you already have
6) It certainly helps to reduce conspicuous consumerism
7) If GPU shortage lasts a long time, then PC game makers will be forced to make games that run on lower end specs and that's good news for low end gamers (also FSR)

Frankly those threads about "oh no, RTX 3080 isn't available" are getting annoying. And to be honest, I never liked high end hardware. This GPU shortage just uncovered how much snobbism there is and it seems that most people that are into PC gaming aren't in PC gaming at all, but instead are just into buying high end shit and anything that isn't running at Ultra settings at 4K and at least 60 fps is literally unplayable to them. Thankfully, these times are doing a good job of getting rid of such people. And that said, in long term PC gaming may get cheaper and more accessible, that is if GPU shortage lasts long enough and instead of going bankrupt, game makers will make games that run on lower end hardware.

WT****! I need a gpu for yesteryear and not for 2024! I'm f******* stressed! Console is very unaffordable here and console games are very expensive(30% of minimum wage/month, pratically)

Edit: In pre-2021: PS5 price = ryzen 2600/3600, b350m/b450m, 16gb ddr4 3000, ssd 240gb, hdd 1tb, psu 500w 80+ and a gtx 1660. beside of games and mouse, etc(vacation included).

 

[claes]

People will buy consoles and PC gaming will die, along with companies that depend on it.

This is kind of an inevitability anyway. Desktops are going the way of the dodo. I don’t think the shortage affects that timeline though.

WT****! I need a gpu for yesteryear and not for 2024! I'm f******* stressed! Console is very unaffordable here and console games are very expensive(30% of minimum wage/month, pratically)

Edit: In pre-2021: PS5 price = ryzen 2600/3600, b350m/b450m, 16gb ddr4 3000, ssd 240gb, hdd 1tb, psu 500w 80+ and a gtx 1660. beside of games and mouse, etc(vacation included).

This is what I was referring to in my previous post, although in a more abstract way. Not having things is fine when you’re already secure, but when you’re insecure it’s just that — insecurity.

 

[Atomic77]

Truth is PC will always be more powerful then console. PC can do more while console is just mainly for games.

 

[The red spirit]

Some are discussing having the privilege of being able to afford the inflated prices, and some others are talking about how the feeling of not being able to afford things has afforded them a new humility/appreciation for the things they have. That’s fine, but it sometimes shifts into glorifying poverty as something that teaches you values that you can’t develop with financial freedom which risks obfuscating how terrible not being able to afford things actually is.

Ain't nobody is glorifying poverty here and you are pulling it off-topic with "how terrible not being able to afford things actually is".

 

[Jetster]

Yep, its not about not having money. I have 0 debt and I'm not buying any GPUs right now. I refuse to pay inflated prices. That's how you keep money you make

 

[claes]

Ain't nobody is glorifying poverty here and you are pulling it off-topic with "how terrible not being able to afford things actually is".

You don't have to understand my posts, or read between the lines of others.

Also, that sentiment is plainly on-topic -- why'd you make this thread other than to counter the "how terrible not being able to afford GPUs is" crowd lol?

Have a nice day and keep that glass half full!

 

[BSim500]

2) It forces people to know which settings to adjust in order to get a better experience

I'm sitting here bemused at people only just realising (with FSR / DLSS review comments) that we've always been able to "get more FPS for just only slightly quality loss!" in general. We've had that for years. It's called "High vs Ultra" or "knowing how to tweak stuff that's a bit more intelligent than the usual dumbed down presets", and it works on all games not just a few cherry picked "supported" ones or locked to hardware. Half the time I get both an fps boost and quality improvement simultaneously just by turning off the dumb cr*p games come loaded with (500x layers of blur, Chromatic Abhorration, etc). No, I don't have untreated cataracts / glaucoma or severe uncorrectable myopia. Stop trying to "simulate" that silly post-process sh*t where I become half blind when speaking to someone 3ft away and performance improves anyway. The number of people who buy into the "Ultra or nothing" BS though as a "benchmark" for everything simply because that's how some tech sites benchmark hardware is unreal though...

4) It's the best time to revisit classic PC games

100% agree. The past year has been the ultimate opportunity for backlog clearance. Playing them oldest to newest is certainly one thing where an increase in common sense can make up for lack of hardware.

7) If GPU shortage lasts a long time, then PC game makers will be forced to make games that run on lower end specs and that's good news for low end gamers (also FSR)

It's a stretch to expect very low end APU's to run new AAA's, and if it lasts a long time then it could end up driving away many people from the hobby altogether. Having said that, some devs could certainly optimise a lot more than what they have been doing. It wasn't that long ago that 2012-2015 era AAA's like Bioshock Infinite, Alien Isolation, Dishonored, The Talos Principle, even Prey (2017), etc, were playing well on low-end GPU's of the day at launch time with little issue or we had 2014 Indie games that looked like this on 3GB VRAM cards, and a lot of AAA performance turds today are definitely nowhere near as optimised as they could be relative to hardware requirements vs visuals.

This GPU shortage just uncovered how much snobbism there is and it seems that most people that are into PC gaming aren't in PC gaming at all, but instead are just into buying high end shit and anything that isn't running at Ultra settings at 4K and at least 60 fps is literally unplayable to them.

A lot of that stuff is the same enthusiast selection bias you see in audiophile circles where people of like mind get together (tech forums) but then spend all day every day talking only to people who own the same stuff they do leaving them with a heavily skewed vision of what the average actually is (as can be seen on Steam HWSurvey where even in 2021, GTX 1060 & 1050Ti top the GPU board, where despite almost punch drunk levels of overhype from tech sites only 2% of gamers actually own 4k, 8% use 1440p and +80% are on 1080p or lower, etc). I can see 60Hz vs 144Hz difference but it's not even close to being the same as 60 vs 30fps or "unplayable". Just ignore the hyperbole and understand that as someone said above, the vast majority of gamers don't post on tech sites at all. You can tell who the real gamers are - the ones too busy playing games to argue over what a "Real Gamer (tm)" is...

 

[The red spirit]

I'm sitting here bemused at people only just realising (with FSR / DLSS review comments) that we've always been able to "get more FPS for just only slightly quality loss!" in general. We've had that for years. It's called "High vs Ultra" or "knowing how to tweak stuff that's a bit more intelligent than the usual dumbed down presets", and it works on all games not just a few cherry picked "supported" ones or locked to hardware. Half the time I get both an fps boost and quality improvement simultaneously just by turning off the dumb cr*p games come loaded with (500x layers of blur, Chromatic Abhorration, etc). No, I don't have untreated cataracts / glaucoma or severe uncorrectable myopia. Stop trying to "simulate" that silly post-process sh*t where I become half blind when speaking to someone 3ft away and performance improves anyway. The number of people who buy into the "Ultra or nothing" BS though as a "benchmark" for everything simply because that's how some tech sites benchmark hardware is unreal though...

I wonder how many people know that you can max out textures (assuming that you have enough VRAM) and anisotropic filter without fps loss.

It's a stretch to expect very low end APU's to run new AAA's, and if it lasts a long time then it could end up driving away many people from the hobby altogether. Having said that, some devs could certainly optimise a lot more than what they have been doing. It wasn't that long ago that 2012-2015 era AAA's like Bioshock Infinite, Alien Isolation, Dishonored, The Talos Principle, even Prey (2017), etc, were playing well on low-end GPU's of the day at launch time with little issue or we had 2014 Indie games that looked like this on 3GB VRAM cards, and a lot of AAA performance turds today are definitely nowhere near as optimised as they could be relative to hardware requirements vs visuals.

For me even CS:GO looks great and it runs well on GT 1030. And the worst offender in terms of optimization are high end AAA games that look like turd on low settings and still run like crap (RDR 2, AC franchise, Kingdom Come Deliverance, PUBG, and etc.) or games that don't have low enough settings to truly improve performance on low end hardware (like Far Cry 5 or Dirt 5). DiRT 5 has been one of the biggest disgrace recently. It doesn't look great and it runs poorly, it really looks so bad that DiRT 3 beats it and maybe even original DiRT looks better and yet even fast cards get destroyed at 1080p low and those same cards could max out DiRT 3 and get 60 fps. Most other AAA games aren't great at optimization either and don't really look all that great and only small minority of AAA titles have actually adequate but not great optimization like Doom Eternal (I'm still salty that it forces TAA and that it's actually heavy on older CPUs like FX 6300 and it doesn't look great at those low settings).

A lot of that stuff is the same enthusiast selection bias you see in audiophile circles where people of like mind get together (tech forums) but then spend all day every day talking only to people who own the same stuff they do leaving them with a heavily skewed vision of what the average actually is (as can be seen on Steam HWSurvey where even in 2021, GTX 1060 & 1050Ti top the GPU board, where despite almost punch drunk levels of overhype from tech sites only 2% of gamers actually own 4k, 8% use 1440p and +80% are on 1080p or lower, etc). I can see 60Hz vs 144Hz difference but it's not even close to being the same as 60 vs 30fps or "unplayable". Just ignore the hyperbole and understand that as someone said above, the vast majority of gamers don't post on tech sites at all. You can tell who the real gamers are - the ones too busy playing games to argue over what a "Real Gamer (tm)" is...

And yet it still sucks to see snobbism in forums. You see, I still have an antiquated mindset that forums are great places to learn how some stuff works or getting very detailed info about things. The average "gamer" person likely doesn't even know what game settings doo and just uses presets and then either thinks that it's just "cheap" stuff that he bought or that their hardware is weak. Those gamers likely aren't the most knowledgeable bunch. Some of them perhaps are, but many aren't. I have read how some people buy computers and I always find it astonishing how they have zero desire to find out what's in it and how easily they are willing to part with their money. I still remember one person on other forum, who thought that he bought a gaming computer and paid premium for it (1500-2000 Euros) and all it had inside was R7 350 with some i3. That was pre-mining era too. And the sad thing is that I have never seen any of my relatives to do anything much different.