Technology

Since when did gfx cards need to cost more than a used car?

We are being scammed by nvidia. They are selling stuff that 20 years ago, the equivalent would have been some massive research prototype. And there would be, like, 2 of them in an nvidia bunker somewhere powering deep thought whilst it calculated the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

3k for a gfx card. Man my whole pc cost 500 quid and it runs all my games and pcvr just fine.

Could it run better? Sure

Does it need to? Not for 3 grand...

Fuck me!.....

You don't need NVENC, the AMD and Intel versions are very good. If you care about maximum quality you would software encode for the best compression

Folks, ask yourselves, what game is out there that REALLY needs a 5090? If you have the money to piss away, by all means, it's your money. But let's face it, games have plateaued and VR isn't all that great.

Nvidia's market is not you anymore. It's the massive corporations and research firms for useless AI projects or number crunching. They have more money than all gamers combined. Maybe time to go outside; me included.

Bought my first AMD card last year, never looked back

My mind is still blown on why people are so interested in spending 2x the cost of the entire machine they are playing on AND a hefty power utility bill to run these awful products from Nvidia. Generational improvements are minor on the performance side, and fucking AWFUL on the product and efficiency side. You'd think people would have learned their lessons a decade ago.

Nvidia is using the "its fake news" strategy now? My how the mighty have fallen.

I've said it many times but publicly traded companies are destroying the world. The fact they have to increase revenue every single year is not sustainable and just leads to employees being underpaid, products that are built cheaper and invasive data collection to offset their previous poor decisions.

It covers the breadth of problems pretty well, but I feel compelled to point out that there are a few times where things are misrepresented in this post e.g.:

Newegg selling the ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 for $3,359 (MSRP: $1,999)

eBay Germany offering the same ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 for €3,349,95 (MSRP: €2,229)

The MSRP for a 5090 is $2k, but the MSRP for the 5090 Astral -- a top-end card being used for overclocking world records -- is $2.8k. I couldn't quickly find the European MSRP but my money's on it being more than 2.2k euro.

If you’re a creator, CUDA and NVENC are pretty much indispensable, or editing and exporting videos in Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve will take you a lot longer[3]. Same for live streaming, as using NVENC in OBS offloads video rendering to the GPU for smooth frame rates while streaming high-quality video.

NVENC isn't much of a moat right now, as both Intel and AMD's encoders are roughly comparable in quality these days (including in Intel's iGPUs!). There are cases where NVENC might do something specific better (like 4:2:2 support for prosumer/professional use cases) or have better software support in a specific program, but for common use cases like streaming/recording gameplay the alternatives should be roughly equivalent for most users.

as recently as May 2025 and I wasn’t surprised to find even RTX 40 series are still very much overpriced

Production apparently stopped on these for several months leading up to the 50-series launch; it seems unreasonable to harshly judge the pricing of a product that hasn't had new stock for an extended period of time (of course, you can then judge either the decision to stop production or the still-elevated pricing of the 50 series).

DLSS is, and always was, snake oil

I personally find this take crazy given that DLSS2+ / FSR4+, when quality-biased, average visual quality comparable to native for most users in most situations and that was with DLSS2 in 2023, not even DLSS3 let alone DLSS4 (which is markedly better on average). I don't really care how a frame is generated if it looks good enough (and doesn't come with other notable downsides like latency). This almost feels like complaining about screen space reflections being "fake" reflections. Like yeah, it's fake, but if the average player experience is consistently better with it than without it then what does it matter?

Increasingly complex manufacturing nodes are becoming increasingly expensive as all fuck. If it's more cost-efficient to use some of that die area for specialized cores that can do high-quality upscaling instead of natively rendering everything with all the die space then that's fine by me. I don't think blaming DLSS (and its equivalents like FSR and XeSS) as "snake oil" is the right takeaway. If the options are (1) spend $X on a card that outputs 60 FPS natively or (2) spend $X on a card that outputs upscaled 80 FPS at quality good enough that I can't tell it's not native, then sign me the fuck up for option #2. For people less fussy about static image quality and more invested in smoothness, they can be perfectly happy with 100 FPS but marginally worse image quality. Not everyone is as sweaty about static image quality as some of us in the enthusiast crowd are.

There's some fair points here about RT (though I find exclusively using path tracing for RT performance testing a little disingenuous given the performance gap), but if RT performance is the main complaint then why is the sub-heading "DLSS is, and always was, snake oil"?

obligatory: disagreeing with some of the author's points is not the same as saying "Nvidia is great"

AMD & Intel ARC are king now. All that CUDA nonsense, is just price-hiking justification

Those 4% can make an RTX 5070 Ti perform at the levels of an RTX 4070 Ti Super, completely eradicating the reason you’d get an RTX 5070 Ti in the first place.

You'd buy a 5070 Ti for a 4% increase in performance over the 4070 Ti Super you already had? Ok.

Have a 2070s. Been thinking for a while now my next card will be AMD. I hope they get back into the high end cards again :/

My last nvidia card was gtx 980.I bought two of them. After i heard about 970 scandal. It didnt directly affect me but fuck nvidia for pulling that shit. Havent bought anything from them. Stopped playing games on pc afterwards, just occasionally on console and laptop igpu.