Please Don’t Buy New Graphics Cards

Linus and Luke discuss AMD and Nvidia’s new graphics cards.


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[michaelstraub]

The fact that you could go from a ryzen 1200 for like 20-30 bucks used to something competitive with the current top-end on the same socket is just bonkers. AM4 is just legendary.

[jfolz]

It's pretty obvious that Nvidia simply does not want a repeat of the 10 series. They were too good and, importantly, had enough VRAM. Until very recently a 1070 upwards would run even brand new titles decently.

Edit: Since people keep replying saying the 30 series was so great, observe the madness.

780 Ti: 3 GB, 699 USD
980 Ti: 6 GB, 649 USD
1080 Ti: 11 GB, 699 USD
2080 Ti: 11 GB, 999 USD
3080 Ti: 12 GB, 1199 USD
4080: 16GB, 1, 199 USD (Ti doesn't exist)

See the problem yet? Healthy VRAM growth all the way to 10 series, followed by over 5 years of stagnation. Meanwhile prices basically doubled.
I'm ignoring the 90 cards, because they're in a completely different league price wise. You could argue that I shouldn't put the 3080 Ti there, because its price is also silly, but the 3080 only came with 10 GB originally. So for the same price as a 1080 Ti, you could now get 1 GB less VRAM! What a steal! Except even that's all academic anyways, as MSRP was completely irrelevant for the entire time the 30 series was current.

ps: This rant was brought to you by the TechPowerUp GPU database.

[Dragonofshame]

When I built my first PC I got my gtx 1070 for $350. It's absolute insanity that they expect us to pay almost double that for what is essentially the "same" spot in the lineup.

Edit: Lots of braindead replies here. For a long time the trend was for each generation to improve on the last while keeping prices roughly the same. Look at the 700, 900, and 1000 series cards. In fact, this trend continues in other parts of the PC part manufacturing business. The 13700k cost ~$70 more than the 6700k did when I bought it. Adjusting for inflation the price actually *dropped* for the "same" spot in the lineup.

Prices increasing year after year for generational tech is not normal. These companies should not be competing with their own products from the previous generation.

[AlexanderTheAverage]

Nvidia has killed all of my excitement for new gpus. They keep making worse and worse products and charging more and more money. AMD isn't much better because they followed Nvidia in raising their prices way higher.

[iankamanda]

This is literally why i ended up buying a 7900 XTX. I started looking at the 4070 but the performance didn't make much sense, so i considered the 4070ti which was an extra 200 dollars at the time with the same VRAM. The next step up would have been the 4080, but that cost an extra 400 dollars from the 4070ti which was madness... and there was no Nvidia card in that 400 dollar bracket. The 7900 xtx was sitting right in that sweet spot with 24 Gigs of VRAM and basically the same raw performance as the 4080.

[SpeedyDocDOCARMY]

I'm hoping for the market to correct itself but I'm worried the new cards will increase in price and will go out of stock immediately. I miss the days when 500 bucks would get you the top of the line card for generation...

[timebomb]

If Linus wants to kill the bottom tier video card he needs to make a video comparing interested graphics to bottom tiers. The graphics card review videos never have the performance metrics of the integrated graphics so the bottom tier at least appears "better than nothing", because the data is missing.

[GremmieWhite]

Luke's role on the podcast is basically say "That's insane" or "That's actually pretty nuts" from time to time

[Spamme-jtnd]

Entry level graphics cards are also bought a lot in government and academic institutions where they need powerful CPUs for running simulations and statistical software. So they go for powerful CPUs which do not always have a iGPUs. However, since they need to give q justification for their purchases, they have to go for cheapest GPUs available as they can't purchase used ones because of rules

[josephparkin]

Why would I buy a new graphics card when there’s like 2-3 games released a year that actually take advantage of it, sticking with my 3080 for years tbh

[motopanda]

when i did my upgrade start of last year i opted to go amd 7900xtx because it actually comes with 24gb of video memory and as far as regular rendering is equal/better than a 4080.. not to mention at the time the 4080s were going for 1600$ whereas i payed msrp of 1070 for my red devil 7900xtx.

[mattuca]

still rocking a 1060 6 GB here, since launch, was a really good price and now we have nothing with the same value, but I remember that Nvidia blocked the SLI option because 2x 1060 was close to a 1080 at that time

[triadwarfare]

3:57 not everyone can buy used. I think LowSpecGamer criticized Linus for this because not all markets have a healthy used card ecosystem like in Brazil and would be better off be buying an entry level card than a used card because nobody's selling for a fair price.

[d.wolfin]

I bought a cheap entry gpu when I first built my computer because I didn’t have enough money for a good gpu and I wanted to be able to use it. I still use it in my NAS if I need a display, or if I need to troubleshoot my gpu in the future. I don’t believe they have no value, but I see the value in these new high end integrated graphics.

[danielmevs]

I just got a used 3080 and was feeling FOMO for not getting the 4070 Super. Thank you for explaining why waiting is the better option!

[itranscendencei]

Yeah this generation has been such a hard pass for me, and thankfully Nvidia has made that a very easy decision for me to make with their scummy prices for the spec. AMD is just not quite there yet, but I know that it will be soon. For now though, 5600X+3080FE still plays everything I want it to and looks great at 1440p 144Hz.

[RuukuLada]

i would buy a 4080 super in a heartbeat if it had 24 gb of vram, huge miss for nvidia i think for many potential customers

[Biostalker]

My 3080 ti isn't going anywhere anytime soon, especially since I took out a second mortgage to buy it.

[Crixer]

Computer stores of my country still sells GT730s (DDR3) around +$110 for some damn reason, or GT1030s costing around +$179, you can import an second hand RX580 8GB for less of $90

[marcfuchs]

Hopefully modern integrated graphics become more reliable. I am using Blender a lot on my main computer, i7 6900K with an Nvidia GTX1080 (love this GPU, so reliable and still capable). I have a secondary computer, that was built for rendering things when I am working on my main computer, that one has an i9 9900K with integrated graphics, so that I didn't need to buy a graphics card (64GB RAM, rendering speeds weren't critical). But I needed to find out, Blender has mysterious issues when running on this iGPU. Shaders containing transparency would load once, and then just turn black, couldn't be rendered. Similar effects with other specific shading instructions.
Months later, I tried it out again, suddenly transparency worked, but other shaders started glitching. Making it barely usable for my purposes. Never found out, if those issues got solved by updates, because at some point I got an RTX3060 and so the iGPU doesn't matter anymore.