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2023 was the year that GPUs stood still
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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Hands up if you/someone you know purchased a Steam Deck or other computer handheld, instead of upgrading their GPU 🙋♂️
To be honest I stopped following PC hardware altogether because things were so stagnant outside of Intel's alder lake and the new x86 P/E cores. GPUs that would give me a noticeable performance uplift from my 1060 aren't really at appealing prices outside the US either IMO
It's diminishing returns.
We need a giant leap forward to show a noticeable effect now.
Like, if a cars top speed was 10mph, a 5 mph increase is fucking huge.
But getting a supercar to top off at 255 instead of 250, just isn't a huge deal. And you wouldn't notice unless you were testing it.
So even if they keep increasing power at a steady rate, the end user is going to notice it less and less everytime.
We had hardware getting massive leaps for years. Problem is, devs got used to hardware having enough grunt to overcome lack of optimizations. Now we got shit coming out barely holding 60+ on 4080s and requiring usage of FSR or DLSS as a bandaid to make the game get back to playable framerates.
If you’ve got 30 series or 7000 series from AMD you don’t need to look for a more performant card, you need devs to put in time for polish and optimization before launch and not 6 months down the line IF the game is a commercial success.
Hell, Cyberpunk 2077 dropped 10-20fps with the last patch on my 4090, and the devs don’t care enough to fix it.
Cities Skylines 2 aims for only 30fps, and it can’t even hit that on my pretty good gaming PC.
A fix that worked for me on Cyberpunk dropping in performance after that patch - turn everything to low, restart the game, then change settings back to what they were.
Yeah, with that trick it went from 50fps to 90fps on everything turned to max. Thank you so much!
Cities Skylines 2 is really bad because you’d expect given how poorly it runs on your 4090 that a meager 1060 wouldn’t run it at all, but on the contrary I’ll probably get the same performance as you. It’s like the game just… isn’t capable of taking advantage of your better card.
One thing that's very apparent is that with more traffic the simulation slows down while the framerate isn't (so all cars go in slow motion, even though I'm at 3x speed). This means that it's severely CPU-limited.
I don't know how multithreaded their simulation is, I have a 5950X with 32 hardware threads. Maybe an upgrade to the new generation of Ryzen CPUs that are going to come out around February could help.
Generally speaking, the simulations running behind the scenes in simulation games are always single-threaded. You’re always better off with a higher clock speed, those extra threads just won’t be utilized.
Well, that will get harder and harder to achieve, since CPUs are getting more cores, they aren't getting much faster these days.
Money is in the AI chips for datacenters, i think regular consumers will be more more only getting dinner's leftovers
I'm not entirely sure about AMD but NVIDIA certainly seems keen on the AI market to the point that they don't really care about the consumer gaming market anymore.
From 2020 I planned on building a new gaming PC. Bought an ITX case and followed hardware releases closely... And then got disillusioned with it all.
Picked up a Steam Deck in August of 2022 and couldn't be happier with it. The ITX case is collecting dust.
I game exclusively on my Steam deck these days.
I absolutely love it. I dock it and use the desktop as my standard pc too. It does everything I need it to do.
Same here! I was worried I wouldn't use it (I haven't been gaming on PC much) but I actually game on it much more than on PC
That's exactly what I did!
Yep. In fact I bought a second deck (OLED) instead of upgrading GPU’s. Prices are nuts, I’ll wait.
That's exactly what happened to me as well.
It's not exciting at all to pay attention to mediocre launches of expensive products. The GPU in my gaming PC is several generations old at this point but I don't really care. There are still plenty of good games that will run fine on it and I'm just going to hold tight. There are games that I still have yet to purchase that will run fine on my hardware. I'm not going to give my money to terribly optimized games or games that require high-end hardware.
The more expensive PC gaming becomes the more high-end hardware doesn't really matter. I think developers and publishers know that they need to target the average consumer because they need to sell volume on these games. If the average gamer is playing on older and/or lower end hardware then they need to service that market. There aren't enough 4090 buyers to sell the volume they need to make money. Hell, at these prices I'm not sure there are even enough 4070 or even 4060 level buyers to do that. Tons of people lost interest and aren't buying into this even if you still see posts online of people purchasing new GPUs.
I waited out the crypto market and I don't have problems waiting longer.
I'm surprised so many people are cross shopping tbh. I briefly considered steam deck, but specs are barely enough to play at 1080p so it's completely useless when docked and a purely portable device with a tiny screen and gamepad carries very little value to me personally.
I ended up getting eGPU enclosure for my laptop and grabbing a 1080ti from a friend that didn't need it anymore. I'm able to play D4 at 4k on medium settings.
Even if I had to buy a gpu like I was originally planning, ~$800 total to play in 4k on a 43" screen with a mouse and keyboard is a completely different experience from anything Xbox or steam deck offer.