We all deserve better than this
Idiotic tariffs, indifferent retailers, depraved flippers and AI mania are making the simple act of buying a graphics card the defining misery of PC gaming in 2025.
The sad part is that in Europe on Amazon the Gigabyte store sells RX 9070 XT for 1150€. That's absolutely grotesque. Mind you this card is supposed to be 550$ before tax, after tax it shouldn't be more expensive than 650€ and Gigabyte is charging 80% on top of that. Who needs scalpers with businesses like that.
At least you can still use your older hardware, and at least Radeon cards as old as GCN1 are still actively supported outside of Windows.
Also, old games still exist and will continue to exist in some form into the foreseeable future, legitimately or not.
Like, if you're not into multiplayer games, the Mesa drivers last time I thought still work well, great even, on Polaris and Vega cards as well as even legacy GCN on the Linux side of things, you can still use your RX 580 or 590 with full support going that route, for example.
Ya I get the hype and the desire to get these cards but do you really NEED it? This is like waiting in line for days to buy the newest iPhone.
You can play all the latest games on the highest setting with the previous generation cards, and they are in stock too.
At this point buying the card isn’t about need. It’s just purely status symbol and people in this article are complaining like spoiled children that they can’t get exactly what they want the SECOND the card hits the market. Jfc.
I upgraded to an open box 7900 XT from my Vega 56. I tried getting a 9070 XT and was still in my return window, but damn am I glad I got the discounted previous gen card.
I definitely could not play all the latest games on the highest setting with the card I'd been rocking since 2017.
I don’t feel like the 4000 series ever really got to easily available at MSRP prices.
But on top of that I know a lot of folks skipped the last couple generations because the scalping was outrageous.
I hate it though. They’re not wrong that the companies selling or making GPUs could easily solve the problem, but they just don’t care.
Yea I'm just saving up for an oled monitor at this point. My 5800X3D + 3080 12GB combo can still pretty much play everything above 60 fps with optimized settings on 1440p.
I also got a handheld for local streaming so I can push the graphics settings down more and still get a good IQ due to smaller size.
Increased demand for new cars raises the price of used cars
The entire GPU market has gone to shit.
It's unacceptable that there's new cards for sale (if you can even find one) that cost more than I paid for my 1080 Ti 8 years ago and have essentially the same amount of VRAM (12 GB vs 11 GB).
I thought that maybe the 9070 XT would be at least a reasonable option if I could get it for MSRP. Of course that launch ended up being another farce.
At this point it looks like I'm going to be riding my 1080 Ti until the bitter end. Sure, newer cards will wipe the floor with it, but I can't justify the current prices.
I should look hard and long at Intel Arc if i was you. Those are nice and a clear move up the ladder from where you are at. And they are reasonably priced.
How was that launch a farce? I went with my friend to MicroCenter on launch day and he got one without any problems. They had over 500 cards in stock. We just made a line to get in, picked out the model and made another line at the cashier. Easy.
He paid MSRP.
That only works if you live near a micro center.
It wasn't the same experience over here. All MSRP cards sold out instantly on all stores. Whatever was actually in stock were all at least £100 over MSRP, and they quickly sold out too.
The 1080 Ti was GOAT'd.
Mine was first in my PC, then it moved into my wife's PC, and now it sits happily in a Jellyfin server. That lad has served me thoroughly.
You can always buy used. Even a 2080 TI would be a big step since you can use dlss with it, and prices for them are better now.
Yeah, I bought my 3090 used in 2022 for $600USD. It hasn't had a single issue yet. Knock on wood
People really shouldn't sleep on buying used. I know it can be risky, but if you do it through platforms that offer some amount of buyer protection for the first 30-90 days, I think the risk is greatly reduced. If your card doesn't die in that early window, the chances of it dying in the next year or so are pretty low.
I’m in this boat. I’ll ride my 1080 ti until it becomes unrepairable and dies. 🚀
I'm sure it doesn't help that Nvidia also runs Geforce Now - the higher they price their cards the more it can make their streaming GPU rental solution look like a better deal by comparison... (also since nobody can compete against GFN as Nvidia controls the pricing there as well and also blocks use of Geforce cards in datacenters).
Yep, this basically sums up my experiences a couple months ago. I've been telling myself since about 2016 that I would save up to go all in and build a solid gaming desktop.
But then there were floods in southeast Asia hindering supplies where I lived. No biggie, they'd recover quick.
Then crypto took off and GPUs and some other hardware tripled or quadrupled in price. No biggie, it's a fad that will go away quick.
Then COVID destroyed production and distribution of computer hardware. No biggie, gives me time to save up more to afford these new crazy prices.
Then everyone needs GPUs for the AI craze, and prices went up even more. No biggie, I'll just...cope?
Finally, I was at the point of "Fuck it, I'm tired of waiting. I'm buying a 5080, even if it costs as much as 2 PS5s."
So I planned it out, made sure I had everything lined up to immediately snag one once they were available. And then day of:
So then I thought, forget Nvidia. Just because their cards are dropping earlier in the year doesn't mean it's them or nothing. I'll just get an AMD card if Nvidia doesn't have stock by then.
And, well...here we are in this article.
PC gaming is the best deal, eh?
There was a window where the AMD 6000 series were cheap and readily available, which was probably your best bet. Now we have to wait the AI bubble to burst. Hopefully.
I was in the same boat. Then I decided that the 50x0 was a paper launch and the leaks told me that the 9070XT would lower or have the same performance as the 7900xtx.
Then the 7900xtx dropped in price, clearing the channel for the new gen.
Then I bought that.
Ever since I've been wondering... Why didn't I buy this thing earlier?
It's more then fast enough. The RT performance is above the 3080.
Every 9070XT I can buy now is almost 200 euro more then what i payed for the 7900xtx.
What I learned? Buy previous gen in it's "dying" weeks.
Same strategy here. I’m in the U.S. and tariffs were my big concern. In December, I waited for the Sapphire Nitro+ 7900 XTX to go on sale and I paid less than MSRP for it brand new. Having experienced both the disasters of the previous two GPU gens, I had the foresight that the launch of the next gen cards would also be a disaster, and here we are.
PC Gaming has become a rich person’s hobby.
Buy current gen right before the next gen launches, and you’ll be set. I expect to get 10 years out of my card, with the incredible performance, build quality, and 24 GB VRAM.
if you have been waiting since 2016, why do you want an 5080, though? 2-3 gens earlier will be a large improvement too, with half or even lower a price.
I did the same, but with AMD. I'm going Linux, and everything is good except nvidia's utterly broken drivers. I mean, they always improve, today it's usable if you don't want to sleep/hibernate your PC, if you are sure you won't run out of video memory (nvidia drivers are the only one in linux that can't transfer some memory to system ram when it's really needed), if you don't need gamescope, and so on...
I expanded elsewhere in this post, but basically it's a combination of:
Consider buying a previous generation card. You can sometimes find good deals on used ones.
This is what I got from the article as well. Jesus, buy a previous gen GPU and fiddle a bit with your graphic settings, it’s just games, not life or death.
I actually had thought of that too, but see my reply to someone else further below:
Good luck finding a used one that isn't barely on its last legs from being poorly OC'd/cooled, or is just an outright brick that burned out in a crypto mining farm and is now being resold by a shell entity of a shell entity of a shell entity on Amazon or Ebay.
get an used one, why make it hard. nobody needs the latest and greatest at launch and they clearly cant/dont want to keep up.
i play me bideogames and be happy that it works well until it doesnt.
I’ve been telling myself since about 2016 that I would save up to go all in and build a solid gaming desktop.
Finally, I was at the point of “Fuck it, I’m tired of waiting. I’m buying a 5080, even if it costs as much as 2 PS5s.”
I assume that whatever you're running right now isn't terribly new if you've been thinking about upgrading for nine years.
The 5080 is a 16GB card. A quick skim on Amazon suggests that 16GB Nvidia cards are in short supply, but that you can get a 16GB AMD GPU without problems.
They aren't quite as fast on the Passmark benchmark as the 5080, but they also cost a lot less (even if the 5080 were available), and I assume that they'd be a lot faster than whatever you're running now.
Could go with that (or something less-fancy) and then if you felt that you wanted to spend more for more performance, do so when GPUs become available.
To add a bit to the story, I did spring for a gaming laptop in 2021 because my 2013 MacBook was starting to show its age, and the model I bought came with a 2070 mobile GPU which has been fine playing newer games at modest settings at 1080p.
Laptops and prebuilts were basically the only affordable option in the pandemic, and I had a laptop need at the time. But for a while now it has still been a goal of mine to put together a good desktop. The last desktop I built was in 2010 (I snagged a GTX 580 GPU and felt like such hot shit then).
Everyone deserves more choices. We need European gpus now!
For me, I haven't bought a new graphics card in a long time. I have a RX 580 that I bought used for $200 CAD. My next upgrade will be my motherboard since I'm still using a 1150 socket and I'm stuck using DDR3 RAM and an outdated CPU (Intel i5-4460).
I can still play newish games at low settings and that's fine for me right now. I'm not buying a GPU at current retail price, fuck that. It's crazy that the best time to build a PC was 2015.
Same, I rocked a second hand GTx 680 from 2012-2013, which I upgraded to a second hand RTX 3060 12GB for a fantastic price, in 2024. Still rocking a DDR3 platform with the intel i7 4400K. And that's more than enough for most games with nice graphics on 1680x1050 :) (display probably 15 years old too). Eventually, I will be looking for some other second hand components to upgrade the rest of the system, but it does everything more than well enough.
$200 CAD is about double the price of a used 580
Well, it is now. They're running an i5-4460, though, so they probably didn't buy the 580 recently.
...Looking at my specs, do you really believe that I paid it recently? This was many years ago.
I stood in line at Microcenter Thursday morning to get a 9070 XT. I arrived at about 8AM (an hour before they opened), and the line was already wrapped around the side of the building. They let people in slowly after opening (apparently so as not to overwhelm the sales staff), and I got near the front door by about 10. They were handing out vouchers, and they actually still had quite a few left, with almost all the different models available when they got to me. After I got my card and left, I looked back at the store and the line still wrapped around the side of the building.
Frankly, from my perspective, I'd say the availability of cards was "surprisingly good." It's just that there was so much pent-up demand, even "surprisingly good" supply wasn't good enough.
You want to know what the punchline is, though? Not expecting to have much choice in cards, and not having had time to research the differences between the ones made by different board partners, I ended up getting the "Gigabyte Gaming OC" version, which sounded good because it had a slightly higher max clock speed but was still $600. In retrospect, I should've gotten the PowerColor "Reaper" version because every other version is too wide to fit in my ITX computer case. [Womp, womp.] So now I have to decide between paying extra to replace a case that I otherwise like, or try to hope the cards actually do get restocked in a timely fashion (and still at MSRP) so I can attempt an exchange? I guess the moral of the story is, even if you "win" it's still a fucking pain in the ass.
The last card I bought was a Radeon Vega 56, also on launch day (7.5 years ago!) and I was also damn lucky to get it. I cannot believe that the GPU market has been continuously fucked up since then!
Well if you are getting a new case, and are into modding, I adore my fractal design node 202. It’s tiny, fits a 420W 3090, and you can duct the cpu/gpu to its vents with like $5 of foam strips. I have no case fans, yet the cpu/gpu idle with their fans off and barely spin up because they only suck in outside air.
The newer fractal ridge is a bit bigger, but should work much better with no modding since it’s more "open"
fractal design node 202
Won't fit. That case supports GPUs up to 310x145x47 mm, but the one I just bought is 288x132x56 mm. It's that extra width beyond "2 slots" that's the killer, both for your suggestion and my existing case.
fractal ridge
That one does fit the new GPU, but did I mention that I'm also still using a 3.5" drive and a full-size ATX PSU?
What I really want is something that has a layout similar to my old case, but literally just maybe half a centimeter wider:
In a way, we brought this on ourselves by tolerating scalpers. Gamers made it known that they'll go hysterical and pay any price to have it now. If enough of us don't do that, scalping video cards won't be a lucrative business and the fuckers will be forced to give up. I guarantee you the reason the stock is disappearing so fast is because resellers have their fucking bots set up to spam all the retailer web sites, and the rest is people trying to compete with them.
What a rat race. Fuck the entire thing.
We have it better than we've ever had it at any point in the past, also: Broad PCI-E backwards compatibility means you can stick your old card in your new board and tough it out for a few months until the fervor dies down and/or the scalpers lose their shirts sitting on their inventory.
In EU basically the retailers were using on the fly price adjustment to gauge their own customers. There were several models at MSRP but all models that were AIB OC versions started at 749-799€ and were dynamically adjusted upwards. I know personally of several cases where people bought and were charged for the early cheaper price and the etailer cancelled their order to fulfill 100€ more expensive prices they were practicing post hoc. We need to amend legislation to make any sale binding from the moment you're charged any amount. In CZ the seller Alza was doing this.
Sounds like an auction with extra steps.
Basically, they outscalped the scalpers...
Honestly, I'm just keeping my money in my saving account. No way I'm spending my hard-earned money on overpriced stuff, I can wait a while longer, and I'm considering a Steam Deck as my daily driver. Not a beast, but not excessively priced either.
Steam Deck is awesome. Highly recommend, especially the OLED
Same. I'm happy with my 7900XTX that I bought in 2023.
These days I only use Amazon for small things, and lately have decided to go back to individual specific websites for whatever it is I need. There's hardly even a price difference at this point.
Agreed, I’m pretty content with my gtx 1660 and steam deck.
As much as I want a high end gaming PC, I’m fairly happy with the combination of ps5 for the heavier stuff and steam deck for everything else + emulation (including some switch) and streaming from the ps5 to SD for cozy gaming. I realize this is not a cheap combination by any means, but for the same price you’d get a PC that’s just barely above the ps5 in ability. I’ll invest in a PC further down the line
I just got the sole rx7900xtx I could find in the state last week.
Glad I didn't wait for this :/
The GPU market is a goddamn disaster. Nvidia can't even put the right amount of ROPs on a card or back up their "5070 is a 4090 hurr durr" claims, AMD ditching higher end GPUs, melting connectors, AI, AI, AI!!, etc. Even with Intel's Arc GPUs it's not enough to compete when Nvidia has all the market share in consumer cards.
I've got a 7800xt, a few 3090s in various gaming/video editing systems and a RX 6400 for a backup card. I'm not buying any more until this AI bubble bursts and cards start having actual amounts of uplift from generation to generation and when I can buy one without them getting botted to hell and back.
You should sell the 3090s now. Prices for them are freaking nuts, probably as high as they’ll ever be.
Also, I must say AMD makes great hardware, and tries as hard as it can to price/sell them uncompetitively.
The MI300X? Better than the H100, yet no one bought them because they priced gouge them, and priced gouged any sane lesser GPU for a dev machines. People would have worked around the funky software stack, but no.
Pro cards? Total joke. Gaming? See the article.
Even Strix Halo, the framework APU, is price gouged to hell. A cheap 32/40CU config with one cut-down CCD would be killer, but no, it’s mega expensive or a completely neutered integrated GPU, your choice.
I really don’t get it. The only explanation I can think of the Nvidia/AMD CEOs are colluding because they are second cousins (and they are actually second cousins).
Hard to justify blowing a couple grand on a card when 5 years of GeForce Now costs well under half that amount. I normally dislike subscriptions but this one is solid IMO
That's how subscription services get you. Why buy DVDs when you can stream all day long on Netflix? Suddenly, DVDs are no longer for sale and streaming services take down content for one reason or another. Then you have no other legal alternative but to pay whatever they ask, be shown whatever they want and continue to own none of it.
The golden ticket for me is buying previous gen. Used.
I picked up a 7950 during the crypto crash. A 980 TI when everyone was doing exactly this and jumping on new stuff. My used 3090 is like $200 more than when I bought it, last I checked.
And the risk of it being faulty? Heck, I could’ve bought two of them and still come out ahead of these stupid new card prices.
This gen is still pretty screwed, though. 7900 prices may drop some with this, but still…
I had thought of that, but the 4080's/4090's were going for significantly more than the next gen cards were going for at MSRP.
I mean, look at this, the 5080 is MSRP $999 but here's Newegg's 4080s:
And looking at the "Buy it Now" prices for used models on eBay isn't much better:
7900s aren’t as outrageous:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=amd+7900&_odkw=rtx+4080&_udhi=1000
You are not wrong though, those 4080 prices are messed up.
Insane
I mean, as much as I like to criticize chip companies, it’s across the board.
In most industries, the owners are sticking it extra hard to the consumer.
All this article does is say tsk tsk instead of recognizing the late stage capitalism and pointing out our few options.
And some people wonder why I have near homicidal tendencies towards cryptobros and/or AI evangelist. This pretty much sums it up.
I consider myself an "AI evangelist," but I hate Altman with a burning passion, probably more than you do, and hate data centers burning the planet.
I think running models locally, as hackable tools you understand, trained on very modest hardware (as Chinese companies are doing by necessity with the import restrictions), is a distinct thing. Doubly so if bitnet takes off and running stuff on-device becomes super cheap.
I feel like there's even a smaller group of programmers that used blockchain for utilitarian purposes, and not pyramid schemes, but TBH it seems vanishingly small.
What I’m saying is… the problem is not AI, it’s billionaires.
It’s always billionaires.
Most of my hatred for it (if you can call it that) has to do with putting AI in everything. Blockchain makes sense in certain instances. I wouldn't say for money, but for information tracking etc. AI LLM's make sense in certain instances. But it's everywhere and it's taking the place of tech I use daily but doing a worse job overall by a wide enough margin that I just can't stand it. And I don't understand why companies want to put it in everything except that they don't want to be the only ones not shilling it.
There are always people who come out of the woodwork to claim it works for them but half of them don't even have a good understanding of how or why it works for them, and a lot of them are just lazy. I look at AI as a bandaid type tech in most of its applications right now and I'm tired of fighting to opt out of it.
Why is your hobby more important than their hobby?
They are just price raping us now on very GPU release.
That's true but it's a race to the top. Resellers selling cards at a price that is twice or more the MSRP. Meaning that these companies have to jump through hoops not to sell to them or raise prices to make it less likely they'll buy them if they can't profit. And everybody else loses.
So Amazon has no limit on how much of the same produce you can buy, against scalpers? Make it percentage based for all i care.
Renpy becoming popular means there are tons of indie games, visual novella genre, with which you don't need a beefy graphics card.
I'd also argue that nice graphics is only one component of a good game, and "nice" is very loosely tied to computing power here.
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Nobody deserves anything
