gpu Archives - Logical Increments Blog

The Pre-Black Friday Update

Yes! Yes! Black Friday is almost here, the day every PC builder waits for all year round.

This year’s Black Friday should bring us some relief from the very topsy-turvy prices we have been seeing, since Black Friday (and Cyber Monday) sales are typically the best prices you see all year round.

We have not had many serious updates to the chart this year. The hardware releases have been slow, the international scene has been volatile enough to ensure most of the PC hardware conversations centred on tariffs/prices and not releases, and some of us on the Logical Increments team have been going through some unforeseen ~~consequences~~ circumstances that an apple-a-day could not cure.

I am very grateful to still have you, dear reader, even though it has been a quiet year update-wise. Now then:

Mid-tier Graphics Card Woes (Big Oof, Large Yikes)

That is a lot of new cards launched recently! The RTX 5050, the RTX 5060, two versions of the RTX 5060 Ti, and two versions of the RX 9060 XT!

Instead of checking each one out separately, let us take a look at them all in one fell swoop, with an eye toward deciding where/if they belong in our main build chart. I am somewhat unsure of what a swoop is, and why it needs to be of the fell variety, but here are the cards:

AMD’s Phantom: The RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are Great, but Have Disappeared

Ah, AMD! At long last, you have decided to do something about your subpar GPU market share. Better late than never!

AMD has recently launched the RX 9070 and the RX 9070 XT, for $550 and $600. So how do these two new cards compare when pitted against nVidia’s offerings?

nVidia’s Mirage: The RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti are Excellent, But Do Not Exist in Reality

nVidia has very recently launched 2 new cards, the RTX 5070 ($550) and the RTX 5070 Ti ($750). This is a standard nVidia launch, so if you want the tl;dr: Good cards, overpriced.

For more details (and how we’ll be changing our chart), read on…

Intel Boldly Enters the Mid-tier Graphics Card Segment

Intel has recently released two new graphics cards, the Arc B570 and Arc B580, both targeting the mid-range tiers.

How do they fare? Do they belong in our chart?

Courting Kings and Emperors with nVidia’s RTX 5000 GPUs

Tell me, how rich are you? If you are rich, then we can be friends. If you are very very rich, I would like to upgrade you to my best friend, and tell you about nVidia’s two newly released hyper-overpriced graphics cards, the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090.

…let us take a closer look:

What Logical Increments Tier is Required to Run the Most Popular Steam Games?

Nigel Delmore
17th Nov 2023
Guides

(Information on Steam’s top games were gathered for this article from Steam Charts)

Back in January 2020, I crafted a neat little piece discussing the Logical Increments tier needed to enjoy each of the top games on Steam at the time. Fast forward to now, and oh, how the scene has shifted! Back around that period, we were seeing trade tariffs causing a good bump in prices for PC hardware. As we ventured into late 2020, high demand meant the cost of PC parts kept climbing, and 2021 brought even higher prices—especially for graphics cards due to a cryptocurrency boom. Oh, and let’s not forget, the world was just getting acquainted with Covid-19, adding a whole new level of complexity to tech market dynamics through supply chain issues.

Now, at the tail end of 2023, with prices and availability having normalized in some (though not all) component categories, and just a week left until Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s about time we take a fresh look at what Logical Increments PC building tier you’d need to dive into the most popular Steam games today. Let’s see what changed in the last few years, and whether that ol’ system still has some life in it, or whether it might be worth a little upgrade. Stick around as we unpack the current gaming demands and discuss today’s tech landscape.

The Best Graphics Cards for Video Editing and Animation

In a world where visuals speak louder than words, video editing and animation have emerged as potent tools to tell compelling stories. For professionals venturing into the realms of cinematic or animated storytelling, the centrepiece of their tech arsenal is undeniably the graphics card. The graphical prowess doesn’t just define the quality of visuals but also the efficiency and speed of rendering them.

Here, we unearth the graphics cards that stand out in the tail end of 2023 for their remarkable capabilities in video editing and animation.

Graphics Cards are Expensive in 2023 – Can Used GPUs Come to the Rescue?

Today we’re taking a look at used vs. new GPU prices, and whether buying a used graphics card is worth your while.

The “A580 and Other Intel Graphics Cards” Update

One year ago (almost to the day) Intel presented its A770 and A750 cards to the world. These were reasonably priced cards with reasonable performance, but were not added to our build chart then because—in addition to other minor issues with them—they suffered from two major flaws:

1. The performance in old titles was poor.
2. The performance on old systems (without Resizable BAR) was poor.

It has been a year, and you still need a system that has Resizable BAR, but that is available on all modern platforms launched in the last ~3 years, so it is less of an issue. More importantly, Intel’s latest drivers have dramatically improved performance in older games, between 20%-40%! That is a huge improvement.

Today, Intel launched the A580, prompting a second look into Intel’s previous cards. Since all three are based on the same silicon, we will look at them together.

Posts Tagged Under: gpu