Rumours of an Intel entry into the graphics card market have been circulating for years, and many people had eagerly anticipated the arrival of a third player to the discrete GPU space.
Well, it happened. A few days ago, Intel released the Arc A750 and Arc A770 cards. Let us take a look at the good and the bad of this launch.
(Sailboat photo by Robbie Sproule)
Can you feel it? The change for PC builders, not very subtle, happening even as I type these words?
The clouds have lifted. The sun is shining. The news is good. It is as follows:
At last! All modern GPUs are available for purchase, new, for MSRP. No more crying as you pay 2x or 3x the recommended price for a card. No more heartbreak as you buy a used card that has been sitting in a crypto farm for 2 years. No more sad checking on crypto prices, hoping and praying for a crash. No, friends, that time is over!
Oh, how sweet it is, to have everything in-stock and for a normal price. With that, a large number of changes have hit the charts, so let us take a look.
Between the addition of cameras to smartphones and the rise of image-centric social media sites like Instagram, photography has only become more and more popular over the past couple decades. This has also meant a lot more interest in image editing and adjusting. When it comes to software for image editing, it’s Adobe Photoshop that dominates both professional and enthusiast work.
However, serious users may find that Photoshop can sometimes be a demanding program. In this article, I’ll briefly discuss the importance of each PC component when it comes to having a good experience with Photoshop.
This post will not be an example build, but rather advice on what to prioritize and what to be aware of. (If you’re looking for something more specific, with recommendations of exact parts to get for different budgets—you should check out the first section our primary guide on building a PC for image editing and graphic design.)
After a full eternity of waiting (two years), GPU prices have returned to something that closely resembles sanity.
In-stock, decently priced, current-generation graphics cards are once again linked in almost every tier of our PC building chart!
Did you feel that? Was it an earthquake? An avalanche? No, nVidia just decided to throw all caution to the wind and create the world’s most powerful consumer GPU, and that GPU is stomping!
The new RTX 3090 Ti is an absolute monster that smashes all the metrics and establishes itself as the new king of consumer GPUs.
Let us take a look at some of its stats:
You want to get the best GPU for your money. That’s natural, because your graphics card is probably expensive, and you want your money to be well-spent. But how do you know what to look for? What GPU specs should you look at? What do the numbers mean?
In this article, I will explain what certain key GPU specifications mean, and roughly how they translate into actual in-game or program performance.
GPU prices started going up (roughly) in March of 2020 when all hardware went up in price or went out-of-stock. It happened slowly at first, then faster and faster, until widespread unavailability became the norm!
During the worst of the worst, it was so bad that you could not buy most graphics cards, no matter what price you were willing to pay! I am very glad that the worst is over.
But we aren’t out of the woods just yet.
How have you been? Better, I hope. Things have not been well for the last 1.5 years, due to… the circumstances being what they are.
But at long last, we can see a ray of hope!
Let’s be fair: it would be more than a little presumptuous if we expected or even demanded improvements to the current hardware shortages. Even after a monumental vaccine rollout procedure in many countries, the pandemic is still having a huge global effect, and we as builders need to have patience.
At this point, we are now deep into the knock-on impact of slowdowns at the lowest and earliest stages of manufacturing affecting every aspect of the assembly and distribution pipeline.
But even after all these caveats and disclaimers, people remain curious: which parts are being affected the most, what are the ongoing problems, and when might things get back to normal? Well, those are the exact topics we intend to cover in this post, part by part!
