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:
(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.
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.
Today we’re taking a look at used vs. new GPU prices, and whether buying a used graphics card is worth your while.
Fig. 1: Our prediction of the only graphics card nVidia will release in the year 2026 (projected MSRP: $20,000)
Greetings. This article was painful to write. Every section hurt, and every section gets progressively more painful. But the truth can hurt, so read on.
The consumer PC world is headed down a bad path:
There is a major focus by PC part manufacturers to produce extremely expensive and overpowered products, with the mid-tiers and the low-end being neglected. There might be no annihilation and havoc in the personal computer sector immediately, but most consumers are unhappy. If things continue as they are, normal PC buyers may choose to opt out, shrinking the market significantly. With fewer and fewer customers in the long-term, some component manufacturers may find themselves facing their own end-of-life.
Come walk with me, friendly reader, down memory lane, and I will show you how we ended up here… and where we might be going next.
This is a double update: one CPU, one GPU.
Let us begin with the section that contains (on balance) good news for PC builders!
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.
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:
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!