(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.
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.
A new decade means lots of exciting new technology to spend your hard-earned money on! If you’ve got the itch to upgrade your PC, it might be worth checking these things out. Then you can either wait to see what improvements are in store, or be confident that a purchase made right now won’t be obsolete in six month’s time.
Keep in mind that a lot of the following information is based on rumours, conjecture, and leaked information. Until it comes direct from the manufacturer in question, take this information with a grain of salt.
If you have not been following the news, AMD announced new cards to be sold at $380 and $450. nVidia responded by releasing “Super” versions of its 2060 and 2070 cards, priced at $400 and $500. This prompted AMD to lower the release price of its cards, to $350 and $400.
Let us take a look at the competition at each price point:
PC photo by Nikitarama
Your computer has faithfully been by your side for all these years. You can’t replace it (for whatever reason), but with Christmas coming up, you decide it’s time to give your little friend a much-deserved gift.
Or maybe it’s frustrating you with sluggishness. Either way, you’ve got a great excuse to give it a little performance boost. What I’m here to do is to help you figure out what you can do to upgrade your older system on a budget.
So, let’s discover how to upgrade an older PC.
This list is more suited to people who fit the following:
It is okay if the above doesn’t quite apply to you. This info can still be really helpful. Just keep in mind that you might have different upgrade options than listed.
The Witcher 3 1080p and 4K Benchmarks from TechPowerUp (source article linked below)
November 2017 was the last time we updated the GPU descriptions. We compared cards to the Titan XP, and had benchmarks for WoW and Witcher 3.
Now that it is November 2018, I have updated the base comparison GPU and the reference games.
I hope you did not miss nVidia’s conference yesterday! Lots of tech/game demos were shown, and lots and LOTS of fancy words (two hours worth) were used to tell us that nVidia is launching the new RTX series of cards.
After some very brief relief around the 2017 holidays, graphics card prices continue on the path of going absolutely insane.
We had a cryptocoin-induced inflation back in late 2013, but it was somewhat mild, and only lasted a couple of months. We had a second inflation in 2017, where the price hikes were higher, and lasted more than half a year. When this ended in December 2017, I thought: “Thank goodness that is over. Nothing could have been as bad as that!”
I was so naive, so wrong.
In short, there is not much we can do about graphics cards prices other than continue to recommend the best graphics cards at each price point. However, we want to be realistic about how bad the situation has gotten.
