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Whatever you do, don't buy an Nvidia GPU right now | Digital Trends
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this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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Thing is: there is always the "next better thing" around the corner. That's what progress is about. The only thing you can do is choose the best available option for you when you need new hardware and be done with it until you need another upgrade.
Exactly. The best time to buy a graphics card is never
really my rule of thumb has always been when it's a significant upgrade.
for a long time i didn't really upgrade until it was a 4x increase over my old. certain exceptions were occasionally made. nowadays i'm a bit more opportunistic in my upgrades. but i still seek out 'meaningful' upgrades. upgrades that are a decent jump over the old. typically 50% improvement in performance, or upgrades i can get for really cheap.
4x…? Even in older cards that’s more than a decade between cards.
A 4080 is only 2.5x as powerful as a 1080ti, those are 5 years apart.
What's wrong with upgrading once every 5-10 years? Not everyone plays the latest games on 4k Ultra
Admittedly 4x is a bit steep, more like 3-4x
Starfield requires a minimum 1070ti to play. It’s not just about fidelity, you just wouldn’t be able to play any newer games.
I had a 1080ti and the only game that really gave me grief playing on high settings was Starfield. I’m not saying older cards won’t have problems playing newer games but I am saying all cards have problems playing Starfield.
Cry’s in 970
Dude, there's dozens of us!
It depends on what you need. I think usually you can get the best bang for buck by buying the now previous generation when the new one is released.
Yup just picked up a whole PC with rtx3090 for $800.
New or used?
Used
On what platform? eBay?
Yeah eBay Canada, was a great deal
Best Buy has refurbished PC's with 4070s for under a grand right now.
Graphics card. Not even once.
Real gamers use ayahuasca.
You have a magical button. If you press it now, you will get $100 and it will disappear. Every year you don't press it, the amount of money you will get if you do press it goes up by 20%. When should you press the button? At any given point in time, waiting just one more year adds an entire 20% to your eventual prize, so it never makes sense to press it, but you have to eventually or you get nothing.
Same thing with graphics cards.
Is it compound or straight percentage?
Cuz if it's just straight percentage then it's $20 a year, whereas if it is compound then it's a 2X multiplier every three and a half years roughly.
Compound, which more closely models the actual rate at which computing power has grown over the years.
So if I waited roughly 35 years then I would get $1 million...
Or you could wait 70 years and leave 34 million to people in your will... The point is that there is no mathematically correct choice.
I think I got about 77 years left in me, unless somebody comes along and kills me that is.
That at least would be $125 million which isn't too shabby. I find it hard to believe that anybody would say that $125 million 77 years from now would not be a considerable amount of money.
Once you need it, or, alternatively, once you have enough to live comfortably for the rest of your life. It's exponential growth, you only get one chance, just gotta decide what your goal with the money actually is.
Yep. My point is that there's no easily calculable, mathematically "correct" moment to push the button. Same goes for buying a graphics card.
Press it before you retire
Same with graphics cards
Yeah it's always that: "I want to buy the new shiny thing! But it's expensive, so I'll wait for a while for its price to come down." You wait for a while, the price comes down, you buy the new shiny thing and then comes out the newest shiny thing.
Yep. There will always be "just wait N months and there will be the bestest thing that beats the old bestest thing". You are guaranteed to get buyers remorse when shopping for hardware. Just buy what best suits you or needs and budget at the time you decided is the best.time for you (or at the time your old component bites the dust) and then stop looking at any development on those components for at least a year. Just ignore any deals, new releases, whatever and be happy with the component you bought.
I bought a 1080 for my last PC build, downloaded the driver installer and ran the setup. There were ads in the setup for the 2k series that had launched the day before. FML
Yep. I bought a 4080 just a few weeks ago. Now there is ads for the refresh all over... Thing is: you card didn't get any worse. You thought the card was a good value proposition for you when you bought it and it hasn't lost any of that.
"The" point. Which is the best available option?
The simplest answer would be "price per fps".
Not always. I'm doing a lot of rendering and such. So FPS aren't my primary concern.