Budget PC Gaming is dead! [Byte Size Tech]

[CP5670]

Maybe you're right, I didn't realize the consoles had become just as hard to find now. The ebay prices on them don't seem as bad as video cards though.

 

[Aikouka]

To start off, I've never seen these two before, but man... the arrogance of "I'm right and you're wrong" is something that I have a hard time swallowing.

Anyway, as others have mentioned, I think their problem is that they define a card's or computer's usefulness by its capabilities in a single game. The guy then states that pointing out games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider isn't acceptable because the game came out two years ago. The thing is... you can't cherry pick a single game to make your point and then state that any other example isn't acceptable. To be fair, I understand that their point is to use a more modern game, because it better reflects the demands of today's games.

Here are a few reasons why that doesn't work:

1. One game isn't a good metric. I'm not a huge fan of focusing solely on Cyberpunk, because not everyone wants to play Cyberpunk. One important aspect of looking into a new graphics card isn't how well it does on all games, but rather, how well it does on the games you want to play. Sure, you can point out how well it does in Cyberpunk may allude to future performance, but you can chase the elusive "future" goal for way too long.
2. What's in a game? This relates to #1 in that I think it's important to understand why a game may not perform well. For example, if a game includes a new method of non-RT lighting that's likely to be widely adopted in the future, it may be worthwhile to pay attention to its performance in cards. However, to my knowledge, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't use any newer technologies. The game is simply very geometrically dense.
   1. Also, as a side note, I think we need to be wary about whether a game might not be optimized the best just yet and that using it as a metric too early could be misrepresenting the usefulness of hardware.
3. How often do we change resolution? I don't know about you, but I would say that monitors are probably one of the more static parts of my computer. I only recently changed one of my monitors due to an issue with a KVM, but even then, I stuck with the same size and resolution (27", 1440/QHD). (It's my second monitor too.) Part of budgeting for a computer is to understand your end goal. Do you want to play on 24", 1080p monitor(s), or large 32", 4K monitor(s)?

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I'll play devil's advocate:

The "point" of the video is to stir up fear like prices won't eventually come back down again. As I said before, this has happened before, it's happening now, and it will happen again. Prices go up and hardware becomes scarce whenever something big comes out or there's some kind of shortage. Remember when bitcoin farming became a huge thing? You couldn't find any decent card for under $1,000. Remember when Crysis came out and everyone said you're going to need tri-SLI configurations just to max it?

- I think one pattern a lot of people, especially the "old timers" are picking up on is the time between scarcity incidents is shortening. We went from "no scarcity" as GPUs were coming of age as a luxury/boutique good, to a huge boom huge bust during the HD7xxx /GTX7xx series, to a huge boom small bust with the RX4xx/5xx/GTX 10xx series, to increased MSRPs with Turing (as a result of the prior boom), to whatever god awful cluster**** we find ourselves in now. We cannot always rely on historical trends of a "return to normal" to occur, and its very possible that we are in the middle of a sea-change in demand for hardware that the suppliers could not have anticipated and will take years to properly adjust to.

There's also another factor nobody has mentioned yet - covid. Due to the pandemic, many people lost their jobs or were working from home or working reduced hours in all facets of employment. I can't imagine that the GPU manufacturers kept their people working like normal through 2020 so that puts a strain on supply. With more people staying home and doing nothing (those with money), a lot of people have been jumping into PC gaming which caused demand to skyrocket. High demand, low supply... you do the math. Videos like the one you embedded serve no purpose other than give people cause to freak out and think the end of PC gaming is nigh simply because prices are high and some people are saying it's impossible to have a budget PC anymore.

- I agree with the core of your point, but the assumption is still "and then covid will disappear and everyone will go back to 2019 and pick up where they left off". There will be a huge, sustained shift to alternate work schedules and making the home the center of entertainment (as opposed to going out). And tariffs. And a growing global middle class. Consolidated suppliers (TSMC is kinda the only game in town for virtually all cutting edge silicon fabbing). Other stuff that I'm surely forgetting.

Covid is definitely hugely disruptive, no argument there, but it is also hitting the fast forward button on society that I don't expect to suddenly snap back. Additionally, while some 1st world countries might get their poo sorted out in the next 6-9 months, there is a huge slice of humanity in India and Asia that has growing purchasing power but a second rate vaccine distribution that will continue to lag another 6 to 9 months behind.

Give the world time to rebound from the pandemic and get everything as close to normal as it once was and give companies like eBay and Amazon time to figure out how to deal with the scalpers (other than using bots to auto-inflate the scalper's prices). I agree that it really sucks that prices are so high right now because I had fully planned on having a new PC by December of last year, but that's life. I wish it was different, but waiting a little longer to build my PC won't kill me and by the time I get around to building it, I'll be happy I didn't spend $1,500 on a single GPU.

- Agreed with "that's life" and there is definitely a certain amount of rolling with the punches that has to happen on the part of consumers in this circumstance. Hard disagree on any sort of return to even close to normal though. It won't be shelter in place levels of isolation, but we're never going back to the way things used to be after this.

Anecdotally, my daughter's school here in the Bay Area has lost fully half its enrollment, and thanks to my wife being a member of the PTO, she knows those student's families are uprooting and moving out to the Sierra foothills, to towns around Tahoe and elsewhere. We may get a handful of rebounds as things settle down, but people aren't getting up and moving out to remote locations because they expect things to snap back (and in a self fulfilling kind of way, their moving means it won't). They fully expect to lean into the isolated lifestyle more.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Added another YT vid to OP, a continuation of the discussion.

 

[Mamere782]

Just me. Playing on a Predator Helios 300 laptop. Not exactly old tech, but not cutting edge either. Anyway, I do not see a lot of new games I want to play...happily playing "old" games like Witcher 2, 3 (with some mods), Skyrim (modded), and lots of other "old" games (Metros, Far Cry 4, Wolfenstein New Order, etc) These games I will probably be playing for a long time to come without needing to buy a new computer every year or so. My old laptop served me well for 10 years.

 

[Linochka13]

I think it's very bad. Every year, more and more new games can no longer be played on your computer. Not everyone is willing to spend $2,000 every year on new computers or computer components. It turns out that I will no longer be able to play games that will be released this year because my last year's computer simply will not support it.
That's why I still play old games like Dota or GTA. Fortunately, now I play these games through an app that pays for them. At least some good news.

__________________________________
partnersinfire.com

 

[VirtualLarry]

2021 was such a bad year for budget hardware, even the LowSpec Gamer gave up on it

The YouTuber who teaches viewers how to run games below their minimum specs is moving on.

www.pcgamer.com

Yet another blow for low-spec/budget PC gaming.

 

[Dannar26]

I've been hoping to wait all this insanity out, but I feel like the way forward right now is laptop gaming. Laptop pricing seems stable, and you can get a really nice 3070 or 6800m system for the same price as most mid-range cards out there.

I sold the 5700xt I have in my signature block early on in 2021, and boy do I regret it now! I fear that my poor 3600x system will sit around into obsolescence by the time there's a card to put in there that makes sense price/perf. I don't want to buy a card that has less performance than the aforementioned 5700xt, but all cards like that are 1k+ now.

God, I never imagined myself saying this, but....Intel! Please release some cards to disrupt this bullshit market!

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I've been hoping to wait all this insanity out, but I feel like the way forward right now is laptop gaming. Laptop pricing seems stable, and you can get a really nice 3070 or 6800m system for the same price as most mid-range cards out there.

I sold the 5700xt I have in my signature block early on in 2021, and boy do I regret it now! I fear that my poor 3600x system will sit around into obsolescence by the time there's a card to put in there that makes sense price/perf. I don't want to buy a card that has less performance than the aforementioned 5700xt, but all cards like that are 1k+ now.

God, I never imagined myself saying this, but....Intel! Please release some cards to disrupt this bullshit market!

- Gonna need to update that signature then...

 

[VirtualLarry]

Maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel, Alder Lake i3-12100(F) and i5-12400(F) are affordable (12100F RCP $97), and the 12100F performs as well in modern games (CP2077) as an Ryzen R5 3600 which is a 6C/12T CPU, for half the price. Assuming that you will be able to find H610 mobos for under $100 that take cheap DDR4, that would seem to bode pretty well for budget PC gaming. That, and the Radeon RX 6500XT, if that gets here soon (MSRP $199). Only 4GB VRAM though.

 

[Dannar26]

I feel myself getting more "desperate" as time goes on. No, I don't need to stick a GPU in my rig, but it kinda bothers me that it's sitting there inoperable. In late 2019 I picked up a 580 8gb new for like ~$140, and a 570 4gb for ~$100. Both are in my kid's rigs. I was following the old pattern of waiting for cards to be sold for below MSRP. It used to be a viable strategy. Now I'm here seriously debating spending something like ~$400 for performance at or below my 5700xt (6600).

In a sane world the 6500xt surely isn't worth $200. But damn I'd be tempted as hell to just stick one in my rig if you can actually find them for that price. My monitors are 1440p though...hopefully a 6500xt could conversantly drive them....maybe not at max settings or above 60 FPS....but I just want to get it back online again.

The REALLY dumb thing is that I have a laptop with a 3070 140watt variant. I don't need the rig to run while I'm using the laptop as my daily driver. And I've got plenty of computers in the house. I guess I'm starting to get to the age where I can fund my hobby to the point of mental sickness.

I was very close to pulling the trigger on an i5-12600k (I live near a microcenter), but the lack of affordable Mobos killed it for me. I was going to take my current mobo and cpu and move it down to one of my kid's rigs, and replace it with the new i5. That way I'd have at least integrated graphics for Minecraft and WoW classic until sanity returns to the realm of PC parts.

 

[Aikouka]

I feel myself getting more "desperate" as time goes on. No, I don't need to stick a GPU in my rig, but it kinda bothers me that it's sitting there inoperable. In late 2019 I picked up a 580 8gb new for like ~$140, and a 570 4gb for ~$100. Both are in my kid's rigs. I was following the old pattern of waiting for cards to be sold for below MSRP. It used to be a viable strategy. Now I'm here seriously debating spending something like ~$400 for performance at or below my 5700xt (6600).

In a sane world the 6500xt surely isn't worth $200. But damn I'd be tempted as hell to just stick one in my rig if you can actually find them for that price. My monitors are 1440p though...hopefully a 6500xt could conversantly drive them....maybe not at max settings or above 60 FPS....but I just want to get it back online again.

The REALLY dumb thing is that I have a laptop with a 3070 140watt variant. I don't need the rig to run while I'm using the laptop as my daily driver. And I've got plenty of computers in the house. I guess I'm starting to get to the age where I can fund my hobby to the point of mental sickness.

I was very close to pulling the trigger on an i5-12600k (I live near a microcenter), but the lack of affordable Mobos killed it for me. I was going to take my current mobo and cpu and move it down to one of my kid's rigs, and replace it with the new i5. That way I'd have at least integrated graphics for Minecraft and WoW classic until sanity returns to the realm of PC parts.

In regard to Alder Lake, the things I would recommend...

• Consider looking into some of the newer variants (e.g. i5-12400) as they may not have much of a difference in most games. A few games -- such as Borderlands 3 -- do seem to show a good boost with a more powerful CPU.
• Definitely keep an eye out for DDR4 boards. DDR5 isn't impossible to find; they've had it at my local Best Buy the last two days that I was in there; however, there isn't that much of a reason to pay the hefty premium over DDR4. This is what I did for my Alder Lake builds. MSI does have a (relatively) cheap DDR4 board that costs around $210; there's a version with and a version without WiFi/Bluetooth.
• Similar to the first point is that you might prefer using a simpler 600-series board like an H670 or a B660. It's really hard to say since I haven't seen their features (a huge point for me in regard to motherboard choice) or cost.

In regard to getting a GPU, I'd say to keep an eye on the Newegg Shuffle. I "won" my 3080 from there. (I also "won" an Xbox Series X for a friend's friend.) If you want to avoid overly expensive options, stick to EVGA as they're the only non-Chinese-built Nvidia AIB, which means they aren't subject to the 20% tariff on Chinese goods. You can also try Best Buy. They do still do online drops of cards, and I did manage to snag a 3070 from there once. They also do the in-store drops, which is where I got a 3060 Ti and a 3080 Ti. (I really should've gone for the 3090 since the 3080 Ti wasn't valid for my 10% off birthday coupon!) Painfully, I really wanted the 3070 instead of the 3080 Ti that I got, but the guy two spots in front of me got the last 3070. If I had only woken up when I meant to instead of sleeping in an extra half hour! 😖