Anyone else just unenthused about gaming and hardware?

[beany_bot]

Been on this forum and watching tech for some time now. And don't think I've ever been this "unenthused" about the state of things. What with Nvidia being so pricey at launch. Vega being nowhere, and when it does come potentially not even that great. Power hungry, no cards available and all grossly overpriced due to mining craze. Ram shortages and prices.

I'm just really not excited at the moment.
Honestly if it wasn't for Ryzen making the CPU space exciting again at least then I really don't know if I would still bother. It's really not the pricing specifically. But I need to be excited by new tech. And at the moment I'm just not feeling it. There is nothing game changing. Nothing "wow".

I dunno, just ranting but it really seems as if the GPU space is just a total mess right now. Not sure what the future holds for it.
We are all fairly loyal PC folk here but I can't help but think that more casual folk are switching to console rather than enter or stay in this very murky and expensive swamp.

 

[beany_bot]

Even threadripper though. You won't notice it unless specifically using it. What I mean by that is. For day to day use, you wouldn't notice a difference between an i3 and threadripper.
I remember the first time I got a VooDoo 3DFX card. Utterly utterly blown away. And when I upgraded my CPU from a Pentium to Athlon XP. Again, utterly utterly blown away. (And that was across the whole computing experience) not just specific tasks like rendering.

I know I can't expect these kind of feelings all the time when new tech comes out. But I can't help but think that we are long overdue a "wow" moment. Something more than a slight incremental upgrade. I just feel that we are handing over so much money at the moment for hardware that performs "slightly better in a benchmark".

 

[beany_bot]

The last few GPU generations have been bad for me. On the green side, massively overpriced, with their mid-range chip selling for £400-£700.

On the AMD side, £250 has got you 290 performance for the last 4-5 years. 290 -> 390 -> 480 -> 580.

So what we're not seeing is more for you money with each new gen. You either pay more/get more (nV), or stagnate (AMD).

I'm also planning on picking up a PS4 Pro come Black Friday this year, and will probably just play indie games on PC.

With mining, etc, I just can't see us budget-conscious PC gamers seeing any progress. It's like groundhog day and we're all stuck in 2012.

If money is no object you can go see gains each gen, but you're paying about £100 more each new gen for those gains.

You've hit the nail on the head.
I'm in the process of building a Pentium 1, windows 95 retro gaming PC. Puerly because it's something a bit exciting to do. Modern PC has me bored. Sure I can buy Ryzen and run cinebench. But that's just not much fun.