Anyone just given up on looking for a new GPU?

[gpuerrilla]

The 3080 10G pretty much does not exist any more, NVIDIA priced it far too cheap and hence why the drops were always rare and short lived and have now become even rarer and why scalpers had it so easy.
...
January will bring some new products and when it comes to prices AMD’s stack is easily available and their pricing though nowhere near MRSP is readily available and OcUK is competitive especially with 6600 at £399 and 6700 XT at £699

Are the new nvidia cards with more VRAM only arriving in AIB only models do you know (like the 3060 was)?

 

[Gibbo]

Are the new nvidia cards with more VRAM only arriving in AIB only models do you know (like the 3060 was)?

Im afraid I can’t comment it’s a matter of weeks but what is coming will have zero impact on current prices the new stuff coming from both sides will basically fill gaps.

 

[Harlequin]

The 3080 10G pretty much does not exist any more, NVIDIA priced it far too cheap and hence why the drops were always rare and short lived and have now become even rarer and why scalpers had it so easy.

People here will of course say it is priced right or still too expensive but the simple facts are the market went absolutely crazy about this card to the point that OcUK within 24hrs of launch had taken like 10,000 pre orders which is a record by miles for all GPU launches. The market is the correct measurement for demand and the 3080 was off the scale !

The market reaction says it all, damn all that performance for so little money, commence the insane buying.

January will bring some new products and when it comes to prices AMD’s stack is easily available and their pricing though nowhere near MRSP is readily available and OcUK is competitive especially with 6600 at £399 and 6700 XT at £699

Pandemic, Mining and shortages means MRSPs will remain pretty much impossible for another year and 2023 thing may improve or might not the world is changing as is the customer base for said products and the markets that use them which could result in higher prices just becoming the norm, let’s hope not but the future is unknown.

The one good thing is todays entry level cards will play games very well at 1080P such as GTX 1650 which are £199 here and AMD and NVIDIA have new stuff due January.

Thank you for the (once again) detailed post, i hope those crying `ocuk are scammers` and ` i want my card from 18 months ago`, might get the message now. Merry Xmas!

 

[Angilion]

We have every GPU in stock with 3070 from £799 and 3070Ti from £899, pricing is still crazy but it’s competitive in todays market and sales are strong.

None LHR cards fetch huge money a friend sold a 3070 none LHR last week for £1100 and has since purchased a 6800 XT from OcUK for £1100.

Prices are high but people are selling old cards at high prices which essentially offsets the high price for a new card.

Prices will get a lot better sometime in 2023 but until then market is gonna remain crazy.

Might be too late by then. The mass market for PC gaming will probably be dead by then. £2000 for a gaming PC not significantly better than a £500 console is not a mass market proposition. Maybe there will be enough of a market left for game devs to bother making quick and dirty ports of games designed for consoles. Maybe not. Even I'm moving to console and I have a big reason to not do so. I don't know if I'll be physically capable of gaming with a controller. I do know that I'm not enough of a mug to pay the current prices for gaming on PC. I could, but I won't.

Maybe I'll look at the PC market again in 2023. I'd certainly prefer to game on PC, but I expect to see PC gaming become nothing more than a far more expensive way to play a smaller selection of some console games that have been ported. And probably badly ported most of the time.

 

[ljt]

Yup. If this is now the new normal going forward, then I'll drop PC gaming like a lead balloon.

Cards twice the price they used to be just a couple of years ago is plain ridiculous so it's a no from me.

 

[pagepack]

January 2003 (I think) I bought a top pc. Athlon 2800+, 9700 pro and 8gb ram. Even came with a Mitsubishi diamond 19" monitor, a keyboard and mouse. £1100, £1778 today accounting for inflation.

Shows the state of the gpu and cpu market today.

 

[Twinz]

I think just looking at price and easily-manipulated terms like (top tier, premium, flagship etc) can be missleading.

Is today's money faster than yesterday's money. Up to Pascal, the answer was generally yes. Turing failed. Ampere *would* have got is back on track to have our money go about 30% faster with each generation, but then people realised the cards could print money and bid the prices through the roof.

If next gen's $700 offering is 30% faster than the 3080, I don't car if it's called "bottom-of-the-barrel", I will consider it a decent value.

By the same token, if next gen's $500 offering is no faster than 3070, calling it "super-duper-premium-tier" won't matter to me. It will still be a poor value.

It sounds like they may be making performance leaps above and beyond the traditionl 30% boost for the next gen though. As long as our money goes faster in a meanigful way, (20-30% IMO) I'm okay with them creating new higher price points if the performance is radically better-enough.

So 4070 %30 faster than 3070 for $500 but 4090 super-duper-Ti 200% faster than a 3090 but $2k? Still fine to me.

 

[The_Arbiter]

Thanks for the update Gibbo!

It's a shame there's no AMD choice at the £200 level. Nvidia are just hoovering up sales at that level with old cards still.

I'm looking forward to see what's round the corner. It's just massively annoying having a new build (over a year ago now), but running on an old budget card still with a decent PSU even.

 

[HangTime]

January 2003 (I think) I bought a top pc. Athlon 2800+, 9700 pro and 8gb ram. Even came with a Mitsubishi diamond 19" monitor, a keyboard and mouse. £1100, £1778 today accounting for inflation.

Shows the state of the gpu and cpu market today.

8GB RAM in Jan 2003 sounds totally bonkers for a gaming PC. What OS were you running? Even 4GB would have been overkill and massively cheaper.

 

[Poneros]

The mass market for PC gaming will probably be dead by then.

I see this as a common sentiment on forums but it's not true - sales, even excluding to miners, have never been higher. The truth is that the market has simply accepted higher prices (just like they have in so many other areas - $1500 phones anyone?). Eventually everyone will understand that reality; because the value proposition is still insanely high PCs will still sell by the boatloads. Also people forget that >70% of the market is pre-builts & laptops anyway and things haven't changed too badly there.

 

[HangTime]

"mass market" is a bit of a subjective term as well, but in my mind the mass market for PC gaming doesn't need current-gen GPUs. So whether an RTX3080 costs £650 or £1300 or £6500 doesn't matter all that much to people who were never going to buy one in the first place.

Of course, there's an issue with this filtering down to the lower segments but it really only impacts people who MUST buy a GPU, either because their current card is broken, they've left an upgrade too long or they are a new entrant to PC gaming (which wouldn't represent someone leaving PC gaming anyway). I mean say someone is there with an RX480 8GB or whatever, that's a 5 year old card now that was fairly cheap when it was bought, normally they would have upgraded by now but perhaps have been put off by pricing. That's still an OK card for the 'mass market'. They can happily carry on playing games at 1080p with graphics and framerates no worse than XBO/PS4.

 

[Angilion]

I see this as a common sentiment on forums but it's not true - sales, even excluding to miners, have never been higher. The truth is that the market has simply accepted higher prices (just like they have in so many other areas - $1500 phones anyone?). Eventually everyone will understand that reality; because the value proposition is still insanely high PCs will still sell by the boatloads. Also people forget that >70% of the market is pre-builts & laptops anyway and things haven't changed too badly there.

Consoles are vastly better value for money than PCs for gaming. I would (and have) accepted double the cost. I think it's worth paying double for the advantages that a PC has over a console for gaming. But not quadruple or more. Not for comparable performance. The value for money on a PC certainly isn't in gaming. £2000+ for a toy to play games on that's about as good as a £500 toy to play the same games on is very far from an insanely high value proposition. Very far indeed.

It might be good value if you use the PC mainly for mining and you guess right on which token(s) to bet on and you only game on it a bit. It might be good value if you have another graphics card you can sell at a vastly inflated price in order to offset the vastly inflated price of the new graphics card you buy. For example, I could probably sell my high end AIB 1070 Ti that's so well cooled it outperforms a stock 1080 for at least double what it's really worth and that scalping would go a long way to offsetting the inflated pricing on a modern card. But that's only possible when there are enough people desperate enough for a graphics card that they'll pay more for a second hand 4 year old card with no warranty than that card cost new (and it was far from being cheap when it was new). How long will that situation last for?

£500 for a glass of water would be an insanely high valuable proposition if you're dying of thirst and you have spare money. But not usually.

"mass market" is a bit of a subjective term as well, but in my mind the mass market for PC gaming doesn't need current-gen GPUs. So whether an RTX3080 costs £650 or £1300 or £6500 doesn't matter all that much to people who were never going to buy one in the first place.

Of course, there's an issue with this filtering down to the lower segments but it really only impacts people who MUST buy a GPU, either because their current card is broken, they've left an upgrade too long or they are a new entrant to PC gaming (which wouldn't represent someone leaving PC gaming anyway). I mean say someone is there with an RX480 8GB or whatever, that's a 5 year old card now that was fairly cheap when it was bought, normally they would have upgraded by now but perhaps have been put off by pricing. That's still an OK card for the 'mass market'. They can happily carry on playing games at 1080p with graphics and framerates no worse than XBO/PS4.

And when that 5 year old card fails or becomes too obsolete, their best upgrade path will be to a console. If they were happy playing on something no worse than an XBO/PS4, they'd be happier playing on an XBX/PS5. Which would cost them less than a bottom end budget graphics card alone. But the rest of the hardware in their PC would probably also be 5 years old or more, so they'd probably be looking at £2000+ for a new PC that will play games about as well as a £500 console. Some people would still choose the gaming PC. But not most.

And a year later the people currently with a 4 year old graphics card will have a 5 year old graphics card. Etc.

A PC can be used for things a console can't be used for. Absolutely. But almost everything that almost everyone might use a PC for other than gaming can be done with the other computer they routinely carry around with them - their phone. Most of the remaining use cases would be well enough served with the cheapest laptop available. Pretty much anything with a screen and keyboard. A £200 Chromebook.

 

[V F]

8GB RAM in Jan 2003 sounds totally bonkers for a gaming PC. What OS were you running? Even 4GB would have been overkill and massively cheaper.

In 2003 I'm pretty sure I was on 512MB. Don't think it was until 2006 I was on 1GB or even 2GB and then of course Windows XP Pro couldn't see more than 3.5GB. So what OS were they on? Windows XP 64bit was flaky when it came to drivers. Very limited in what was available.

 

[andybird123]

snip

The problem with all of this is that you are stating your opinion as though it's fact. But year after year people say the same thing and are continually proven to be wrong.

I will never buy a console, but then I also wouldn't pay £1k plus for a 3080, I got mine for £650 by just being patient, as would everyone if they didn't fall prey to scalpers (including retailers selling at scalper prices). And all the retailer's would be forced to sell at MSRP too if everyone did the same.

The fact that almost everyone buying GPU's DID pay scalper prices blows all the rest of your argument out of the water. Its not just discrete GPU's (which you could try to explain away with "hur dur mining"), pre-built gaming desktops and gaming laptops sales are all up as well at at time when PS5 in its first year sold less than the PS4 did in its first 12 months. Sony also sold less software year over year (down 6%). PC games sales were up 19% in 2020 and still projected to have risen another 3-5% in 2021.

 

[Harlequin]

In 2003 I'm pretty sure I was on 512MB. Don't think it was until 2006 I was on 1GB or even 2GB and then of course Windows XP Pro couldn't see more than 3.5GB. So what OS were they on? Windows XP 64bit was flaky when it came to drivers. Very limited in what was available.

Windows xp 64bit wasnt released till 2005.

 

[ljt]

As has been said it is definitely affecting the lower to mid range market.

A friend of mine who has been coming to me over the last 15 years for his PC upgrades (his current PC is a Ryzen 1500x with a AMD rx580) asked me a couple of months ago about a CPU and GPU upgrade for around £400-£500 that would double his performance (which has been easily doable up until now)

When I told him about GPU prices and that it'll basically cost him £400 alone for a GPU that is a smaller performance upgrade than he used to he just went "sod that" and he went out and got a Xbox series X instead which is basically twice the performance of his whole PC for £450. He loves it and his PC is basically relegated to office stuff now.

 

[gpuerrilla]

The problem with all of this is that you are stating your opinion as though it's fact. But year after year people say the same thing and are continually proven to be wrong.

I will never buy a console, but then I also wouldn't pay £1k plus for a 3080, I got mine for £650 by just being patient, as would everyone if they didn't fall prey to scalpers (including retailers selling at scalper prices). And all the retailer's would be forced to sell at MSRP too if everyone did the same.

The fact that almost everyone buying GPU's DID pay scalper prices blows all the rest of your argument out of the water. Its not just discrete GPU's (which you could try to explain away with "hur dur mining"), pre-built gaming desktops and gaming laptops sales are all up as well at at time when PS5 in its first year sold less than the PS4 did in its first 12 months. Sony also sold less software year over year (down 6%). PC games sales were up 19% in 2020 and still projected to have risen another 3-5% in 2021.

You also have to factor in that in tandem consoles for periods have been OOS. People will mention "they are dropping in daily" when we all know this is tosh. Just like the belief gpu's are in abundance at or near MSRP which its not, founder edition come in dribs and drabs with low volume so there are not enough to go around. In the alert apps I have installed the ps5 seems to be the harder console to get and some were also having trouble up until recent which has been a year.

 

[The_Arbiter]

As has been said it is definitely affecting the lower to mid range market.

A friend of mine who has been coming to me over the last 15 years for his PC upgrades (his current PC is a Ryzen 1500x with a AMD rx580) asked me a couple of months ago about a CPU and GPU upgrade for around £400-£500 that would double his performance (which has been easily doable up until now)

When I told him about GPU prices and that it'll basically cost him £400 alone for a GPU that is a smaller performance upgrade than he used to he just went "sod that" and he went out and got a Xbox series X instead which is basically twice the performance of his whole PC for £450. He loves it and his PC is basically relegated to office stuff now.

Whilst i don't agree with the argument of "need £2k to buy PC equal to console performance" whatsoever, (more like £900/£1000), your point holds a lot of weight. The current gen of console will see no degradation of ability until games stop launching for it, so it's a guaranteed system (if it doesn't die) for 4yrs minimum being the nail of the head. The only issue i see with the next consoles is games eating up storage space too easily, i read a post about a year ago saying the new consoles don't utilise any files/reading from the disk, which is a bit underwhelming given information that could potentially be utilised under disk read speeds, say cutscenes or music.

 

[Donnie Fisher]

The only issue i see with the next consoles is games eating up storage space too easily, i read a post about a year ago saying the new consoles don't utilise any files/reading from the disk, which is a bit underwhelming given information that could potentially be utilised under disk read speeds, say cutscenes or music.

i thought that they did read, that was the whole point of the ps5 ratchet n clank jumping between worlds seamlessly as it was able to read soooo fast from the drive to be able to load in the other world in a fraction of a second.

 

[The_Arbiter]

i thought that they did read, that was the whole point of the ps5 ratchet n clank jumping between worlds seamlessly as it was able to read soooo fast from the drive to be able to load in the other world in a fraction of a second.

It was a year ago, so i guess it could be wrong. Depends on the architecture i guess. Seems like performance wasted for sure.