Why is he foolish for buying something he wants and makes use of (and is actually something tangible unlike in game spend)
Like I said, nothing personal, I come from a culture where paying on credit is acceptable only for big, essential purchases such as a house or a car.
When I call the 4090 a whale card or a Tupolev Tu-144 it's not to disparage their users but rather as a warning about using it as a realistic benchmark as its pricing puts it as a card 1% or less will purchase and basically more of a technological showcase, especially as you require the very best PC components to be able to properly run it.
This puts the total system cost as the equivalent of several median paychecks for most countries, which is a big part of the issue.
I've been gaming since 1988 so I can tell you that such a system would proportionally cost the same as a PC in the 1980s (inflation adjusted) but that was usually seen as a
family investment to prepare yourself and the kids for the future just like buying a big encyclopedia (if you were born after 1990 it could be harder for you to understand it).
To put the 4090 in proportion, when the 3dfx was released it costed an outrageous half of a paycheck, basically triple than most video cards and that was already pretty hard to justify, now we're being asked a full paycheck or likely more for that, especially when the most popular GPUs on Steam tends to be sub-$300 cards.
Most people won't be spending that kind of money so they fall in one of the "traps":
- Team green will happily rent you their GPU via streaming services
- Team red will gladly welcome you to the console world either directly or via gamepass
If you guys think latency will be an issue forever I have bad news for you. I worked for an ISP until last year and I was in meetings with NVIDIA reps about their game streaming platform. Without going too much in details (NDA), if you're happy with a roughly 10% cut of the pie (minus hosting and setup costs) any ISP could have an NVIDIA streaming cluster in their datacenter or a cheaper deal setting up a dedicated connection to NVIDIA own clusters and you could cover a country the size of Italy at an acceptable latency with just 2 locations.
Unless Intel or another player will come and take over the mass market neither player has any incentive on providing affordable GPUs as that will cannibalize their other segments.
Valve recognised this and are setting up their slice of the pie via their own console line (of which the Steam Deck is just the start), DYI will get relegated to yet another gaming winter of being second class gamers until performance per dollar will get acceptable again.
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