Originally published at: Survey finds weak interest in expensive upgrades among gamers | Boing Boing
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Yeah, I have to agree. I’ve got the next one up from the 3060, a 3080ti, and it’s served me well for a couple of years now. I did have to take it apart and add a little more thermal paste to it to prevent thermal overload and GPU crashes, but it’s running rock solid now and can handle most everything I can throw at it game wise. I don’t need the graphics cranked to 11 to enjoy a good game.
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The 1080Ti has had some incredible legs in terms of long term value. It still runs a large swath of newer games fairly well at 1080p. That and given the huge library of games available nowadays, it’s really hard to justify getting the latest and greatest unless you really really have to play the most demanding games. But really there are too many incredible games to ever possibly run out.
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My 3070ti says, “What am I, chopped liver?”
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Sometime in the last 2 years my desire to upgrade graphics was less about gaming and more about running AI models locally
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My dataset of one, which is my gamer kid, says that the 1080Ti is all anyone will need for the forseeable future, as long as the new games will allow it to be used. He’s able to tell the difference between 210 fps and 240 fps in gameplay, so I believe him.
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1080ti is an amazing machine.
In addition to demanding titles, I’d add 4k and ultra-wide or super UW monitors to the reasons that you might want to upgrade from 1080ti these days
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I’m still running a 1070 myself. Though I’m in the process of planning a new build. One of the major considerations I have to make is that my current monitors only support 1080p… so if I get a newer card that supports 4k I’ll need to get at least one new one. Possibly not worth the trouble.
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I’ve got a Radeon RX580, and it is fine for running ARMA3 (my main game) and might be okay for Balder Gate 3, if I pick it up come Cyber Monday.
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I play BG3 a little bit every Sunday and it is excellent! I think I love everything about it, except that I don’t make the time to play more often.
I’m running a NVIDIA 3060ti and haven’t experienced any issues. The fans kick in high speed occasionally, but performance has been super smooth with max settings, 1440 resolution. There’s the option of running it with DirectX 11 or Vulcan, too, which might be advantageous for some systems over others? It seems like the kind of game that will run well on a wide range of configurations.
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My backlog is in the 4 digits. It takes quite the game for me to want an upgrade.
ETA:
To give a sense of it, I currently have Baldur’s Gate installed. The lack of “3” is not a typo or shorthand.
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If I want to play a really high graphics intensity game I have used the Nvidia subscription service, which runs the game on servers somewhere else. No issues, and no need for a high end local graphics card. I played a lot of Cyberpunk on my old work laptop (no graphics card to speak of) without difficulty.
Then, when I had spent about $20 on the subscription but lost interest in the game, I cancelled. Much cheaper than a graphics upgrade.
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I am running a laptop with a 1070 and an i7 7th gen. I can still play most games just fine at 1080.
The only reason I plan to upgrade next year is because my laptop is noisy late at night.
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Until just last year my PC build from 2015 was rocking a lowly GTX970 (the bare minimum necessary to run the contemporary Oculus Rift), and it handled most of what I threw at it. Since I upgraded the 970 to an 8Gb 3060 a few months ago, it now easily handles everything else. Haven’t seen any compelling reason yet to replace the central components of this ancient build - the CPU, I’m told, is slightly more susceptible to security issues, and it won’t run Windows 11, which suits me fine. Overall I’m very happy with the current failure of Moore’s law.
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I tend to overbuy and hold onto my gear. I built my current PC in 2015, upgraded the original graphics card to a GTC 1070 in 2016 and haven’t really made any changes since. It still performs pretty well, although I don’t comes close to pushing the bleeding edge.
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Some recent benchmarks have shown that installing Linux gives 10-20% boost on a lot of games, especially CPU bound ones. Which is basically a video card upgrade by itself, if people are looking for a reason to switch.
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It makes sense - Moore’s Law is pretty well done in this context; it’s certainly not remotely the same situation as the early days of 3D cards, when each generation doubled the power and made significant, extremely noticeable, improvements to graphics. Then there’s also the nature of diminishing returns with graphic technology - at this point you can double the polygons and often not notice a difference at all. (The whole development process has long been about taking high-polygon-count models and reducing the polys to turn them into game-ready assets while keeping them looking the same, thanks to things like normal maps.) New graphics cards can do some impressive things with ray tracing for lighting and reflections, etc, but games have gotten really good at faking that stuff. Those improvements can also be pretty subtle, especially in the context of your average AAA game, where players get distracted by all the shooty-bangs.
At this point, the only reason I’d replace my graphics card is for game development, rather than playing, as I’m having to deal with large numbers of un-optimized assets, rendering light-maps and compiling textures that really do need the extra power…
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I’m running a 1650, purchased shortly after release in that brief window when bang === buck. I’m happy with it. It mostly runs Flight Simulator and Fallout 76. Almost everything else I play is on GeForce Now. Even at the new higher price, I’m happy with GFN, and the no-upgrade path it keeps me on.
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I too am a happy mid tier system user but I truly do need a beefier system to run flight sim at the settings necessary to make that small but startling boost into life like realism settings. But I don’t believe I am going to upgrade until I can get into VR at a good price point and the vr hardware matures.
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