Best we're getting is probably a stop to the price raises, but no price cuts. Kids will continue to grow up not knowing a $600 flagship GPU or a $1000 gaming PC.
Pet peeve: Contrary to a persistent popular belief, inflation != currency debasement.
(You can have inflation while your currency go up relatively to all the others on the FX market, like what happened to USD in 2022-S1, or you can have massive inflation difference between countries sharing the same currency, like it happened in the Euro Area between 2022 and today).
>Pet peeve: Contrary to a persistent popular belief, inflation != currency debasement.
Not to mention that "debasement" doesn't make sense anymore given that there basically aren't any currencies on the gold standard anymore. At best you could call a pegged currency that was devalued as being debased (with the base being the pegged currency), but that doesn't apply to USD. "debasement" therefore is just a pejorative way saying "inflation" or "monetary expansion".
I think it's fair to keep using debasement for the act of letting your currency go down against other currencies on the FX market.
> "inflation" or "monetary expansion".
This is my second pet peeve on the topic, inflation and growth of the money supply are independent phenomenons. (they are only correlated in countries with high inflation regimes and, hyperinflation aside, the causation is essentially reversed: the money supply grow because of the inflation, higher price leading to an increase of loans).
>A gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold.
and
>The Zimbabwe Gold (ZiG; code: ZWG)[3] is the official currency of Zimbabwe since 8 April 2024,[2] backed by US$900 million worth of hard assets: foreign currencies, gold, and other precious metals.
>...
>Although the rate of devaluation of the ZiG may vary,[13] the ZiG has consistently lost value since its introduction, and its long-term prospects are dim so long as large grain imports continue and the government continues to overspend.
sounds like it's not "fixed" at all, and "backed by ... hard assets" just means it has central bank reserves, which most fiat currencies have.
The Radeon 8500 from 2001 was even cheaper than that, roughly 300 USD... the voodoo 3 3500 from 1999 was roughly 200 USD... if you ask me, we don't need graphics chips as intense as we have now, but the way they crank them out every year and discontinue the older models ruins most of the value of buying a GPU these days.
It really is a damn shame, but before AI, it was cryptomining. Desktop GPU prices have been inflated to nonsense levels for gamers, to the point where console vs. PC isnt even really question anymore.
And even with increased priced you often still get paltry amount of RAM. All for market segmentation due to AI use cases. Which is bad as requirements have crept up.
Really frustrating for a hobbyist 3D artist. Rendering eats gobs of RAM for complex scenes. I'd really love a mid-level GPU with lots of VRAM for under $500. As is, I'm stuck rendering on CPU at a tenth the speed or making it work with compositing.
3d rendering can use multiple GPUs right? Maybe pick up a couple MI50 32GB cards off Alibaba. A couple months ago they were $100 each but it looks like they're up to ~$160 now.
In some ways though, the increase in visual fidelity has been _marginally_ improved on a per-year basis since the PS4/Xbone era. My GPUs have had much, much longer useful lives than the 90s/early-2000s.
Part of what made PC gaming in the late 90s/early 2000s so exciting was that the improvements were real and substantial instead of today where we're stuck with minor improvements including bullshit like inserting fake frames generated by AI, and the cards back then were usually pretty easy to get your hands on at a normal price. You might have had to occasionally beat your neighbors to a best buy, but you didn't have to compete with armies of bot scalpers.
If you stay off of the upgrade treadmill, you can game with a pretty dated card at this point. Sure, you cannot turn on all of the shines, but thanks to consoles, a playable build is quite attainable.
For $50, kids these days can buy a Raspberry Pi that would have run circles around the best PC money could buy when I was a kid.
Or, for $300, you can buy an RTX 5060 that is better than the best GPU from just 6 years ago. It's even faster than the top supercomputer in the world in 2003, one that cost $500 million to build.
I find it hard to pity kids who can't afford the absolute latest and greatest when stuff that would have absolutely blown my mind as a kid is available for cheap.
> Or, for $300, you can buy an RTX 5060 that is better than the best GPU from just 6 years ago. It's even faster than the top supercomputer in the world in 2003, one that cost $500 million to build.
RTX 5060 is slower than the RTX 2080 Ti, released September 2018. Digital Foundry found it to be 4% slower in 1080p, 13% slower in 1440p: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Ob40dZ3JU
That's exactly how it works. A whole generation is already unaware that you used to be able to buy PC games anonymously, offline, without a rent seeking middleman service.
I think there's always been a rent-seeking middleman service. In the 80s it was retail: you'd go to a physical computer store to buy a game for $50 (note: that's $150 inflation-adjusted, more expensive than most games today), and the retail store, the distributor, and the publisher would all take a cut. In the 2000s it was the developer's ISP, web developer, and credit card payment processor, which were non-trivial in the days before Wix and Stripe.
The shareware/unlock-code economy of the 90s was probably the closest you'd get to cutting out the middlemen, where you could download from some BBS or FTP server without the dev getting involved at all and then send them money to have them email you an unlock code, but it was a lot of manual work on the developer's part, and a lot of trust.
That's not what rent-seeking is. Rent-seeking is charging for something that's free before, generally through seeking legal enforcement. If you think the concept of renting stuff is bad, you've missed somewhat.
Depends whether or not there's a big bubble burst that involves bankruptcies and Big Tech massively downscaling their cloud computing divisions. Most likely they'll just end up repurposing the compute and lowering cloud rates to attract new enterprise customers, but if you see outright fire sales from bankruptcies and liquidations, people will be able to pick up computer hardware at fire sale prices.
