Idiotic tariffs, indifferent retailers, depraved flippers and AI mania are making the simple act of buying a graphics card the defining misery of PC gaming in 2025.
I was in the same boat. Then I decided that the 50x0 was a paper launch and the leaks told me that the 9070XT would lower or have the same performance as the 7900xtx.
Then the 7900xtx dropped in price, clearing the channel for the new gen.
Then I bought that.
Ever since I’ve been wondering… Why didn’t I buy this thing earlier?
It’s more then fast enough. The RT performance is above the 3080.
Every 9070XT I can buy now is almost 200 euro more then what i payed for the 7900xtx.
What I learned? Buy previous gen in it’s “dying” weeks.
if you have been waiting since 2016, why do you want an 5080, though? 2-3 gens earlier will be a large improvement too, with half or even lower a price.
I did the same, but with AMD. I’m going Linux, and everything is good except nvidia’s utterly broken drivers. I mean, they always improve, today it’s usable if you don’t want to sleep/hibernate your PC, if you are sure you won’t run out of video memory (nvidia drivers are the only one in linux that can’t transfer some memory to system ram when it’s really needed), if you don’t need gamescope, and so on…
I budgeted to be able to buy something good, not just good enough.
but those were good, a few years ago. and they are still good. It’s not like performance doubles every 2 or so years, afaik not even near to that. there are a few games from the worst publishers that run garbage on any hardware or only run acceptably on topmost of top tier hardware, but I just ignore the mediocre products of them.
There was a window where the AMD 6000 series were cheap and readily available, which was probably your best bet. Now we have to wait the AI bubble to burst. Hopefully.
holy shit the situation is dire, i just looked at the price of my card and it costs just as much as it did a few years ago when i bought it used. i guess GPUs are not for us anymore, its for AI slop and surveillance now.
deleted by creator
I was in the same boat. Then I decided that the 50x0 was a paper launch and the leaks told me that the 9070XT would lower or have the same performance as the 7900xtx.
Then the 7900xtx dropped in price, clearing the channel for the new gen.
Then I bought that.
Ever since I’ve been wondering… Why didn’t I buy this thing earlier?
It’s more then fast enough. The RT performance is above the 3080.
Every 9070XT I can buy now is almost 200 euro more then what i payed for the 7900xtx.
What I learned? Buy previous gen in it’s “dying” weeks.
deleted by creator
if you have been waiting since 2016, why do you want an 5080, though? 2-3 gens earlier will be a large improvement too, with half or even lower a price.
I did the same, but with AMD. I’m going Linux, and everything is good except nvidia’s utterly broken drivers. I mean, they always improve, today it’s usable if you don’t want to sleep/hibernate your PC, if you are sure you won’t run out of video memory (nvidia drivers are the only one in linux that can’t transfer some memory to system ram when it’s really needed), if you don’t need gamescope, and so on…
deleted by creator
but those were good, a few years ago. and they are still good. It’s not like performance doubles every 2 or so years, afaik not even near to that. there are a few games from the worst publishers that run garbage on any hardware or only run acceptably on topmost of top tier hardware, but I just ignore the mediocre products of them.
deleted by creator
There was a window where the AMD 6000 series were cheap and readily available, which was probably your best bet. Now we have to wait the AI bubble to burst. Hopefully.
get an used one, why make it hard. nobody needs the latest and greatest at launch and they clearly cant/dont want to keep up.
i play me bideogames and be happy that it works well until it doesnt.
deleted by creator
holy shit the situation is dire, i just looked at the price of my card and it costs just as much as it did a few years ago when i bought it used. i guess GPUs are not for us anymore, its for AI slop and surveillance now.