According to a recent report, Nvidia is increasing the supply of GTX 1650 cards to the desktop consumer market after having prioritized the GPU for notebooks. This is good news. The GPU market is so overheated, we’re currently recommending readers look at cards like the eight-year-old R9 290 or R9 290X if they have to buy one. Any improvement in this situation, including increased availability of low-end cards so that people have something to purchase, is a positive development.
Increased availability of a bottom-end Turing with no ray tracing capability, or a relaunched GTX 1050 Ti, however, is not exactly what PC gaming is supposed to deliver. Supplies of Ampere and RDNA2 GPUs remain extremely tight, with recent reports from ODMs such as Asus and MSI stating the situation has gotten worse. Some of these problems are reportedly caused by yield issues at Samsung, some by the pandemic-driven semiconductor shortage, and some by new demand in cryptocurrency mining. It isn’t clear how much responsibility should be assigned to each, but reports now indicate the GPU shortage might not improve until 2022.
Shortages are tolerable in the short term. So long as your GPU doesn’t die outright, it’ll keep offering acceptable performance in older titles, and plenty of people have a backlog of older games they’ve never played. In the short term, cryptocurrency mining is an annoyance. In the long term, it could be an existential threat to PC gaming as we’ve known it since the invention of the GPU. I am not arguing that PC gaming would die — I don’t see that happening — but it could change a great deal, and not for the better.
When prices of a good or service rise above what the market can bear, people look for alternatives. In this case, the alternatives to PC gaming are consoles such as the Switch, the PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X, and cloud gaming services such as Stadia or GeForce Now. The three consoles are suffering from their own shortages and scalping problems, but the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 are now much less expensive than a graphics card on eBay.
An RTX 3070 ought to be a $400 GPU. They’re currently selling on eBay for between $1,200 and $1,700. An Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 will set you back $750 to $850 based on a survey of recently sold listings on eBay. So long as console prices keep trending downward and GPUs don’t, the gap will only grow.
This problem is somewhat compounded by the ray tracing issue. Right now, turning ray tracing on in an AMD or Nvidia GPU carries a heavy performance hit that isn’t always mitigated by 1080p. Both Ampere and RDNA2 offer more ray tracing performance at a lower price than Nvidia debuted with Turing in 2018, but gamers who specifically want ray tracing cards have to buy in at a higher price point if they also want acceptable performance. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X support ray tracing out of the box, at a much lower price point than you’d pay for Ampere or RDNA2.
These results from our 6700 XT review show how heavy the hit can be. Turning on ray tracing on an RTX 3070 or 6700 XT can tank the frame rate depending on the game. Gamers who want ray tracing, even in 1080p, need to buy a higher-end GPU that can handle it.
What Happens When PC Gamers Can’t Buy New GPUs Long-Term?
Not all PC gamers build their own hardware and not all builders game. But considerable overlap exists between gamers and the DIY market, especially if you include people who might buy an OEM PC but upgrade the GPU. If the add-on board market for PCs stays this way, we’re looking at a future where paying OEM prices…
Read More:Cryptocurrency Mining Could Destroy PC Gaming as We’ve Known It – ExtremeTech
