The last 3 generations of nvidia gpus have been a big middle finger to PC gamers in terms of price and power usage
Gone are the days of affordable graphics accelerators in the $300 to $500 range. Now it’s $1000 to $2000. 400 watts now instead of 100.
"Pay more and get less" has been the trend
https://www.xda-developers.com/shrinkflation-is-making-nvidi...
That's even before you get into bullshit like fake frames
> "Pay more and get less" has been the trend
That article doesn't support what you're saying whatsoever. GPU cores going down at the same price point is the opposite of shrinkflation, especially when you consider the US dollar is worth ~40% less than it was in 2012. And VRAM prices aren't going down anywhere, especially now.
> bullshit like fake frames
Fake frames are an option. You can play at native 4K/8K resolution, with the same 2.25-4x cost in power usage and raster compute. It will be miserable, but that's your choice.
> Gone are the days of affordable graphics accelerators in the $300 to $500 range. Now it’s $1000 to $2000.
What are you talking about? nVidia only has two models in the $1000 to $2000 range and they’re clearly premium parts.
The $300 to $500 cards are actually fine for normal gaming unless you demand to play at 4K at high settings.
> The $300 to $500 cards are actually fine for normal gaming unless you demand to play at 4K at high settings.
I don't think that wanting to play games at the native resolution of your screen without changing settings from their defaults in order to make the game look and perform much worse is a very unreasonable "demand".
That used to be possible without spending as much money and it's also not unreasonable for people to point that out
Fair, but there are 2025 games that don't run even well on the 5090. This is the fault of game developers who think they're making the next Crysis, targeting some hypothetical future hardware instead of providing a great experience on today's midrange hardware.
Looking at the best looking games from today vs 10 years ago, they're so similar it's hard to see where that extra performance is even going.
So far waiting ~5 years to bother with them has been a working strategy for me.
> That used to be possible without spending as much money and it's also not unreasonable for people to point that out
That used to be possible when the most common resolution was 1080p and refresh rates weren't pushing 240hz+.
Pretty much all the lower price cards are a bad buy. Nvidia is only competitive on performance at the absolute top end, where they have no competitors. In every other price bracket they lose to AMD and Intel.
You're right.
People want to pretend fundamentals of economics don't exist AND the company has moral obligations to fulfill to consumers. It's laughable.
It's not just nVidia, I've seen other expensive consumer brands getting the same sentiments.