Well I am shocked, SHOCKED I say! Well, not that shocked.
In the US, a new RTX 5090 currently costs $2899 at NewEgg, and has a max power draw of 575 watts.
(Lowest price I can find)
… That is a GPU, with roughly the cost and power usage of an entire, quite high end, gaming PC from 5 years ago… or even just a reasonably high end PC from right now.
…
The entire move to the realtime raytracing paradigm, which has enabled AAA game devs to get very sloppy with development by not really bothering to optimize any lighting, nor textures… which has necessitated the invention of intelligent temporal frame upscaling, and frame generation… the whole, originally advertised point of this all was to make hi fidelity 4k gaming an affordable reality.
This reality is a farce.
…
Meanwhile, if you jump down to 1440p, well, I’ve got a future build plan sitting in a NewEgg wishlist right now.
RX 9070 (220 W) + Minisforum BD795i SE (mobo + non removeable, high end AMD laptop CPU with performance comparable to a 9900X, but about half the wattage draw) … so far my pretax total for the whole build is under $1500, and, while I need to double and triple check this, I think the math on the power draw works out to a 650 Watt power supply being all you’d need… potentially with enough room to also add in some extra internal HDD storage drives, ie, you’ve got leftover wattage headroom.
If you want to go a bit over the $1500 mark, you could fit this all in a console sized ITX case.
That is almost half the cost as the RTX 5090 alone, and will get you over 90fps in almost all modern games, with ultra settings at 1440p, though you will have to futz around with intelligent upscaling and frame gen if you want realtime raytracing as well with similar framerates, and realistically, probably wait another quarter or two for AMD driver support and FSR 4 to become a bit more mature and properly implemented in said games.
Or you could swap out for a maybe a 5070 (non TI, the TI is $1000 more) Nvidia card, but seeing as I’m making a linux gaming pc, you know, for the performance boost from not running Windows, AMD mesa drivers are where you wanna be.
The entire move to the realtime raytracing paradigm, which has enabled AAA game devs to get very sloppy with development by not really bothering to optimize any lighting, nor textures
You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about here. Ray tracing has nothing to do with textures and very few games force you to use RT. What is “allowing” devs to skimp on optimization (which is also questionable, older games weren’t perfect either) is DLSS and other dynamic resolution + upscaling tech
Doom the Dark Ages is possibly what they’re referring to. ID skipped lighting in favour of Ray tracing doing it.
Bethesda Studios also has a tendency to use hd textures on features like grass and terrain which can safely be low res.
There is a fair bit of inefficient code floating around because optimisation is considered more expensive than throwing more hardware at a problem, and not just in games. (Bonus points if you outsource the optimisation to some else’s hardware or the modding community)
That is a prominent example of forced RT… basically, as I described with the TAA example in my other reply…
idTech 8 seems to be the first engine that just literally requires RT for its entire render pipeline to work.
They could theoretically build another version of it off of vulkan-base, to enable you to be able to turn RT off… but that would likely be a massive amount of work.
On the bright side… at least the idTech engines are actually well coded, and they put a lot of time into making the engine actually very good.
I didn’t follow the marketing ecosystem for Doom Dark Ages, but it would have been really shitty if they did not include ‘you need a GPU with RT cores’.
…
On the other end of the engine spectrum:
Bethesda… yeah, they have entirely lost control of their engine, it is mangled mess of nonsense, the latest Oblivion remaster just uses UE to render things slapped on top of Gamebryo, because no one at Bethesda can actually code worth a damn.
Compare that to oh I dunno, the Source engine.
Go play TitanFall 2. 10 year old game now, built on a modified version of the Portal 2 Source engine.
Still looks great, runs very efficiently, can scale down to older hardware.
Ok, now go play HL Alyx. If you don’t have VR, there are mods that do a decent job of converting it into M+K.
Looks great, runs efficiently.
None of them use RT.
Because you don’t need to, if you take the time to actually optimize both your engine and game design.
I meant they also just don’t bother to optimize texture sizes, didn’t mean to imply they are directly related to ray tracing issues.
Also… more and more games are clearly being designed, and marketed, with ray tracing in mind.
Sure, its not absolutely forced on in too many games… but TAA often is forced on, because no one can run raytracing without temporal intelligent upscsling and frame gen…
…and a lot of games just feed the pixel motion vectors from their older TAA implementations into the DLSS / FSR implementations, and don’t bother to recode the TAA into just giving the motion vectors as an optional API that doesn’t actually do AA…
… and they often don’t do that because they designed their entire render pipeline to only work with TAA on, and half the games post procrssing effects would have to be recoded to work without TAA.
So if you summarize all that: the ‘design for raytracing support’ standard is why many games do not let you turn off TAA.
…
That being said: Ray tracing absolutely does only really make a significant visual difference in many (not all, but many) situations… if you have very high res textures.
If you don’t, older light rendering methods work almost as well, and run much, much faster.
Ray tracing involves… you know, light rays, bouncing off of models, with textures on them.
Like… if you have a car with a glossy finish, that is reflecting in its paint the entire scene around it… well, if that reflect map that is being added to the base car texture… if that reflect map is very low res, if it is generating it from a world of low res textures… you might as well just use the old cube map method, or other methods, and not bother turning every reflective surface into a ray traced mirror.
Or, if you’re doing accumulated lighting in a scene with different colors of lights… that effect is going to be more dramatic, more detailed, more noticable in a scene with higher res textures on everything being lit.
…
I could write a 60 page report on this topic, but no one is paying me to, so I’m not going to bother.
Saved up for a couple of years and built the best (consumer grade) non nvidia PC I could, 9070XT, 9950X3D, 64gig of RAM. Pretty much top end everything that isn’t Nvidia or just spamming redundant RAM for no reason. The whole thing still costs less than a single RTX 5090 and on average draws less power too.
And then to stick it to the man further you’re running Linux of course, right?
I tried Mint and Ubuntu but Linux dies a horrific death trying to run newly released hardware so I ended up on ghost spectre.
(I also assume your being sarcastic but I’m still salty about wasting a week trying various pieces of advice to make linux goddamn work)Levelone techs had relevant guidance.
Kernel 6.14 or greater Mesa 25.1 or greater
Ubuntu and Mint idt have those yet hence your difficult time.
Try Bazzite. Easy, beginner friendly, but very God hardware support and up to date.
Yep, thats gonna be significantly more powerful than my planned build… and likely somewhere between 500 to 1000 more expensive… but yep, that is how absurd this is, that all of that is still less expensive than a 5090 RTX.
I’m guessing you could get all of that to work with a 750 W PSU, 850 W if you also want to have a bunch of storage drives or a lot of cooling, but yeah, you’d only need that full wattage for running raytracing in 4k.
Does that sound about right?
Eitherway… yeah… imagine an alternate timeline where marketing and industry direction isn’t bullshit, where people actually admit things like:
Consoles cannot really do what they claim to do at 4K… at actual 4K.
They use checkerboard upscaling, so basically they’re actually running at 2K and scaling up, and its actually less than 2K in demanding raytraced games, because they’re actually using FSR or DLSS as well, oh and the base graphics settings are a mix of what PC gamers would call medium and high, but they don’t show console gamers real graphics settings menus, so they don’t know that.
Maybe, maybe we could have tried to focus on just perfecting frame per watt and frame per $ efficiency at 2K instead of baffling us with marketing bs and claiming we can just leapfrog to 4K, and more recently, telling people 8K displays make any goddamned sense at all, when in 95% of home setup situations, of any kind, they have no physically possible perceptible gains.
1000W PSU for theoretical maximum draw of all components at once with a good safety margin. But even when running a render I’ve never seen it break 500W.
GTX 1060 6Gb still going strong!
Runs FFXIV at 1440p.
Runs HL Alyx on my Rift.
Runs everything prior to this gen.
If I need to run a more modern game, I’ll use my PS5.
That was a beautiful card, bought to use with vr, my gf is still rockin that system
Jesus christ man. I thought I was slumming it with a 3070.
hahahahahahahaha.
rx580
RX580 remains a power efficient champ. The old hot hatch of the GPU world.
There’s so many games out there I’d like to play, but I’m an adult with responsibilities. I don’t need the newest game or gaming hardware because no matter how hard I try to catch up I never will, so I don’t bother to try and I always have something to play on my hardware.
First: Nobody gives a shit about the ray tracing craze, like not really. It applies to a thin margin of games, and is an option easily turned off or avoided. Seeing as AAA games are most of the ones developing for it anyway, and seeing as most of those are utter shit, yeah I’m not buying into the craze and spending obnoxious amounts of money on it.
Unfortunately gamers aren’t the real target audience for new GPUs, it’s AI bros. Even if nobody buys a 4090/5090 for gaming, they’re always out of stock as LLM enthusiasts and small companies use them for AI.
Ex-fucking-actly!
Ajajaja, gamers are skipping. Yeah, they do. And yet 5090 is still somehow out of stock. No matter the price or state of gaming. We all know major tech went AI direction disregarding average Joe about either they want or not to go AI. The prices are not for gamers. The prices are for whales, AI companies and enthusiasts.
5090 is kinda terrible for AI actually. Its too expensive. It only just got support in pytorch, and if you look at ‘normie’ AI bros trying to use them online, shit doesn’t work.
4090 is… mediocre because it’s expensive for 24GB. The 3090 is basically the best AI card Nvidia ever made, and tinkerers just opt for banks of them.
Businesses tend to buy RTX Pro cards, rent cloud A100s/H100s or just use APIs.
The server cards DO eat up TSMC capacity, but insane 4090/5090 prices is mostly Nvidia’s (and AMD’s) fault for literally being anticompetitive.
The progress is just not there.
I’ve got RX 6800 XT for €400 in May 2023 which was at that point almost a 3y old card. Fastforward to today, the RX 9060 XT 16GB costs more and is still slower in raster. Only thing going for it is FSR4, better encoder and a bit better RT performance about which I couldn’t care less about.
bit better RT performance about which I couldn’t care less about.
Yeah raytracing is not really relevant on these cards, the performance hit is just too great.
The RX 9070 XT is the first AMD GPU where you can consider turning it on.
But I wouldnt turn it on and actually play with it even if I could because I will always take the better performance.
I’ve actually tried Path Tracing in CP2077 running at native Steam Deck resolution streamed to my Steam Deck OLED from my PC at max settings and it could do 30FPS locked fairly well (overlocked by 20% though). But the game looks absolutelly horrible in motion with it’s terrible LOD so no amount of RT or PT can save it. It looks dope for screenshots though. But that’s PT, RT is basically almost indistinguishable. And PT is many, many years away for it to be viable for majority of people to use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNcYZ5l_c48
(The game reports W10 but it was Fedora42 actually)
But I wouldnt turn it on and actually play with it even if I could because I will always take the better performance.
Depends. In Cyberpunk I can get 90-100fps on 1440p on ultra with raytracing on and FSR4 Quality (via Optiscaler). That is a very good experience IMO, to the point that I forget about “framerate” while playing.
That’s Windows though, in Linux the raytracing performance is rather worse for some reason and it slips below the threshold of what I find noticeable, so I go for 1440p native.
GPU prices are what drove me back to consoles. It was time to overhaul my PC as it was getting painfully out of date. Video card alone was gonna be 700. Meanwhile a whole ass PS5 that plays the same games was 500.
It’s been 2 years since and I don’t regret it. I miss mods, but not nearly as much as I thought. It also SOOO nice to play multiplayer games without cheaters everywhere. I actually used to be one of those people who thought controllers gave an unfair advantage but… you can use a M/KB on PS5 and guess what? I do just fine! Turns out that the problem was never controllers, it was the cheaters.
But then there is that. The controller. Oh my lord it’s so much more comfortable than even the best gaming mouse. I’ve done a complete 180 on this. So many game genres are just so terrible to play with M/KB that I now tell people whining about controller players this:
Use gaming equipment for gaming and leave office equipment in the office.
I’m rocking a GTX 1660 and have no plans to upgrade. Ray-tracing is a scam and all the “AAA” titles that are too vram hungry for my card are not that attractive anyway.
980gt.
Though, due to circumstances, I’ve not played any games in about a year.
Before that I only really played Rocket League in the few years preceding. So if that still going when I do have time to play them I’ll still be fine with my old GPU.
I’m still surviving on my RX580 4GB. Limping along these days, but no way I can justify the price of a new GPU.
R9 380x does more than I need it too.
If it wasn’t for video format compatibility (av1 mostly) then I would still some R9 fury coil whine as background noise.
The R9’s were really something.
Same, but the 8GB edition.
UE5 runs like a tragedyWhat about the used market? The Nvidia 1080/1080 TI or AMD 6000/7000 series is not too bad.
All I want is more VRAM, it can already play all the games I want.
But with our new system we can make up 10x as many fake frames to cram between your real ones, giving you 2500 FPS! Isn’t that awesome???
Bullshitted pixels per second seem to be the new currency.
It may look smooth in videos, but 30fps upframed(?) to 120fps will still feel like a 30fps game.
Modern TVs do the same shit, and it both looks and feels like ass. And not good ass.
I don’t mean to embarrass you, but you were also supposed to say “AI!”
Points with a finger and laughs
Look at that loser not using AI
I don’t buy every generation and skip 1 if not 2. I have a 40xx series and will probably wait until the 70xx (I’m assumimg series naming here) before upgrading.
deleted by creator
That you misremembered the generation of Nintendo console that Quake 2 was on makes this the perfect chefs kiss millennial boomer comment, lol.
Bought a 5700xt on release for £400, ran that til last year when the 7900gre released in the UK. Can’t remember what I paid but it was a lot less than the flagship 7900 and I forsee lasting many years as I have no desire to go above 2K.
AMD GPUs have been pretty great value compared to nvidia recently as long as you’re not tying your self worth to your average FPS figures.
I’m ngl, finances had no impact on my decisions to stay at 3080. Performance and support did. Everything I want to play runs at least 60 to 180 fps with my current loadout. I’m also afraid once Windows 10 LTSC dies I won’t be able to use a high end GPU with Linux anyways.
You can always side-grade to AMD. I was using a 3070 and ditched Windows for Kubuntu and while it was very usable, I would get the slightest input lag and had to make sure the compositor (desktop effects) was turned off when playing a game.
After some research I decided to side-grade to the 6800 and it’s a night and day difference. Buttery smooth gaming. It performs better with compositor on than Nvidia did with it off. I know 6800 isn’t high end but it’s no slouch either. AMD is king on Linux.
I’m sitting on a 3060 TI and waiting for the 40-series prices to drop further. Ain’t no universe where I would pay full price for the newest gens. I don’t need to render anything for work with my PC, so a 2-3 year old GPU will do just fine
I’m pretty sure that production of the 40 series has stopped. The 50 series uses the same node.
Exact same here and I’m upgrading any time soon. MHWilds runs like ass no matter the card and I’m back to playing Hoi4 in the mean time.
