The GPU industry is so broken right now and to make things worse, MSI thought it would be a good idea to do a lottery for a chance to win the ability to buy a GPU. I had to do a triple-take to make sure I was reading it right.
I would really love to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting where MSI thought this was a good idea. A competition that lasted all of 3 days, where people who signed up and entered would be put into a prize-draw where MSI would pull names out of a hat and give them the chance to buy a GeForce RTX 4090 within 48 hours.
Wow, that's super generous isn't it? A "limited" amount of people would also get a $50 MSI store code.
I can't be alone in thinking that was just really weird, getting a chance to possibly spend money by entering a competition. What in the world…I thought doing a lottery was supposed to be the exact opposite of that. Did I fall into an alternate even worse universe recently?
Am I going insane, or is the GPU industry just a complete total mess right now? Prices are absolutely crazy, pricing out a huge amount of people with AMD and NVIDIA focusing mostly on the high-end with their latest chips, with both sides also having plenty of problems like melted power connectors and temperature issues (noted at the bottom). Then we have Intel, whose new GPUs aren't exactly turning heads.
ME: No thanks.
I thought that companies wanted to sell as much as possible, not as less as possible.
But given how the availability of the 4080 is looking, i truly believe (even more than at the beginning) that nvidia is either having pretty bad yield issues on the full Ada chips (somewhat unlikely given the state of quadro) or purposely limiting supplies of the 4090 to make the impression that 'most people are willing to shell out such absurd amounts of money' and further try to normalize the rip off. And perhaps even 'convince' people that are hesitant (read: sane) until now that their resistance is futile....
Scalpers: DDoS'es the lottery
Perhaps Valve should start designing GPUs and save PC gaming yet again?
I wish this happened to phones, so people wouldn't be literally changing phones every 2 years. 'this' being shortage, not lottery of course.
Last edited by ShabbyX on 16 January 2023 at 2:58 pm UTC
If you manage to take your head out of manufacturer's distorted-reality bubble, you will realize you can play any modern AAA game, with a image quality superior to what the average PC gamer had a mere decade ago, using only the iGPU on a modern AMD processor.
Granted, is not the same experience as playing it on a 1000 dollar discrete card, but is the same game. It IS the same game. Vanity pushes us out of our senses, to make us spend a lot of money on a system just to play a game "better than in the peasant consoles".
Now, I can hear you say that I'm making excuses because I'm poor and cannot afford a 1000 dollar card. But that is a mistake. I'm a adult. I'm employed in the same place for a decade now. But as a full-grown adult, I don't have the luxury of making bad financial decisions anymore. My parents will not bail me out of financial trouble.
I also play games for 30 years. Started in the 8bit generation. I had some of the best gaming experiences of my life on a N64, playing games under 20fps (yeah, twenty!) at resolutions that look ridiculous by today's standards. So you tell me that I cannot have a great gaming experience at 60fps/1080p, just because 4k/120fps is the new hotness? Give me a break. The Steam Deck is out there proving that gaming is more than bragging rights on the internet.
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