Love that hardware is literally becoming more expensive now instead of getting cheaper.
Gamers need to take over the means of production in a GPU Revolution.
huh, turns out building a new PC like 3 months ago was a galaxy brain move on my part
Think the AI bubble popping will cause prices to crash or will some other “industry” suck up all the hardware instead? I struggle to imagine cloud computing/compute-as-a-service being that big of a thing.
if i remember correctly, memory manufacturers reported that they sold out all available orders until the end of 2026, and that they will not increase production to meet the surge in demand. even if the bubble pops they’ll make sure to force at least someone to honor these pre-orders.
on top of that, most production of computer parts either has already shifted or will continue to shift to data center products, which are not compatible with consumer parts. changing back to consumer parts will take months if not years, so it’s safe to assume that shortages will continue up until 2027 at least.
the most plausible scenario in the event of an AI crash (in my non-expert opinion) is that most of the data center ownership will change to the hands of the few already existing tech giants that run profitable businesses (amazon, meta, google, microsoft etc…) or will end up in the hands of the US government (including the pre-orders i mentioned) as a form of bailout for hardware and AI companies, possibly in exchange for ownership stake (similar to how trump shifted the CHIPS act funds to a 10% stake in intel).
the thing about CaaS is, it is not what these companies want to pursue, but have to in the event of a crash. whether it makes sense or not, these companies will have to shove CaaS down our throat in order to be able to find some use for these data centers and keep investors happy. CaaS is simply seen as the easiest business for these data centers to get into. other possible uses are mass surveillance and MIC like palantir, so get ready for those as well.
the only possible saving grace are chinese hardware manufacturers but from what i’ve heard, in the best case scenario, they still need at least 3-4 years to catch up. even then i’ll doubt they’ll catch on outside of china and software support will probably be limited.
The problem is that they’re producing data center products, which are completely unusable to normal people. The crash won’t put products you can use on the market, companies are making GPU’s that can’t output videos, computers that need to integrate with building cooling, and chips that are completely unified (so you can’t pull out the memory to use even if you wanted to).
Prices will stay high.
Once the demand for those gpus fall of a cliff they’re still going to have that memory produce and need to put it somewhere. There won’t be “gaming on a used cheap datacenter” GPU, but there will be memory that needs to be put into something.
At best it’ll be back to normal pricing, the memory producers haven’t really bothered to expand production, after all they probably make more money with limited supply. The contracts that companies have signed with the big three memory producers also, afaict, aren’t just for “memory” in general, but specifically for memory meant for HBM and unified, so that “memory that needs to be put into something” can’t be put in a normal computer.
I also think that even if the AI crash leads to increased consumer supply, companies will keep price gouging. There’s no particularly good reason for them to try to return prices to lower than before. “competition” on the “open market” doesn’t ever seem to be very good at lowering prices after a spike like this.
Yeah it’s purpose built to suck ass. It’s like the old “car idling to solve sudokus” meme but in this case the car can’t be used as a car, it can only be used to idle, regardless of whether sudokus exist to be solved.
The CaaS thing is because they project the AI Bubble popping in the near future. There will be a lot of unused data centers with outdated hardware lying around, they need to monetize them after the AI companies collapse or move on.
I have no idea what could suck up compute the way ai can.
I mean, if they make it so it’s the only affordable option. ‘You will own nothing and be happy about it’ kind of hours.
I think it’s unlikely something else comes along with the same demand AI has for hardware for awhile just with prices being so high now and when the bubble pops the rest of the US economy is gonna be in too rough shape to be investing much especially in something that would likely seem to be a similar risk as AI.
I think if you’re looking to get hardware just waiting until the bubble crashes will be smart since all the overproduction will lead to prices plummeting to get rid of inventory.
Compute as a Service is going to become reality as local compute will become crazy expensive.
Hardware as software as a service. Then once they somehow manage to use fiber optics to mint crypto or sell shitty pictures of the same cartoon monkey, we’ll have bandwidth as hardware as software as bandwidth as software as hardware as a service.
Platform and infrastructure as a service is a thing
As a millennial - it’s fine, I was foolish to expect anything good at all … but I don’t really need to play games newer than 2010 & I should be happy with that. Just need to have enough PCs in storage to last me a lifetime (shouldn’t be too long).
If one was thinking of building a good gaming PC soon (I probably can’t begin to afford it, but you know, hypothetically), and wanted it to be mainly a Linux box, but hopefully still high end for gaming, would it be wise to buy just the GPU for it right now? Even though the rest of the components can’t be purchased at the moment, maybe they can be later, at least the sky rocketing prices of the GPUs would have been avoided. Also, assuming this hobby is something this hypothetical person knows very little about, what GPU should they get? As far as best bet on being as future-proof as possible. It should be AMD for Linux, not NVIDIA right?
No that’s probably a bad idea.
But if you were to get a gpu, the most recent and highest end ones are the ones that stay relevant the longest. People could still run shit on titans until nvidia dropped support from the latest driver package.
You could try doing without a gpu, in which case you save a lot of money you would have spent on one but now you have to spend more money on a motherboard/cpu/memory in order to squeeze maximum performance out of the onboard gpu and when one of them starts to be too slow you’re fucked.
If you do buy a gpu then you can reasonably expect only a 5% drop in frame rate when you use a very cheap 6-7 year old ddr4/pcie3/old cpu combo, which aren’t being hit quite as bad with ram pricing.
Gpus have grown significantly in the last two decades from components that often shipped with a half height bracket in case you wanted to stick it in a sff pc to the main geometric limitation of case choice. Use the “length” filter field in the pc part picker website to not end up with an unfortunate situation.
Amd or nvidia? People will say there are serious differences on linux, I’m not seeing it. The nvidia stuff tends to be performant longer but ymmv. The top end current generation amd cards can be had for under a grand, you’ll be lucky to get a 5090 for under two grand.
People will disagree with me, and they’re wrong, but the best gaming experience overall is nvidia. It may not be worth 1k to you, but it’s reality.
If I were feeling antsy and needed to pull the cost effective trigger on some parts I’d look at the area around me or eBay for a used professional workstation targeting pcie3/ddr4 and gpu mounting length and get a 9070. Once it’s up and running, mission accomplished, I’d still sock cash back and keep an eye out for an nvidia deal.
Get RAM first before it spikes worse. I’ll be real, modern games aren’t that much more demanding than 10 year old games if you want those 10 year old games at ultra settings and the modern ones at medium settings. A used or refurbished GPU would suit basically anyone’s gaming needs just fine nowadays.
RAM might be going up faster than GPU prices? It’s hard to tell what the best move right now is. CPU prices are probably not going to change much, and motherboards and PSUs use much more standardized components that are unlikely to skyrocket in price. One of (RAM, SSD, GPU) is going to be the best choice, can’t say more than that.
Nvidia has Linux support, it’s just not open source. I run amd on windows with no real issues for gaming. I think amd for Linux and Nvidia for windows is probably not wrong per say but highly exaggerated. (unless open source everything is critical for you).
Intel also produces a good card for the price, but driver support is not ideal. Getting better but not ideal. Avoid Intel at the moment if you don’t want to tinker.
Considering Nvidia has been calling Israel their second home, I’d rather not have their drivers installed on my OS.
Supertuxkart doesnt need a high end GPU.
More serious answer: recommend just getting a very powerful integrated CPU/GPU combo. It should be able to play most games. A GPU is overkill if the goal is to play games and not just stare at them.
Its most similar to what the steam deck uses (integrated amd).
I was hoping to wait until a 24GB version came out of this next gen but looks like I’ll be skipping it. Thankful I bought my RAM kits beffore this fiasco and I’m on AM4 platform. My main gaming computer is built. Got most of the parts for my data cruncher - just need power supply really. The AM4 platform is more than capable of running everything maxed out for now.
Wonder how much 7900xtx are going for now, but I really don’t need that with a data cruncher, though BONIC can use it. I suspect people will be scrambling for last gen and refurbished parts. But I really want that 9950x3D2 with that massive L3 cache. Just to see it tear things to pieces. Guess I got to wait till AM 6, Zen 9, R420xXx in 2030 now.
but also 
Back 2 thin client
No shot. If the author confuses regular memory with graphics memory (unless they think we’re still running GDDR5 like it’s 2010) I don’t believe them
