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The GPU price hike is here and you should avoid any Nvidia card ~~with more than 8 GB VRAM, if you value your bank balance~~
Hot take, developers should start optimizing for 4GB of VRAM or less. I'm personally just fine with a 7th-gen console level of detail at 1080p60, and I'm even willing to settle for 720p30.
Then again, most of the games I play these days are literally from the 90s, so what do I know?
Nah I'm happy with 720p even for modern games - ideally 60fps but i'll take what I can get. I have a 1440p monitor and 720p looks good on it as it's an exact 1:2 ratio
Didn't know it was an integer ratio, I will try this on my 1440p monitor as well!
If you're planning to buy a GPU in the 2020s it's probably best to aim for late 2023.
A used 1080ti is half the price of a 3060 and has more vram
Also is on life support drivers, does not support compute shaders and is not supported by modern Linux at all.
Life support drivers yes, not supported by modern Linux is a blatant lie.
How so? Nvidia dropped support, so as it stands you are at the mercy of the distro maintainers to keep the old drivers in the repos.
3rd party repos or packaging it yourself. On Arch you can just update the pkgbuild yourself (or any other distro really).
while fair, the crappy open source drivers are still under development as far as I'm aware.
As far as I could tell Neuveu drivers do not support older cards at all. It does load into the environment, but crashes as soon as there's any rendering trying to happen.
I just tried to find out and even they don't seem to know but the general answer seems to be yes?
"Does my card work with Nouveau?
The most likely answer for your particular Nvidia graphics card is: yes for 2D and maybe for 3D. You can find the details in Status on the front page.
If you have a laptop with dual Intel/Nvidia graphics, the Nvidia card may or may not be usable. The card may be selectable via vgaswitcheroo or a BIOS option, you should check those first. If neither works, you are probably out of luck. See the above link for Nvidia Optimus.
If you want a definite answer, try it. "
Then the status is just this lol:
"Current Status
OpenGL is supported on all GPUs.
Vulkan is supported on all Kepler and later GPUs.
Video decoding acceleration supported on most pre-Maxwell cards; see VideoAcceleration for details.
Automatic reclocking available for Turing and newer GPUs through GSP firmware.
Support for manual performance level selection (also known as "reclocking") on GM10x Maxwell, Kepler and Tesla G94-GT218 GPUs. Available in /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/pstate. There is little hope of reclocking becoming available for GM20x, GP10x and GV100 as firmware now needs to be signed by NVIDIA to have the necessary access.
"
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Ive got a 1070 that still works really well. Steam games and all.
The GPU price hike is here and you should avoid any Nvidia card
Fixed the headline. You're welcome.
Unironically yes, for now at least, 9070 and 9070XT are well around their MSRP prices still.
just avoid buying hardware at all
AMD, Linux and indie games for the win.
Ah yes “Go for the 8GB card” you know, the same one we’ve been telling for years to avoid because of its limited vram capacity.
Just avoid nvidia. AMDs RX 9070 XT is still a solid deal. I bought one two weeks ago for under $700. This thing is fantastic, plays everything Ive tried and the open source drivers on Linux are a breath of fresh air compared to the nightmare of nvidias drivers
If one is on Linux I’d urge to avoid NVidia like the plague. Replaced my 4070 Super with an AMD card and I’ve had zero problems since.
I've been slowly switching the family PCs I manage for exactly this reason. I've warned my family that if windows stops working, I'm installing Linux on their PCs and will sit down with them to train them how to use it rather than put up with Windows anymore. Someday I'll be windows free, except for the office but I don't have any control over company property.
I thankfully have two company laptops, one with NixOS on it. It's rare that I need to use the Windows one.
My own computer runs on Tumbleweed. Every time there was an issue when doing a system upgrade, it was because of that fucking NVidia card. Thankfully with Tumbleweed you have Snapper functionality built in so rolling back is easy as hell, but there was a decent amount of time lost to troubleshooting and workarounds that I've just not experienced since switching from NVidia's garbage.
I've got one in my living room PC I use as a home theater PC and couch gaming system running Mint. It runs every game I've tried at 4K60 no problem. Definitely recommend as well. I think I paid $650~ at Microcenter for it.
is here
As in, it wasn't here a year ago? Two years ago?
Its been here for long enough to set up a tent
You should also be avoiding cards with 8GB of VRAM.
I'm avoiding computing I guess.. I won't pay those absurd prices, and I will not every pay for cloud bullshit.
I'll abandon computing and the internet if it comes to it.
I got a used 3ds and dsi and been loving it. Love them more than my switch. I'll go for vintage hardware and vintage games if needed over paying for cloud computing.
That's pretty much the point I arrived at a couple years ago when prices never really did come down after the crypto bullshit tailed off.
The latest hardware I bought was a 16 GB kit of DDR3 for my spare parts server.
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Ah so the price hike is finally here after years of price stability...
I've been avoiding Nvidia for a while now. Too much buck per bang.
You should be avoiding NVIDIA anyway, AI boom or not.
What? Nvidia cards have been super expensive for many, many years. Keep your old card- it's probably fine. If you need a new card get yourself a nice cheap B580 or whatever AMD is on now. Play some older games or just turn off some of the eye garbage. You'll be ok.
This will be The Year of Optimization (copium)
To be fair, people need to set their priorities straight. Even though these are marketed as 'gaming' hardware, are they actually?
I have an RTX 4060 8GB VRAM that seems to have people hating all over it, but I don't see the point, currently, to buy another GPU. It runs smoothly enough every single game I've attempted to run it, including stuff like Alan Wake 2. There's also the fact that most AAA games that demand a strong hardware are barely worth playing.
But as long as 'gamers' keep fixating on the idea that gaming can only be enjoyable when they own the best hardware to run things on 4k, 120fps, almost zero input delay, and whatever the fuck else the market sells as essential for a 'true gaming experience', that's what you get: extremely overpriced hardware, that will never feel enough.
That's not exactly true. Gamers have always been like that, but entry level cards didn't cost like high end ones like they do now. That only happened in recent years.
I'm still getting by on just a Steamdeck. I don't own a computer otherwise, and my console really just plays a game or two.
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First crypto now AI, can the users just asking for a decent GPU catch a break here?
Crypto was limited bad since it only targeted GPU performance. AI targeting DRAM affects EVERYTHING. Phones, TVs, monitors, your router, smartwatches, ANYTHING that runs even a semblance of OS...
Microcontrollers are mostly safe as they use a different structure of RAM (500kB-8MB RAM doesn't need multi-thousand MT/s, so older tech is useful there).
But everything else is fucked.
if you value your bank balance
Joke's on you, I don't have a bank balance
Every PC gamer in my circle did an emergency purchase of a new PC this year because as bad as it's now, we all know it's going to get a hell of a lot worse and probably won't go down in at least 4 years if ever. Even my broke ass bought a 5080 and a 5800X3D (because I had 96GB DDR4 RAM already). Even my wife agreed better do it now than having to buy during peak AI price stupidity.
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avoiding nvidia since the gtx 1070, which I still have and is fully functional!
I see, a man of culture. My last Nvidia card is also a GTX 1070 (before that had the 970 and before that the 750 Ti). Its in my last PC build, as I upgraded to AMD with my new PC. AMD is just much better choice on Linux. Imagine new low end cards in 2026 will be released with 4gb VRAM, while the mid tier 1070 has 8gb VRAM. It has been 10 years.
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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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