General Gaming News

[Raid]

https://www.eurogamer.net/amd-and-nvidi ... ly-in-2026

This shouldn't come as a surprise if you've been following the news over the last few months (AI companies buying out entire chip manufacturers' output), but it might be worth grabbing that new GPU asap if you're planning on an upgrade. Just another example of AI ruining everything for everyone.

Expectations are that these price increases will impact certain GPUs, including Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50 series and AMD's Radeon RX 9000 series which are already expensive. According to Newsis, the Nvidia RTX 5090 which was released at a price point of $1,999 could eventually increase to $5,000 this year.

[Sly Boots]

Just fucking stupid. Already was massively outpriced on being able to upgrade my brave little 3060ti anytime soon, and now looks like that conceivably may never happen.

At least until the AI bubble bursts, as it assuredly will.

[Mantis]

I had postponed my new rig build after the RAM I scoped out jumped from 200 quid to over 500. I've just picked up a partial upgrade with a 5060 Ti because my old GPU is really ready for a rest and there's no way I'm buying one if they triple the price.

The end game for this is consumers being priced out of the market entirely and all gaming we do in future being done via cloud streaming services all owned by the top monopoly holding companies.

It won't evaporate entirely like the whole NFT (remember that next big thing?) saga did because AI does have some practical applications where it can be useful, but I still hope this entire thing has a catastrophic meltdown when people start realising a lot of the ways it is currently being pushed on us is pure poor quality brain rot crap.

[Raid]

At this point I'm almost scared to see what'll happen when the AI bubble bursts. Companies are just ploughing so much money into it, with absolutely no return on investment, and when the inevitable happens (because for all of that investment, I haven't seen a single sign that the models they're using are ever going to be trustworthy enough to fill the role that the CEOs are promising they will), what happens when all of that investment is just gone? Do we start finding out that pension pots are heavily invested in these things? What then?

[Mantis]

Capitalism, baby. We survived the Dot Com crash and the GFC, we'll survive another market correction.

A crash is 100% coming. Absolutely insane amounts of money are being plouged into this market and it's only a matter of time before companies realise that they can't really make any money out of AI beyond laying off staff in favour of automation, nobody wants to buy AI slop art or movies and I wouldn't trust a LLM to make me a cup of tea. People were excited about it a couple of years ago but I think the public mood is slowly shifting against it, particularly as the huge negative ramifications of replacing everyone with AI is slowly dawning on everyone.

[Lenny Solidus]

Out February 19.



Out January 29.

[Hatredsheart]

Having played the first two Styx games this news excites me.

[Lenny Solidus]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/steam ... l-picture/

[DjchunKfunK]

I think the current trend with graphics cards could ultimately spell the end of dedicated graphics card. SOCs are only getting more powerful, Intel's latest chips for example have integrated ARC graphics into them with a promise of a 40% graphics performance improvement. With how Nvidia have behaved the last five+ years it's hard to be sad if SOCs turn out to be the future.

[Raid]

I think the current trend with graphics cards could ultimately spell the end of dedicated graphics card. SOCs are only getting more powerful, Intel's latest chips for example have integrated ARC graphics into them with a promise of a 40% graphics performance improvement. With how Nvidia have behaved the last five+ years it's hard to be sad if SOCs turn out to be the future.

I've seen some good headlines about Intel's ARC, but I can't say it's something I've followed closely. Are the graphics capabilities of these CPUs in any way comparable to even a low-end dedicated GPU? Surely the more you load onto the CPU die, the more expensive it becomes to produce them, as a defect in the silicone spoils the whole chip and you either have to give it a lower bin (and reduce the selling price) or throw it out entirely. Even if they had the capacity to challenge a GPU, surely they'd just run into the same problem with VRAM unless they use some entirely different memory concept I'm not aware of.

[DjchunKfunK]

I've seen some good headlines about Intel's ARC, but I can't say it's something I've followed closely. Are the graphics capabilities of these CPUs in any way comparable to even a low-end dedicated GPU? Surely the more you load onto the CPU die, the more expensive it becomes to produce them, as a defect in the silicone spoils the whole chip and you either have to give it a lower bin (and reduce the selling price) or throw it out entirely. Even if they had the capacity to challenge a GPU, surely they'd just run into the same problem with VRAM unless they use some entirely different memory concept I'm not aware of.

I've not seen any benchmarks but I would think they would be aiming for similar performance to RDNA that AMD has on their chips that are appearing in a lot of the other handhelds. The AMD MAX chip that is in the Framework desktop PC has a pretty beefy iGPU on it and from benchmarks I've seen can challenge the 4060. There is nothing that gets near 5070s and up but it's trending upwards.

In terms of memory usage from what I understand because they are on the same die the communication is faster and therefore memory usage is not as intensive as when using a dedicated card. I'm not hear saying it's a perfect or even good solution, just that I could see the industry trending in that direction for consumers, especially those on the low to mid-range end.

[Wrathbone]

It'd be good to see a Digital Foundry analysis of them, but I think Chris is right that VRAM is going to be the problem regardless of whether graphics are handled by the CPU or a dedicated GPU. Faster memory is encouraging, though.

The future of graphics cards looks rocky at best, and integrated graphics could be a compromise, but it'll still be expensive and it'll likely be at a lower tier than we're used to.

[Raid]

I suppose I should have thought about the new generation of PC handhelds; they're obviously quite capable little machines, and I hadn't considered they were using that sort of technology. But if they're capable of challenging desktop-grade mid-range GPUs, that's obviously very promising.

Something has to change with the GPU, and really the wider PC component market; I remember thinking my £800 3080 was extortionate back in 2020/21, and a cursory google suggests you can't get the 5080 for much less than double that just a few years later. High-end PC gaming used to be three to four times the price of the current console generation, so it's never exactly been cheap, but I dread to think how much I'd be looking at if I specced something to match the capability range of my current machine - even just the 32gb RAM I have would set me back the price of a PS5 now (genuinely £420, and that's not high-end RAM).

[Raid]

The future of graphics cards looks rocky at best, and integrated graphics could be a compromise, but it'll still be expensive and it'll likely be at a lower tier than we're used to.

I think it's good that we've seen the move towards software solutions rather than raw horsepower over the last few years. I don't pretend to know much about frame generation tech, I just switch it on if a game's particularly chuggy, but given that it's being used in consoles at the OS level (if the reports about Switch 2 are anything to go by) suggests that devs are expecting lower end hardware to still produce some pretty decent visuals. I don't think I'm that fussed by cutting edge graphics technology these days anyway, art style and other presentation factors influence me more than poly counts, and maybe it wouldn't be bad if the industry started moving back towards doing what the hardware is capable of, rather than pushing for the theoretical maximum and letting the consumers work out the rest.

And speaking of OS-level stuff, I'm starting to see murmurs of a move towards Steam OS as an alternative platform for PC gaming, which sounds like a really positive experience, and might deal with some of the reduction in absolute hardware power with its lower system overheads. I love the OS on the Steam Deck, it's sensibly laid out, has easy access to full controller customisation and OS-level rendering options, and Valve are clearly pushing to make it capable of running all PC games on kernels they were never designed for with zero input from the user. I'm really quite excited to see if their new hardware takes off, and whether they'll offer the OS as an official option for more machines.

[Wrathbone]

On the plus side, my current PC (which I built in 2023) is still going strong and I have no upgrade plans in the foreseeable future. Things like DLSS will hopefully extend it's viability longer than previous PCs, and the fact that the bleeding edge of graphics is all around ray tracing means that usually you can just turn that off if needs be and get a massive performance boost. I don't expect I'll think about upgrading for another 5 years at least.