Comment by avaer
16 hours ago
It was obvious AI would further stratify the haves and have-nots, but I was too naive to realize the tech of the have-nots could literally just regress. Has such a thing ever happened before in tech?
16 hours ago
It was obvious AI would further stratify the haves and have-nots, but I was too naive to realize the tech of the have-nots could literally just regress. Has such a thing ever happened before in tech?
Sorta, kinda. For a long time, a new PC tended to be built with new parts. New motherboard, new storage, new CPU, new graphics card. New.
During every mining crunch that made GPUs very expensive, we sometimes went backwards on parts of new builds. A used GPU from years ago was often a more-viable choice than a new model in any kind of condition.
edit to add: A lot of folks in 3D printing like to have a small computer driving the machine, especially with tinkerer-friendly hobbyist printers of yore. That often meant some manner of Raspberry Pi because it was inexpensive-enough, small, and a known quantity that was simple to deal with in an appliance-like way.
During the covid-era chip shortages, Pi hardware was expensive, hard to find, or often both. So folks started driving their printers with things like old cell phones or cheap Android TV boxes instead.
I remember getting a Radeon card on sale for about $180AUD in 2012ish. And 4 years later looking for an upgrade and discovering the cheapest higher performing card was at least $300 Aud.
I eventually upgraded to an RX 570 in 2018, and hit the same problem 5 years later.
So as far as loe to mid range cards are concerned you can wait 5 years and still have to pay more to replace it for an upgrade.
Yes, the previous fad (crypto) killed consumer GPU prices for good. I don't believe anything has compared on price-performance to a 1080 in the 10 years since.
Also the enshittification of software might count? You used to own Photoshop for life, now you're expected to pay a subscription for life. And legal onslaught, too. Encryption and consumer VPNs are on the chopping block in much of the world at the rate things are going. The end goal of governments and corporations alike is to remove the ability of consumers to own hardware they control. We are rapidly moving towards a future where you will only be able to access the internet and government services with a "trusted device", which will be a thin client with a TPM, biometric verification, telemetry of everything you do on it, and which will require paying an ongoing subscription to use.
As far as I can tell, in terms of MSRP, 980ti was $649 at launch. 1080 and 1080ti were both $699 when they hit the market.
$699 in 2015 (when the 1080 was new) is ~$975 today, adjusted for inflation.
$975 is pretty close to the launch MSRP of a 5080, which is "just" $999. (We can't actually buy them for $999, of course, but we couldn't usually get 1080 cards at MSRP during the mining frenzy a decade ago either.)
The big difference here is that by the time the 2080 had saturated the market, you could regularly find a 1080 for ~$300 (I paid $275 for an EVGA B-stock model).
Whereas today, with the 5000 series in the market for quite a while already, a 4080 is still well over MSRP
Back in the day 1080 was top of the line. For couple of generations now it's xx90 lineup.
You could say that there was Titan but in practice they were not seriously considered. At least for gaming.
I don’t see that at all obvious.
Businesses are competing like crazy to make algorithms that are in high demand. AI could theoretically let people and create new things that they would never be able to otherwise.
It is entitled to thing that people wanting GPUs and new PCs for gaming and hobbies is a more valid use. And if someone values it, all they have to do is pay the market price.
This is the crux of a lot of the anti-AI sentiment especially in the gaming market. They feel entitled to access to the latest chips at a subsidized price below what industry is willing to pay. Many of them then take it a step further and claim some conspiracy (like a few commenters here).
I get why they're upset (it's not fun to be crowded out) but it's a fundamentally selfish position.