Nvidia won, we all lost

This article goes much deeper than I expected, and is a nice recap of the last few years of "green" gpu drama.

Liars or not, the performance has not been there for me in any of my usecases, from personal to professional.

A system from 2017/2018 with an 8700K and an 8GB 2080 performs so closely to the top end, expensive systems today that it makes almost no sense to upgrade at MSRP+markup unless your system is older than this.

Unless you need specific features only on more recent cards, there are very few use cases I can think of needing more than a 30 series card right now.

I mean, most people probably won't directly upgrade. Their old card will die, or eventually nvidia will stop making drivers for it. Unless you're looking around for used cards, the price difference between something low end like a 3060 isn't that much less in price for the length of support you're going to get.

Unless nvidia's money printing machine breaks soon, expect the same to continue for the next 3+ years. Crappy expensive cards with a premium on memory with almost no actual video rendering performance increase.

> Unless you're looking around for used cards, the price difference between something low end like a 3060 isn't that much less in price for the length of support you're going to get.

This does not somehow give purchasers more budget room now, but they can buy 30-series cards in spades and not have to worry about the same heating and power deliveries as a little bonus.

> A system from 2017/2018 with an 8700K and an 8GB 2080 performs so closely to the top end, expensive systems today

This is in no way true and is quite an absurd claim. Unless you meant for some specific isolated purposed restricted purely to yourself and your performance needs.

> there are very few use cases I can think of needing more than a 30 series card right now.

How about I like high refresh and high resolutions? I'll throw in VR to boot. Which are my real use cases. I use a high refresh 4K display and VR, both have benefited hugely from my 2080Ti > 4090 Shift.

I have this exact CPU sans a 3090 (I started with 2080 but upgraded due to local AI needs). 8700k is perfectly fine for todays workloads. CPUs have stagnated and also the amount of RAM in systems has too (Apple still macbook air defaults of 8 GB in 2025??????)

It wasn’t “workloads” being talked about, it was gaming performance, the one area in which there is an absolutely huge difference mainly on the GPU side. We are taking a difference of close too if not 100%.

And despite CPUs stagnating it’s absolutely still possible to be held back on a stronger GPU with an older CPU especially in areas such as 1% lows, stuttering etc.

> This is in no way true and is quite an absurd claim.

You provided no evidence to back up this very strong statement; should we just take your word for it?

> especially in areas such as 1% lows, stuttering etc.

Oh, if you're willing to spend $1k to improve your 1% lows, I guess your argument makes sense.

> You provided no evidence to back up this very strong statement; should we just take your word for it?

Where is your evidence? You were the one making grand claims entirely unsupported by reality. Should we just take your word for it? It seems to have been your expectation given you backed it with literally nothing.

My evidence would be literally any benchmark in existence and the fact I actually owned the 2080ti and now own modern a modern high end GPU. They are not even remotely in the same class of performance in anything other than your head. But hey if that isn’t enough:

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5080-f...

Now go on, I eagerly await any evidence that supports your claim. Take all the time you need.