You should also be avoiding cards with 8GB of VRAM.
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.
I’ve been avoiding Nvidia for a while now. Too much buck per bang.
I’m kind of tapping out of it all for now. This 2070s will have to hold on another 7 years. There are still so many games I haven’t played that I own and this card is too powerful for them, so I might as well do the 'ol backlog.
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
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.
Im gonna frame the FX-8350 and 1070. True workhorses
if you value your bank balance
Joke’s on you, I don’t have a bank balance
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
Ive got a 1070 that still works really well. Steam games and all.
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.
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.
Then buy a used 3060 for $250-$300
This will be The Year of Optimization (copium)
The GPU price hike is here and you should avoid any Nvidia card
Fixed the headline. You’re welcome.
just avoid buying hardware at all
Unironically yes, for now at least, 9070 and 9070XT are well around their MSRP prices still.
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.
What does one use that much DDR for?
Web browser tabs.
(I only have 64GB, but that’s my answer. Firefox still eventually runs out of memory and crashes, BTW. Not blaming the browser itself; I think there’s a memory leak in the JS in some of the tabs I keep open.)
Interesting. I use tons of bookmarks and close tabs/firefox frequently so I often forget that web browsers are capable of using that much memory.
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.
Ah so the price hike is finally here after years of price stability…
You should be avoiding NVIDIA anyway, AI boom or not.
