But that's beside the point, the 2080ti was a shiny toy you couldn't afford two years ago and now you can, good for you. People complaining about it are upset at the fact that people like you say "Oh, you'll be able to get a 60 series card for $300."
That's insane to us. We're budget builders. $300 used to be like 60% of our entire budget. Now we're being told that's just one component.
To put things in perspective, my first "nice" graphics card was a GTX 460 that I paid $140 for in 2011. How much were 480s back then? $499. So, the high end market hasn't really been affected the same way. You said it, you can buy essentially a 2080ti for those same $499 that the 480 cost 10 years ago. That's great. Seriously. But we can't get 3060s or even 2060s without paying more than double what we used to pay. If you can't understand that then your just an asshole or an Nvidia fanboy, but most likely both.
This right here. I'm a budget gamer. WTF else would I be on CAG? Yeah I play on every platform but I want my gaming dollar to stretch as far as it can. I'm not a PC Master Race gamer throwing thousands of dollars at my rig every year. And GPU's are now the major the sticking point when it comes to budget gaming. Literally every other component can be had at budget pricing (Ryzen CPU's, affordable M2's and SSD's, RAM, etc) but what's the champ budget GPU today? It's still the RX580!! 4 year old tech!
We budget gamers used to get several years from our ~$200 GPU's, and every few years a new budget king in that price range would release, letting us double our frame rates at the same resolution or allow us to play with bells and whistles on or higher resolution at acceptable frame rates. I have owned 3 cards in the last 12 years. The Radeon 4850 (released in 2008 at $199, I paid $149 a few months after release), then the 6850 1GB (launched in 2010 for $179, bought mine in 2011 for $150), and the RX480 (released in 2016 at $199, paid $179 a few weeks after release). All of these cards were solid budget performers and decent overclockers. But since the RX480/580 and the cryptomining craze, we haven't seen a single solid budget GPU that launches in the $199 and below range and doubles the previous budget card's performance. I mean even today, a 1660Ti for $270+ only yields about a 25% boost over an RX 480/580, and the 5600 xt also at $270+ is about 30% more. To double frame rates in 1080p benchmarks, you'd have to go to a 2070 Super for $500. WTF??
It's a terrible time for budget gamers and video cards. I keep hearing about waiting until the next round of cards to see a solid $200-$249 option, but it's as if both nVidia and AMD are intentionally avoiding competing at this price range. We are literally a couple of weeks out from a whole new generation of high end cards, and as of today a search for $190-$250 cards on newegg yields only 1660's and 5500XT's, literally less than a 10% performance increase over the RX480/580 cards!! And with no announcement of a 3060 card in the latest round, budget gamers are again left looking at their 3-4 year old cards with no performance valued upgrade path under $250. Honestly there is no reason we shouldn't have 2060 Super and 5600XT performance at $200 by now when you compare them to performance that RX480/580's still put out 4 years later.
Rumors still claim a 3060 will come out later this year, and be somewhere between $300-$400 (many guessing $369 or $399). And Navi 23 is likely even further off (apparently the AMD midrange card), but any chance of it being $250 or below? Not likely. There just isn't anything coming down the pipe anytime soon that will be an upgrade to the RX480/580 in the sub $250 range. nVidia and AMD are only offering $400+ cards, or poorly performing sub $200 cards (like the 1650 at $190, equal to rx580 performance).
Maybe the days of the $200-$250 budget king cards are just over...
they probably have agreements to sell them to system builders along with their higher end cards. Might as well toss some into retail boxes.
