Are new GPU's worth it anymore?

[665b10c96d5c1Pacmikey]

The games I've been playing recently are 40K Darktide, Deathloop (which is awesome BTW, in typical Arcane fashion), and MW2. One thing these games all have in common is FSR 2.0.

I used FSR 1.0 previously, however the jump in quality with 2.0, combined with new GPU releases got me thinking; Is there even a reason to upgrade your card post 2020?

Let's compare the 2000 series and the new 4000 series from Nvidia. (I'm not bothering with 3000 because the gains over time have become so incremental I see no point)
It's more powerful than the 2000 series (obviously), yet draws on average ~70-100W more power.

Where is the innovation? Making a bigger card (THAT IS LITERALLY BIGGER THAN A BRICK) that draws more power is obviously gonna be more powerful, is that really it?

As a sidenote, modern electronics generate way too much power. My PC needs at least 700W to operate. If I play a demanding game for an hour, even with A/C, my room gets noticeably warmer. If this trend of "bigger PC parts with bigger watt requirements" continues, we're gonna need mini generators for our computers soon. Something something energy crisis blah blah blah.
 
And for what? Better 4K performance? Higher HZ support with resolutions above 1440p? The advent of AI upscaling has, in my opinion, rendered new GPU's obsolete.

For reference, I have 1080p, 1440p, 4K, and 165hz screens. I have experienced every aspect of fidelity. And speaking from experience, the difference between UPSCALED 4K, and NATIVE 4K is so tiny, I can't see why people would invest another couple hundred bucks for it? If you look really, REALLY closely, you'll notice the difference. But it's so small it doesn't matter.

As for higher refresh rates, FSR has allowed me to run demanding games at 120+ FPS, despite my mid-range card (AMD 5600XT) and select games on 4K at 60fps. I honestly can barely notice the difference between native and upscaled at this point with FSR 2.0.

Video game graphics plateaued years ago. Realistically this is the best it's gonna get. (Until some dev makes genuine realtime photorealistic environments, which won't happen for another half decade at least. I'm expecting GTA 6 to be the first.)

The way I see it, if you are satisfied with 1080p 60fps, you probably won't have to upgrade your GPU ever again. (CPU and RAM yes, as games get bigger and more complex, but graphically it won't evolve too much.)

Back in the 90's/early 2000's, if you wanted to run games at an acceptable framerate you'd need to upgrade every 2 years or so. Games like Quake 2 were constantly raising the bar, 3D acceleration, all that shit. Nowadays if you bought a card in 2016 you're probably still good for most games.

To people who own the latest GPU's, why did you do it? Is it because you have a 4K monitor? Is raytracing important to you? (yes Quake 2 RTX was cool but I honestly don't care about the rest.) Pray tell. Outside of the bleeding edge crowd, I don't see a market for new GPUs.

[665b10c96d96dChandlermaki]

I bought a 3070 Ti because it's what I could get for a reasonable (ish) price during the GPU shortage, and my 1070 wasn't really cutting it for certain things anymore, especially at 1440p, which is probably the resolution I'll be sticking with for quite awhile for desktop use. It's just about twice as powerful on top of having more features, hardware RT and DLSS being the two obvious ones. DLSS is actually very, very cool to have despite my initial skepticism. I could have sprung for the 3080, but I like to build more compact machines, and I wasn't interested in all that extra heat and power consumption. I currently have it undervolted and with a decent overclock, so I get very reasonable temps and about 10% more performance over stock, while only consuming ~400W for the whole machine during realistic (i.e. non synthetic) workloads.

RT can be either a negligible difference, or be completely visually transformative. Whether or not it's worth the performance hit is really up to the implementation.

Ultimately it comes down to how much it's personally worth for you - the hardware aspect of PCs is really what my main hobby is, more than gaming itself, so I'm willing to spend the money (the rest of the machine is a 5900X, 64GB of RAM paired with suitably high end storage etc). In the grand scheme of things, it's actually a relatively cheap hobby to be into.

That said I do take major issue with current pricing - it has absolutely gotten out of hand. I understand that we can't really get the same gains per generation as we used to, but the market is being pushed to its limits and we're seeing that with how poorly the 4080 is selling. I remember getting an 8800GTX for about $600 (which I recall was actually pretty expensive for a GPU) back in the day, and it was a massive leap over the 7 series cards it replaced. It's a real shame that those days are over.

PCs tend to perform well for far longer than they used to, at least.

[665b10c96e467Pacmikey]

I remember getting an 8800GTX for about $600 (which I recall was actually pretty expensive for a GPU) back in the day, and it was a massive leap over the 7 series cards it replaced. It's a real shame that those days are over.

Funny, the 8800GT was my first GPU. I had to upgrade to a 760TI in order to play Human Revolution, and then to a 1060 to play Mankind Divided. I rebuilt my PC with a 5600XT to future proof it for 1080p.

PCs tend to perform well for far longer than they used to, at least.

That's the silver lining. PC gaming is cheaper than it has ever been, and future proofing your rig is no where near as expensive as it used to be. (Especially post crypto crash).

If I wanna get really meta, I think it's about our revenue driven society expecting unlimited growth and constant net gains and record profits. Their business grew, and has reached its peak. Yet they expect to keep making record amounts of money every year. (Same goes for Facebook, Amazon, pretty much every major company, all of which are experiencing massive layoffs...)

Needless to say I'm looking forward to the coming recession and potential economic crash.

[665b10c96e768Nameless Voice]

Right now, I have a GTX 1080, and can play pretty much everything at high settings at 1080p resolution, with good framerates.
I even get mostly 50-60fps in Darktide on High, even though it kept detecting the card as "Medium".

I'm somewhat considering getting a newer card specifically for RTX, since it's meant to make a fair bit of difference in Unreal Engine 5, especially for lighting.

I also imagine I'll need a new card when I (eventually) get a higher-resolution screen, but I'm still waiting for OLED monitors for that.

The prices are insane though.  I thought ~€550 for my current was really expensive - but now the latest generations are somehow four times the price.   How does anyone buy those?  It's hard to justify spending that much money on one, even if you have the money to spare.

[665b10c96e937fox]

And don't forget that, coming from a 1080, you also need to invest in an all new system around these insanely expensive cards. That's easily another 1500€ flying out of the window.

[665b10c96ea65Nameless Voice]

Not in my case, my CPU is fairly recent, I mostly just need more RAM.

Unless you mean that you need everything else to be top-end or it will look bad in comparison to the nearly-two-thousand-Euro card?

[665b10c96ee6eRocketMan]

I have dual R9 270X and didn't want to upgrade every again so I resigned myself to being stuck playing old games.  Are you saying this is good enough for current/future games?

[665b10c96f223Pacmikey]

RocketManProbably not. That card is nearly a decade old, you'll want something 2016-onward if you want to play future games. Current games should be fine though. (if you are okay with less than 1080p, and have a decent cpu and wam)

DLSS/FSR have retroactively made older GPU's more powerful, depending on how far devs go you could hypothetically keep going on that card.

The main factor is VRAM, so long as you have 6 GB or more, you are good.

Basically, 8th gen consoles established the vague baseline of hardware for the foreseeable future. They were kinda under powered but they can still keep up, even if barely, 9 years later.

[665b10c96f5f2fox]

Not in my case, my CPU is fairly recent, I mostly just need more RAM.

Unless you mean that you need everything else to be top-end or it will look bad in comparison to the nearly-two-thousand-Euro card?

Well, in my case (still on a 1070 and i7-6700K), I'll at least need a stronger PSU, a new CPU, a new motherboard to support it, more RAM and a bigger case. That's basically a whole new system. I wouldn't want to bottleneck those cards with over-compromising on the CPU und RAM-front anyway. I was already set on upgrading to a 3080 when it was announced. Than all the supply issues hit and I soon decided to sit that generation out entirely. Slowly starting to feel some limitations with my current rig (on an ultra-wide monitor, no less) but it still works quite well with most things, actually. At the same time, I'm not gaming as much as I used to anymore so I'm still debating with myself to wait out the next 23 months as well. Once the 50xx arrive, a 4090 might become a little more affordable. Maybe. Or not worth it anymore. Would have saved me quite a bit of money either way.

[665b10c96f7afvoodoo47]

*laughs at new gpu prices in HD4770, which still runs SS2 no problem*

[665b10c96fa87Chandlermaki]

*laughs at new gpu prices in HD4770, which still runs SS2 no problem*

I have my old Athlon X2/8800GTS machine around specifically for the occasional drunken SS2 coop session. I’m pretty sure the only reason the GPU lasted that long is because of the lack of actual stress.