Thing is: there is always the "next better thing" around the corner. That's what progress is about. The only thing you can do is choose the best available option for you when you need new hardware and be done with it until you need another upgrade.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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Exactly. The best time to buy a graphics card is never
really my rule of thumb has always been when it's a significant upgrade.
for a long time i didn't really upgrade until it was a 4x increase over my old. certain exceptions were occasionally made. nowadays i'm a bit more opportunistic in my upgrades. but i still seek out 'meaningful' upgrades. upgrades that are a decent jump over the old. typically 50% improvement in performance, or upgrades i can get for really cheap.
4x…? Even in older cards that’s more than a decade between cards.
A 4080 is only 2.5x as powerful as a 1080ti, those are 5 years apart.
What's wrong with upgrading once every 5-10 years? Not everyone plays the latest games on 4k Ultra
Admittedly 4x is a bit steep, more like 3-4x
Starfield requires a minimum 1070ti to play. It’s not just about fidelity, you just wouldn’t be able to play any newer games.
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Yeah it's always that: "I want to buy the new shiny thing! But it's expensive, so I'll wait for a while for its price to come down." You wait for a while, the price comes down, you buy the new shiny thing and then comes out the newest shiny thing.
Yep. There will always be "just wait N months and there will be the bestest thing that beats the old bestest thing". You are guaranteed to get buyers remorse when shopping for hardware. Just buy what best suits you or needs and budget at the time you decided is the best.time for you (or at the time your old component bites the dust) and then stop looking at any development on those components for at least a year. Just ignore any deals, new releases, whatever and be happy with the component you bought.
I bought a 1080 for my last PC build, downloaded the driver installer and ran the setup. There were ads in the setup for the 2k series that had launched the day before. FML
Yep. I bought a 4080 just a few weeks ago. Now there is ads for the refresh all over... Thing is: you card didn't get any worse. You thought the card was a good value proposition for you when you bought it and it hasn't lost any of that.
choose the best available option
"The" point. Which is the best available option?
The simplest answer would be "price per fps".
Not always. I'm doing a lot of rendering and such. So FPS aren't my primary concern.
All three cards are rumored to come with the same memory configuration as their base models...
Sigh.
i saw a 4080 on amazon for 1200, shits crazy
Or ever.
just 10-15 years at least, for smartphones\electronics overall too. Process nodes are now harder to reduce, more than ever. holding up to my 12nm ccp phone like there is no tomorrow ..
Major refresh means what nowadays? 7 instead of 4 percent gains compared to the previous generation?
The article speculates a 5% gain for the 4080 super but a 22% gain for the 4070 super which makes sense because the base 4070 was really disappointing compared to the 3070.
Will the price be the same or up to 22% more expensive?
You’ll pay 30% more for the honor of owning a 4 series
For anything ML related, having the additional memory is worth the investment, as it allows for larger models.
That said, at these prices it raises the question if it is more sensible to just throw money at GCP or AWS for their GPU node time.
As a Linux gamer, this really wasn't on the cards anyway
AMD is a better decision, but my nVidia works great with Linux, but I'm on OpenSUSE and nVidia hosts their own OpenSUSE drivers so it works out of the get go once you add the nVidia repo
I had an nvidia 660 GT back in 2013, it was a pain in the arse being on a leading edge distro, used to break xorg for a couple of months every time there was an xorg release (which admittedly are really rare these days since its in sunset mode). Buying an amd was the best hardware decision, no hassles and I've been on Wayland since Fedora 35.
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freezes
stands there with my credit card in my hand while the cashier stares at me awkwardly
Only slightly related question: is there such a thing as an external nVidia GPU for AI models? I know I can rent cloud GPUs but I am wondering if long-term something like an external GPU might be worth it.
A 3090 (used) is the best bang for your buck for any LLM / StableDiffusion work right now. I've seen external GPU enclosures, though they probably cost as much as slapping a used 3090 into a barebones rig and running it headless in a closet.
Generally speaking, buying outright is always cheaper than renting, because you can always continue to run the device potentially for years, or sell it to reclaim some capital.
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