PC Gaming

It's not manufactured scarcity, it's just scarcity that the market can't (or won't risk) reacting to quickly.

It costs hundreds of billions and multiple years to build out the capacity to make these chips at scale, and decades to earn back that investment on each plant. If the companies think it's going to be a short term thing, they won't build enough new plants because that would risk being over-supplied and not being able to recoup the investment. If they think it's going to be a long term thing, they will start building. They are clearly building some new capacity, so they must think it's not entirely a short term thing. However, they won't build as much as possible, because that risks oversupplying if too much gets built and the demand shifts.

LLMs could shift to an entirely new tech that doesn't rely on these chips in 5 years, and then they'd be fucked.

All it takes is one crazy ass dude or dudette to build out a more efficient biological processor or something and then we're all going to be growing AI brains in jars to do our work for us.

Yeah, they're not eBay scalpers. The cost to make a product doesn't go up because more people want it. This is straight up cartel behavior and a sane government wouldn't allow it.

Honestly, as a silver lining, this is likely to finally make studios pull back from graphics being the end all be all, and instead focus a bit more on art styles that run well on weaker hardware.

The endless pursuit of graphics has had drastically diminishing returns since the PS3, it's about time the industry focused on optimization and doing more with less for once.

It'll let our hardware stay relevant, and it's better for the environment if we make it last as long as possible anyway :)

Down with consumption, and bring on the age of Permacomputing, I say!

cut the doomerism, Chinese chipsets are half the price of american ones, just be patent my friend, the silk road will deliver....

Learn to use ebay and enjoy the used discounts, dude. It's such a refresher.

There will always be businesses liquidating inventory, cryptominers dumping their cards, and average joes hoping that they can sell their old PC rather than recycling it. It sucks that most of the stuff will not be new, yeah, but you can still get powerful hardware at an affordable price.

bc-250 builds are pretty cool!

tech hobbyists are unkillable as cockroaches. if we all get priced out of new parts, we’ll build our computers with e-waste.

It is ok. No one is going to make games for a gaming PC anyway.

if its like a boil, then not yet, it will grow into carbuncle/furuncle before it burst, and not before it spreads first.

No, Elon still wants to generate pictures of naked kids.

Unfortunately signs point to "no"

Yeah and also not just PC/PC components either. Anything that's electronic, uses copper, uses a PCB, all of it's being sucked up by AI and driving prices of everything up.

I mean you're right but for the wrong reasons lol. A laptop contains a gpu, too still. But other components are up also, especially ram and storage.

Unfortunately it's a good card for local AI use so people do actually prefer that card and are buying a lot of them. If they're running a business with it they'll keep buying... :(

I started playing around with local AI just for fun running off my 5080 and in learning about it like 26362826472985 YouTube videos are just business hustle bros spouting off about their fully AI run Instagram hustle or whatever...

I was able to get 16GB of DDR3 SODIMM for $50 recently, so old laptops are still affordable to upgrade at least… 🥴

Its not fixed if we keep raising it!

So true. I'm never getting a new high end GPU again. They're like 10k it's impossible now