The GPU market at retail is a mess right now. And the answer that “MicroCenter has the RX 9070 XT in stock every day until 3pm” is a disingenuous take that everything is ok for everyone else in the global market who CAN’t get to a MicroCenter. Anything that is in stock tends to be overpriced. RTX 5080’s are going for $2100 and up. That for a card with a $999 MSRP.
Tech Spot Ran a story today about a retailer selling cards at MSRP but only via lottery.
Lottery.
I’d laugh if I didn’t want to cry. I need a GPU. I’m trying hard to convince myself that I don’t need three. I had an RTX 4070 Super crap the bed last week. I don’t really want to replace it with another GeForce card. But good luck nabbing an RX 9070 XT. The only MicroCenter within striking distance only has the RX 7800 XT in sufficient stock that I’d be willing to get in a car and drive the 1.5 hours to get there without fear that they would be out of stock by the time I got there. At the end of the day, that might still need to be the move. The only other time things were this bad was during the pandemic. When no RTX 3000-series card could be easily obtained, I opted to go Red for the first time and got two RX 5700 XTs. It was a wondrous brief moment in time that allowed me to stave off stepping up to 3000-series cards until they were readily available at retail.
I’ve temporarily replaced the RTX 4070 Super with a Radeon RX 6700 XT. But Avowed is giving that card fits. And in my box with a RTX 3080 Ti, Monster Hunter Wilds is also making that card feel like it’s in a hallway fight with Charlie Cox’s Daredevil. In my box with an RTX 3070 Ti, which is only connected to 240Hz 1080p displays, things are copacetic. But of course if I were to upgrade the other two, I probably wouldn’t want that to be the only RTX 3000-series card loping along.
Somewhere in here I’ll make a decision. Right now trying to upgrade my Apple ecosystem to the latest M4 announcements that came out last week has me preoccupied. But anytime I have to fire up Avowed or Monster Hunter Wilds I am reminded of this itch.
Admittedly I need to do enough testing to reassure myself that this is solely a symptom of those two games not being well-optimized. I know that’s the going conventional wisdom. But I always like to reinforce that with actual metrics I take in the lab. And I just haven’t had enough time to run different performance checks; multiple games on the 6700 XT that have known good performance envelopes. And then other titles on the 3080 Ti that are recent releases in the last six months.
The thing is I do not expect this issue to be rectified until well into May / early summer. And by then we’ll be hearing about nVidia’s mid-cycle refreshes of Supers and additional Ti’s. It’s enough to make me think about just going back to 1080p gaming and not worry about 1440p. I prefer frames over res, hands down no doubt.
But another very serious consideration is to start gaming on MacOS. I have a Mac mini M4, and my MacBook Air M4 shows up tomorrow. Both should be pretty capable of gaming, no? I’ve given myself an easy checkpoint by downloading and installing Steam on the Mac mini M4 and Civilization VII. More to follow.
(Drafted on my Mac mini M4)
Rounding Off Infinity 