6mo ago

Gamers Are Reportedly Skipping GPU Upgrades Due to Soaring Prices — Paying Bills Takes Priority Over Chasing NVIDIA’s RTX 5090

wccftech.com Gamers Are Reportedly Skipping GPU Upgrades Due to Soaring Prices — Paying Bills Takes Priority Over Chasing NVIDIA's RTX 5090

It seems like gamers have finally realized that the newest GPUs by NVIDIA and AMD are getting out of reach.

Well I am shocked, SHOCKED I say! Well, not that shocked.

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It seems like gamers have finally realized that the newest GPUs by NVIDIA and AMD are getting out of reach, as a new survey shows that many of them are skipping upgrades this year.
Data on GPU shipments and/or POS sales showing a decline would be much more reliable than a survey.
Surveys can at times suffer from showing what the respondents want to reply as opposed to what they do.
- I mean, as written the headline statement is always true.
  I am horrified by some of the other takeaways, though:
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  Nearly 3 in 4 gamers (73%) would choose NVIDIA if all GPU brands performed equally. 57% of gamers have been blocked from buying a GPU due to price hikes or scalping, and 43% have delayed or canceled purchases due to other life expenses like rent and bills. Over 1 in 4 gamers (25%) say $500 is their maximum budget for a GPU today. Nearly 2 in 3 gamers (62%) would switch to cloud gaming full-time if latency were eliminated, and 42% would skip future GPU upgrades entirely if AI upscaling or cloud services met their performance needs.
  
  if latency were eliminated
  I'm sure we'd all switch to room temperature fusion for power if we could, too, or use superconductors in our electronics.
  
  That's the problem with surveys, isn't it? What's "latency being eliminated"? On principle it'd be your streamed game responds as quickly as a local game, which is entirely achievable if your target is running a 30fps client on a handheld device versus streaming 60 fps gameplay from a much more powerful server. We can do that now.
  But is that "latency free" if you're comparing it to running something at 240Hz in your gaming PC? With our without frame generation and upscaling? 120 Hz raw? 60Hz on console?
  The question isn't can you get latency free, the question is at what point in that chain does the average survey-anwering gamer start believing the hype about "latency free streaming"?
  Which is irrelevant to me, because the real problem with cloud gaming has zero to do with latency.
  
  That last one is especially horrifying. You don't own games when you cloud game, you simply lease them. We all know what that's done for the preservation of games. Not to mention encouraging the massive amounts of shovel ware that we get flooded with.
  
  You don't own games when you cloud game, you simply lease them.
  That's also how it is with a game you purchased to play on your own PC, though. Unless you have it on physical media, your access could be revoked at any time.
  
  I don't know that cloud gaming moves shovelware in either direction, but it really sucks to see the percentage of people that don't factor ownership into the process at all, at least on paper.
- It really depends if they hired a professional cognitive psychologist to write the survey for them. I doubt they did...

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