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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't help that crypto and then AI back to back killing the consumer GPU market. A lot of people want to buy GPUs to play games but basically they are priced out by the enterprise market.

The GTX 1080 MSRP was $599 in 2016, the RTX 4080 launched $1199 this year.

Much easier to recommend a console nowadays than years ago, even with for example Sony increasing the PS5 price after launch

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The vast majority of PC sales aren't desktops, let alone anything with a discrete GPU [1]. The AI craze boosting GPU prices to the moon has very little to do with this.

[1] https://windowsreport.com/desktop-vs-laptop-market-share/

It always surprises me that laptops maintained such as large market share over desktops. I'd have thought that as PCs became more of a niche, power user tool (a lot of people only use smartphones these days), desktops would prevail.

Many power users travel often and it's nice to take your computer with you. If the top of the line laptop is powerful enough for your use, then it's a great choice. Power users compute is often in the cloud anyway, so having a powerful home machine is not always useful.

Nobody under the age of 50 can afford to own their own home, which means they are much more likely to be in a small or shared living situation and cannot justify having a desk separate from the table they cook and eat at.

Even people above 50s, see housing crysis in many European countries.

I've noticed that a lot of people hardly know what a desktop PC is anymore. Every PC they use at work is a laptop, and if they buy a PC for themselves it's a laptop. Most people, when they imagine "Computer" -- a laptop flashes in their mind.

The only people who are familiar at all with desktop PCs are gamers. That's why every consumer desktop PC component is called "Stryker Ice Wraith Elite"

Anyone at work who still uses the desktop form factor is a creative person (they use a Mac Studio) or a workstation tower from Dell/Lenovo or similar.

Why are you comparing the pricing of an RTX 4080 with a console?

From my experience an RX 6650 XT provides me with a similar experience, and I picked that up for £200.

With a Ryzen 5600x from £120 stuck in an Era ITX, it's just a shame that we don't have prebuild Steam Machines like this. That's the only reason I would recommend a console, prebuilts.

Otherwise I'm able to play games that are otherwise only able to be played on one console brand or the other. That's a massive savings.

> The GTX 1080 MSRP was $599 in 2016, the RTX 4080 launched $1199 this year.

Nvidia shifted their entire product stack up in the 4000 series - the 4080 should be badged as a 4070.

That wave is gone, previous gen of GPU's are sold very cheaply.

You don’t need an RTX 4080. The 2080 mobile gpu in my laptop is plenty strong to play pretty much anything on the max settings + ray tracing.

I believed you until you mentioned, specifically, "max settings" and that is flat out not accurate with the games released in the past couple of years.

It is accurate for the vast majority of games. There are very few games that actually ask for more. And most of the games that do are trashy AAA games imo.

Edit: maybe more helpful. The highest end recent games I’ve played without any issues at max include Resident evil 4 remake and remnant 2 off the top of my head.

And ray tracing on top of that, on a mobile GPU with low power budget. No way. Well maybe if the screen is 720p.

At 1080p right? Not at 1440p or 2160p

Depends on the game I guess. I don’t really care. I find resolution greater than 1080 to be invisible once you’re actually playing a game or watching a show.

DLSS upscaling tends not to work well on my laptop but I also think caring about that is dumb

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