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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

I got into desktop gaming at the 970 and the common wisdom (to me at least, maybe I was silly) was I could get away with a lower wattage power supply and use it in future generations cause everything would keep getting more efficient. Hah...

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For the curious what I actually did was stop gaming and haven't bought a GPU since 2000's! GPU stuff is still interesting to me, though.

I stopped playing a lot of games post-2010/2014 or so.

Lots of games that are fine on Intel Integrated graphics out there.

I went from 970 to 3070 and it now draws less power on average. I can even lower the max power to 50% and not notice a difference for most games that I play.

Yeah, do like me, I lower settings from "ultra hardcore" to "high" and keep living fine on a 3060 at 1440p for another few gens.

I'm not buying GPUs that expensive nor energy consuming, no chance.

In any case I think Maxwell/Pascal efficiency won't be seen anymore, with those RT cores you get more energy draw, can't get around that.

I feel similarly; I just picked up a second hand 6600 XT (similar performance to 3060) and I feel like it would be a while before I'd be tempted to upgrade, and certainly not for $500+, much less thousands.

8Gb VRAM isn't enough for newer games though.

I'm generally a 1080p@60hz gamer and my 3060 Ti is overpowered for a lot of the games I play. However, there are an increasing number of titles being released over the past couple of years where even on medium settings the card struggles to keep a consistent 60 fps frame rate.

I've wanted to upgrade but overall I'm more concerned about power consumption than raw total performance and each successive generation of GPUs from nVidia seems to be going the wrong direction.

I think you can get a 5060 and simply down volt it some, you'll get more or less the same performance while reducing power draw sensibly.

That's probably not going to be an option for me as I wanted to upgrade to something with 16 GB of vram. I do toy with running LLM inference and squeezing models to fit in 8 GB vram is painful. Since the 5070 non-ti has 12 GB of vram there is no hope that a 5060 would have more vram than that. So, at a minimum I'm stuck with the prospect of upgrading to a 5070 ti.

That's not the end of the world for me if I move to a 5070 ti and you are quite correct that I can downclock/undervolt to keep a handle on power consumption. The price makes it a bit of a hard pill to swallow though.

I've actually reversed my GPU buying logic from the old days. I used to buy the most powerful bleeding edge GPU I could afford. Now I buy the minimum viable one for the games I play, and only bother to upgrade if a new game requires a higher minimum viable GPU spec. Also I generally favor gameplay over graphics, which makes this strategy viable.

Yeah, that's another fact.

I upgrade GPUs then keep launching League of Legends and other games that really don't need much power :)

I thought opposite. My powersupply is just another component. I'll upgrade it as I need to. But keeping it all quiet and cool...

I built a gaming PC aiming to last 8-10 years. I spent $$$ on MO-RA3 radiator for water cooling loop.

My view:

1. a gaming PC is almost always plugged into a wall powerpoint

2. loudest voices in the market always want "MOAR POWA!!!"

1. + 2. = gaming PC will evolve until it takes up the max wattage a powerpoint can deliver.

For the future: "split system aircon" built into your gaming PC.

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