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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

Technology has always been deflationary. But you don't put off buying a computer because it will be cheaper next year. Nobody seems to be putting off buying GPUs despite scary depreciation and a blistering pace of new product introductions that are ever cheaper faster and better.

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only really faster and better if you don't use them for gaming, unfortunately. Upscaling and frame generation is not a better GPU, it's one with a band-aid applied to hide the fact that it actually did not get much faster.

RTX doesn't count to me either, because that's some bullcrap pushed by gpu manufacturers that requires the aformentioned upscaling and frame generation techniques to fake actually being anywhere close to what gpu manufacturers want gamers to believe.

> only really faster and better if you don't use them for gaming, unfortunately. Upscaling and frame generation is not a better GPU, it's one with a band-aid applied to hide the fact that it actually did not get much faster.

The generations gains haven’t been as great as past generations, but it’s getting silly to claim that GPUs aren’t getting faster for gaming.

Intentionally ignoring frame generation and DLSS up scaling also feels petty. Using those features to get 150-200fps at 4K is actually a very amazing experience, even if the purists turn their noses up at it.

The used GPU market is relatively good at calibrating for relative gaming performance. If new GPUs weren’t actually faster then old GPUs wouldn’t be depreciating much. Yet you can pick up 3000 series GPUs very cheaply right now (except maybe the 3090 which is prized for its large VRAM, though still cheap). Even 4000 series are getting cheap.

"Guessing what a pixel's color might be were one to actually do the work and render it" is not the same as actually rendering it. No, upscaling doesn't count.

Doing it for a whole screenful of pixels, for the majority of frames (with multi-frame generation) is even less of it.

Gamers don't buy GPUs to do rendering, they buy them to play games and make them look good; rendering is just an instrumental proxy to the actual goal of making their games look good. If RTX and DLSS are accomplishing that, who cares how it is done?

I dunno, the kiddo went from a 1650 Super to a 3060 and it's a lot nicer looking, I don't think frame gen and what not is enabled. Sure, that's up a notch on the SKU list and tons more VRAM. The 1650 Super was working with most of the games he tried, but Marvel Rivals was terrible (haven't seen him play it with the new card though)

It does help that he has a small screen and regular DPI. Seems like everyone wants to run with 4x the pixels in the same space, which needs about 4x the GPU.

Some people do put off buying cellphones and laptops when they know a new model will come out every year.

The overall trend has been the opposite though, hasn't it? People used to buy a new phone (or new laptop/etc) every couple of years because the underlying tech was improving so quickly, but now that the improvements have slowed down, they're holding onto their devices for longer.

There was an article[1] going around about that recently, and I'm sure there are more, but it's also a trend I've seen first-hand. (I don't particularly care for the article's framing, I'm just linking to it to illustrate the underlying data.)

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/23/how-device-hoarding-by-ameri...

> Some people do put off buying cellphones and laptops when they know a new model will come out every year.

Don't confuse technical deflation with the Osborne effect:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

The Osborne affect has been heavily disputed over the years - it says so in your own citation.

But at least with iPhones, there is a deflationary affect because Apple has since the 3GS in 2009, kept the old phone around and reduced the price. For instance my son wanted an iPhone 16 Plus. I told him to wait until the 17 was announced and he bought one cheaper from T-Mobile

> But you don't put off buying a computer because it will be cheaper next year.

Why not? Sounds like a pretty reasonable strategy.

> Nobody seems to be putting off buying GPUs

Many people doing exactly that.

Back when I was first started wrestling with this issue it the question was “how much faster will the daily photoshop operations be with a new computer?”

Now a new computer barely does anything faster for me.

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