AMD Radeon RX 9050 8GB Review: Budget GPU, Zero Budget Value

[yRaz]

The 8060s should be faster than this when run not thermally constrained. 8060s is about a 7600, teensy bit slower but not as much as this card, pretty much a head to head with the 8060s slightly ahead. Though 388+ systems hardly exist yet and even then you won't find them with 32gb soldered for below a 1000, definitely no ai max+ is any comparison, heh. A more interesting comparison point will be if nova lake comes with a big Xe3 version for a new desktop apu hopefully without soldered ram only and more affordable.

I want to start seeing APUs with CAMM2 modules. Framework and Dell *have* them, but it seems like they're always out of stock. It also seems like CAMM2 is Intel only right now

 

[GhostLegion]

Steve, I think the review proves the RX 9050 is badly priced at $280. I'm just not convinced it proves the card itself is the technological war crime the conclusion makes it sound like.

For starters, this is a 92watt, bottom of the stack GPU. Testing it at Ultra settings is useful for comparison, but it's a strange way to define the experience of the buyer it's actually aimed at. Nobody buying a 9050 is sitting there agonizing over whether Cyberpunk's volumetric fog should be Ultra or Psycho. They're going to run 1080p medium/high, esports titles, older games, or drop it into a modest PC and get on with their lives.

And this is where “just buy the faster card” becomes a little too easy.

The RX 9060 XT 8GB is around $419 right now. That's roughly $140 more than the 9050, or about a 50% increase in purchase price. Yes, it has better cost per frame. Wonderful. A Mercedes may have better depreciation than a Kia too, but that doesn't magically put another $140 in the buyer's pocket.

Then there's Intel.

The Arc B570 is around $259 and the B580 around $349. Those are exactly the cards that make the 9050's $280 price hard to defend. The B570 undercuts it, while the B580 costs about $70 more and offers considerably more performance. That is a much more meaningful criticism of the 9050 than simply pointing at a $419 9060 XT and announcing that budget buyers should save harder.

So yes, AMD has a pricing problem here.

But “bad value at $280” and “horrible GPU that need not exist” are two rather different conclusions.

The card averaged playable 1080p performance, has 8GB of VRAM, consumes only about 92 watts, runs cool and quiet, and fills the exact sort of niche previously occupied by cards like the RX 6500 XT. None of that makes $280 a good price. It does, however, mean the silicon itself isn't the problem.

At $200-$220, we'd probably be discussing this as a perfectly reasonable low power 1080p med/high settings card.

At $280, we're sharpening pitchforks.

Apparently those extra sixty dollars don't merely alter the value proposition; they transform the GPU into an affront to civilization.

And perhaps the larger story is being missed.

When the 9050 is $280, the B570 is ~$259, the B580 is ~$349, the RTX 5050 is hovering around the same neighborhood, and stepping up to a 9060 XT 8GB costs ~$419, maybe the problem isn't that AMD somehow forgot how to manufacture a low end GPU.

Maybe the entire entry level GPU market has become absurd.

Steve's benchmarks actually demonstrate that rather well.

The editorial flamethrower afterward is optional.

Not only do I agree with you but I’d suggest we would all say it’s a decent card if it cost no more than $200 and needed no external power with an x8 interface. It would trounce the 3050 6GB I have with more VRAM. It wouldn’t have the requirement for ReBAR that Intel cards have. It would be perfect to throw into my Dell Optiplex running Linux with a i7-6700. I yearn for an AIB to turn this into a single slot LP card. I’ll gladly sell the 3050 and buy this. Wouldn’t even be a question.

 

[demonicmaniac]

I want to start seeing APUs with CAMM2 modules. Framework and Dell *have* them, but it seems like they're always out of stock. It also seems like CAMM2 is Intel only right now

The big problem is there that you cannot buy the camm modules - that's why framework had to delay their panther lake framework multiple times and only offer them with 32gb because they couldn't get any 64gb and then ask insane prices. There's no way to buy any camm2 retail and when crucial 32gb lpcamm2 were available for a month they cost 550€ for 32gb so.. yeah :/ while I do agree with you there won't be any if you can't even buy the ram at all let alone for even more than ddr5 when it's available

 

[Lew Zealand]

The video is misleading regarding power consumption, it treats the system's power consumption as if it were solely from the GPU.

This product would only be suitable for mini-ITX systems if it were a 75W card.

There's a reason for this: Nvidia's drivers offload some load to the CPU that AMD's drivers don't, so just using the GPU's power consumption doesn't tell the entire story of how much power it's use requires. The CPU also needs to be accounted for to assess the total power differences each GPU demands.

 

[jpvalverde85]

It's in no man's land, they should have capped at 75w for oems and made a 125w XT 8GB for entry gaming, and I'm not even talking about pricing...

 

[scoffer]

Basically, it's just a big "**** you" from AMD.

 

[LordVile95]

The problem with this is that the 7600 launched at a 269$ msrp - lower than this. And their newegg listing shows 300$ which is pretty much the 280$ msrp of this 9050 xt. If you want to accept that each class of gpu gets a 100$ price bump every new generation then the next lowest entry gpus will be 400 or 500 - yay. In the market it competes with the 7600 which is still available. And as it is not slot powered it also doesn't slot into any office pc without pcie power and it's also neither single slot nor low profile. Granted, on a 280w or so psu office desktop 92w is easier to make work than 150w spare but still. If this or the 4gb were slot powered and single slot I'd see an argument there - price still too high but at least an argument to be made.

Hardware costs have gone up

 

[Loadedaxe]

To my way of thinking, the whole scenario has got sweet F.A to do with the GPU manufacturers (component constraints notwithstanding). The bigger issue is why on earth these game studios are writing such computationally-intensive code in the first place.....or else why would such hyper-powerful hardware even be needed?

Damn, but I've never been so glad to be a 'retro-gamer'. The stuff that gets MY pulse racing comes from 20-25+ years ago..... Modern AAA+ titles are so yawn-inducing, it's a wonder as many people bother with 'em as they do.

Waiting for attacks from ALL sides here...!!

Miq.

I'm actually surprised nobody has touched this comment, because buried underneath the retro gamer heresy, Miq has a pretty good point.

I wouldn't let the GPU manufacturers completely off the hook. AMD, Nvidia and Intel are perfectly happy to sell us the hardware required for ray tracing, path tracing, upscaling and frame generation, and they market those features aggressively.

But there is another side of this discussion that gets remarkably little attention...

Why have we normalized games requiring dramatically more computing power without asking whether the actual gaming experience improved by anything remotely proportional?

We've gone from 1080p/60 being perfectly respectable to 1440p, 4K, 120/144 FPS, ray tracing and now path tracing becoming the benchmarks by which hardware is judged.

Then, after enabling all that computationally expensive technology, we're increasingly relying on upscaling and generated frames to recover the performance we just lost...

That's an interesting little circle.

Meanwhile, there are games from 10, 15 and 20 years ago with excellent art direction, gameplay and visual presentation that remain perfectly enjoyable today on hardware that modern reviews practically classify as hazardous waste.

And that matters to this discussion.

Who's actually buying an entry level GPU?

Is it really somebody expecting to run every brand new AAA title at 1440p Ultra with ray tracing?

Or is it more likely somebody playing esports, GTA V, Minecraft, indie games, older titles, strategy games, emulation and whatever happens to be fun rather than whatever currently makes a benchmark chart sweat?

I disagree with Miq only on laying all of this at the developers' feet. I think it's been a mutually beneficial escalation...developers have increasingly designed around abundant compute, while GPU manufacturers have been delighted to sell us more compute.

Everyone wins.

Well...everyone except the person staring at the checkout button wondering when a “budget” gaming PC became a four figure purchase.

Miq may be sitting comfortably in the retro bunker waiting for incoming fire, but I think he deserves a little cover here. He has a point.

 

[Lew Zealand]

I'm actually surprised nobody has touched this comment, because buried underneath the retro gamer heresy, Miq has a pretty good point.

I wouldn't let the GPU manufacturers completely off the hook. AMD, Nvidia and Intel are perfectly happy to sell us the hardware required for ray tracing, path tracing, upscaling and frame generation, and they market those features aggressively.

But there is another side of this discussion that gets remarkably little attention...

Why have we normalized games requiring dramatically more computing power without asking whether the actual gaming experience improved by anything remotely proportional?

We've gone from 1080p/60 being perfectly respectable to 1440p, 4K, 120/144 FPS, ray tracing and now path tracing becoming the benchmarks by which hardware is judged.

Then, after enabling all that computationally expensive technology, we're increasingly relying on upscaling and generated frames to recover the performance we just lost...

That's an interesting little circle.

Meanwhile, there are games from 10, 15 and 20 years ago with excellent art direction, gameplay and visual presentation that remain perfectly enjoyable today on hardware that modern reviews practically classify as hazardous waste.

And that matters to this discussion.

Who's actually buying an entry level GPU?

Is it really somebody expecting to run every brand new AAA title at 1440p Ultra with ray tracing?

Or is it more likely somebody playing esports, GTA V, Minecraft, indie games, older titles, strategy games, emulation and whatever happens to be fun rather than whatever currently makes a benchmark chart sweat?

I disagree with Miq only on laying all of this at the developers' feet. I think it's been a mutually beneficial escalation...developers have increasingly designed around abundant compute, while GPU manufacturers have been delighted to sell us more compute.

Everyone wins.

Well...everyone except the person staring at the checkout button wondering when a “budget” gaming PC became a four figure purchase.

Miq may be sitting comfortably in the retro bunker waiting for incoming fire, but I think he deserves a little cover here. He has a point.

You don't even need to play retro as I mostly play indie titles though I have a backlog of great older games from the mid to late teens, is that retro yet? I'm slowly plodding through those but on occasion I want to play Horizon Forbidden West and that game looks good and benefits from modern GPU power. So my RX 5600 XT will handle almost everything no problem but really H:FW needs a bit more like a 9600 XT or 5070.

And the reason I've upgraded my GPU in the past (a 1060 to a 1080 and a 3070 to the 5070) was precisely the type of game you're decrying here. Unoptimized and poorly coded for the visuals it delivers: Ark:SE and later Ark:SA. I'm finally over those games but the trash performance in both games drove both upgrades. Well at least I ended up prepared for other games as a result and didn't break the bank with either GPU.

 

[RaXelliX]

The fact that this card and the RTX 5050 are basically on par with a 3060 12GB just goes to show how shitty both AMD and Nvidia have done the bottom tier GPUs over the past two generations.

On par?

Did we watch different reviews?
I see it constantly trailing 3060 with several card between them. It cant even match A770, let alone 3060. Not to mention that the tested 3060 is the 12GB version that is superior to 8GB 9050.

 

[MiqWalsh]

@Loadedaxe :-

Heh. Well, thanks for the, er, "vote of confidence", I guess. Appreciated!

I'm surprised I hadn't been "shot down" before now. I really don't fit the usual 'gamer' profile, not by a LONG chalk, no sirree.

Most of my time is occupied with looking after my elderly Mama, God bless 'er. At 93, she's still as sharp as a tack, though the body is sadly letting her down.

I have days when I don't have a minute to call my own. Other days - the 'good' ones - I'm often twiddling my thumbs, wondering what to do with myself.....and it's on days like these I may occasionally play the odd game. It's never been a big part of my life; God knows, I've always had more than enough stuff to keep me fully occupied, though now I'm the wrong side of 60, I feel my age more often than not!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I've always bought "off-the-peg" hardware; for years, I simply accepted the limitations, though luckily I've never been in a job where I actually needed to use a PC. Now, THAT takes some believing, doesn't it?

I only got into the "techie" side of things around 12, perhaps 13 years ago. I've always taken the route of upgrading that "off-the-peg" hardware to within an inch of its life, just to see how far I CAN push it. For me, this stuff has never been more than a 'hobby', TBH.....but that's ALL it is. So I'm happy messing around with gear that's far from cutting-edge, just for the hell of it. Keeps me occupied, and keeps me out of mischief.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My first introduction to 'gaming' of any sort came in the mid-to-late 90s. A mate of mine, who lived in Harlow, in Essex - one of the 'new' towns to the north of London, that were built here in the UK after the war, mainly to house all the displaced individuals when so much of London got flattened in 'the Blitz' - used to spend all his time messing around with stuff like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, things like that. Whenever I used to visit, he was always on his PS1. Never saw him off it!

Really, I only started playing the odd title, here and there, just a few years ago. Being a Linuxian, I practically qualify as an 'untouchable', anyway.....but I was frankly amazed at the sheer amount of good-quality, free-to-use (and fun-to-play) indie stuff there is out there. I often wonder why more folks on sites like Techspot don't avail themselves of these games, 'cos there are some real gems out there. All ya gotta do is dig a little. They're not hard to find. And they're darned good fun.

Current hardware? Nowt special. A refurb'd Core i7-8700; 32 GB DDR4....and an Inno3d GeForce GT 1030. Crap, ain't it? <lololol> But for what I do with my system - and what games I do play - it's more than sufficient.

As you've no doubt noticed, I don't tend to post here very often. I usually only bother when I feel I have summat worth saying.

Still, there ya go. That's me in a nutshell. Old tech, and indie games. I'm content with my lot.....and just how many of us can say that, AND really mean it?


Miq.

 

[Loadedaxe]

@Loadedaxe :-

Heh. Well, thanks for the, er, "vote of confidence", I guess. Appreciated!

I'm surprised I hadn't been "shot down" before now. I really don't fit the usual 'gamer' profile, not by a LONG chalk, no sirree.

Most of my time is occupied with looking after my elderly Mama, God bless 'er. At 93, she's still as sharp as a tack, though the body is sadly letting her down.

I have days when I don't have a minute to call my own. Other days - the 'good' ones - I'm often twiddling my thumbs, wondering what to do with myself.....and it's on days like these I may occasionally play the odd game. It's never been a big part of my life; God knows, I've always had more than enough stuff to keep me fully occupied, though now I'm the wrong side of 60, I feel my age more often than not!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I've always bought "off-the-peg" hardware; for years, I simply accepted the limitations, though luckily I've never been in a job where I actually needed to use a PC. Now, THAT takes some believing, doesn't it?

I only got into the "techie" side of things around 12, perhaps 13 years ago. I've always taken the route of upgrading that "off-the-peg" hardware to within an inch of its life, just to see how far I CAN push it. For me, this stuff has never been more than a 'hobby', TBH.....but that's ALL it is. So I'm happy messing around with gear that's far from cutting-edge, just for the hell of it. Keeps me occupied, and keeps me out of mischief.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My first introduction to 'gaming' of any sort came in the mid-to-late 90s. A mate of mine, who lived in Harlow, in Essex - one of the 'new' towns to the north of London, that were built here in the UK after the war, mainly to house all the displaced individuals when so much of London got flattened in 'the Blitz' - used to spend all his time messing around with stuff like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, things like that. Whenever I used to visit, he was always on his PS1. Never saw him off it!

Really, I only started playing the odd title, here and there, just a few years ago. Being a Linuxian, I practically qualify as an 'untouchable', anyway.....but I was frankly amazed at the sheer amount of good-quality, free-to-use (and fun-to-play) indie stuff there is out there. I often wonder why more folks on sites like Techspot don't avail themselves of these games, 'cos there are some real gems out there. All ya gotta do is dig a little. They're not hard to find. And they're darned good fun.

Current hardware? Nowt special. A refurb'd Core i7-8700; 32 GB DDR4....and an Inno3d GeForce GT 1030. Crap, ain't it? <lololol> But for what I do with my system - and what games I do play - it's more than sufficient.

As you've no doubt noticed, I don't tend to post here very often. I usually only bother when I feel I have summat worth saying.

Still, there ya go. That's me in a nutshell. Old tech, and indie games. I'm content with my lot.....and just how many of us can say that, AND really mean it?


Miq.

Miq, I think that last line probably explains why your post stood out to me in the first place.

I'm in much the same boat these days.

I tried the newer hardware route and eventually realized that, for what I actually do outside of work, most of it simply wasn't worth chasing and sold it.

My job requires Apple hardware, so my M4 Mac Mini does the heavy lifting when I need it to. For personal use, though, I don't really dabble in many new games anymore. Most of them lose me somewhere between the shiny reflections, the enormous install size and the realization that the gameplay underneath it all isn't doing much for me.

Give me GTA V, StarCraft II and WoW Classic and I'm perfectly happy.

I've even got an old retro PC with Win 98SE specifically for the nostalgia stuff. Battlefield 1942, Battlezone, the original StarCraft, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans...every now and then it's fun to go back and remind yourself that a game didn't need path tracing and a 200GB install to keep you glued to the screen.

My great modern "beast" isn't exactly frightening anyone either... i7-10700, GTX 1660 Super and a first-generation SK Hynix NVMe drive that, somewhat amazingly, still runs like a champ.

And you know what?

It plays SC2, WoW Classic and GTA V perfectly.

So what exactly am I supposed to upgrade for?

That's the bit I think gets lost in these discussions. We spend so much time talking about what hardware can no longer do that we forget to ask whether the owner actually wants to do any of those things in the first place.

If your GT 1030 plays the games you enjoy, then it isn't "crap." It's doing its job.

Same with my 1660 Super.

Neither one is winning a benchmark chart in 2026, but neither one has apparently been informed that it's obsolete yet.

And I have to agree with you about the indie side of things too. There's a huge amount of genuinely fun stuff out there that doesn't require a small power station or a second mortgage to run.

More importantly, good on you for looking after your Mama. At 93 and still sharp as a tack, I'd say she's doing pretty damn well.

Hardware is a hobby.

Family is the real stuff.

And being genuinely content with what you already have may be the one upgrade the industry has absolutely no interest in selling us.

 

[Neatfeatguy]

On par?

Did we watch different reviews?
I see it constantly trailing 3060 with several card between them. It cant even match A770, let alone 3060. Not to mention that the tested 3060 is the 12GB version that is superior to 8GB 9050.

5050 generally comes out just ahead and the 9050 just behind - they're pretty much on par with the 3060. Sometimes ahead, sometimes behind. In the end, you've pretty much gone 2 generations forward from the 3060 and you have two bottom tier cards that pretty much match it's performance.

Hench why I said:

just goes to show how shitty both AMD and Nvidia have done the bottom tier GPUs over the past two generations.

Meaning, they haven't done anything remotely useful on the low-end of GPUs since they cannot do any better than the 3060 that came out over 5 years ago.

 

[BSim500]

Why have we normalized games requiring dramatically more computing power without asking whether the actual gaming experience improved by anything remotely proportional?

Exactly. Half the Stutter Engine 5 slop I've seen doesn't even look any better than 10 year old Indie Walking Simulators (that run 1440p / 120fps on an RTX 4060). They all just seem to run 4-8x slower with nothing to show for it, even with Fake Frames (tm). Take upscaling away and the illusion of "progress" falls apart completely, stretching back almost a decade.

Personally I grabbed a cheap RTX 4060 last year and it's running every actually enjoyable AAA game I want to play from the mid 2010's (eg, Prey, Talos Principle, Alien Isolation, etc) all at 1440p & 120fps silky smooth, using barely 2/3rds of the 8GB VRAM. Early 2010's stuff (Bioshocks, Skyrim, etc) and older gets bumped to 4k @ 120fps. If new games can't even hit 1080p / 60fps on anything short of an £800 GPU (yet still look a blurry mess because UE5's forced-on TAA), that's no longer a hardware problem, that's a software problem. I'm long done with the mindless PCMR rat-race, as well as the gaslighting from tech reviewers and 'influencers' pushing the "either you pay 4-digits for a GPU and play only the newest & worst optimised AAA's, or gaming is dead / e-waste / sand" drivel, usually accompanied with silly pulled faces clickbaity Youtube thumbnails...

As someone who's been PC gaming since my first 286 + EGA graphics card in the mid 1980's, the most important lesson learned is "Buy for your own needs, not for someone else's FOMO / the industry's laziness". Because as you get older you will absolutely find the most interesting / fun / creative games rarely overlaps with "what's new". And even Techspot reported on that last year that's no longer a minority viewpoint but is now quite mainstream.

 

[Loadedaxe]

Exactly. Half the Stutter Engine 5 slop I've seen doesn't even look any better than 10 year old Indie Walking Simulators (that run 1440p / 120fps on an RTX 4060). They all just seem to run 4-8x slower with nothing to show for it, even with Fake Frames (tm). Take upscaling away and the illusion of "progress" falls apart completely, stretching back almost a decade.

Personally I grabbed a cheap RTX 4060 last year and it's running every actually enjoyable AAA game I want to play from the mid 2010's (eg, Prey, Talos Principle, Alien Isolation, etc) all at 1440p & 120fps silky smooth, using barely 2/3rds of the 8GB VRAM. Early 2010's stuff (Bioshocks, Skyrim, etc) and older gets bumped to 4k @ 120fps. If new games can't even hit 1080p / 60fps on anything short of an £800 GPU (yet still look a blurry mess because UE5's forced-on TAA), that's no longer a hardware problem, that's a software problem. I'm long done with the mindless PCMR rat-race, as well as the gaslighting from tech reviewers and 'influencers' pushing the "either you pay 4-digits for a GPU and play only the newest & worst optimised AAA's, or gaming is dead / e-waste / sand" drivel, usually accompanied with silly pulled faces clickbaity Youtube thumbnails...

As someone who's been PC gaming since my first 286 + EGA graphics card in the mid 1980's, the most important lesson learned is "Buy for your own needs, not for someone else's FOMO / the industry's laziness". Because as you get older you will absolutely find the most interesting / fun / creative games rarely overlaps with "what's new". And even Techspot reported on that last year that's no longer a minority viewpoint but is now quite mainstream.

That is a great way of putting it, and I think your last line is probably the part more people should pay attention to...Buy for your own needs, not someone else's FOMO.

That's really what this whole discussion comes down to.

If your RTX 4060 runs the games you actually enjoy at 1440p/120 or even 4K/120, then it isn't "obsolete," "e-waste," or somehow inadequate because the newest AAA release needs upscaling and frame generation just to stay upright.

The Steam playtime numbers make your point even stronger. Most people aren't spending all their time chasing the newest release anyway. A huge amount of PC gaming is still happening on games that are years old.

I do think some newer engines are genuinely doing more under the hood than older ones, so I wouldn't blame every performance problem on lazy developers. But when the hardware requirement goes up several times over and the player is sitting there wondering where the visual improvement actually went, that's a perfectly reasonable criticism.

And that circles right back to this review....

The 9050 may be poor value at its expected price, but judging a low end GPU almost entirely by how it handles the newest, heaviest AAA titles at aggressive settings only tells us part of the story.

For somebody playing older AAA games, esports, indies, emulation, or simply games they actually enjoy, even modest modern hardware can provide an excellent experience for years.

Funny how "buy what you need" somehow became controversial advice in PC gaming. Pricing is crazy, but I digress.

Apparently the approved alternative is to sell your right arm, your left kidney, and perhaps a lightly used spleen every year or two so you can keep up with whatever new piece of hardware the Internet has declared absolutely essential this week.

 

[Loadedaxe]

Basically, it's just a big "**** you" from AMD.

Ah yes, the devastating technical analysis...“Basically, it's just a big **** you from AMD.”

Well, that certainly saves everyone the inconvenience of having to discuss performance, pricing, power draw, market positioning, competing products, or who the card is actually intended for.

For those of us still foolish enough to enjoy numbers, the problem appears slightly more complicated.

At roughly $280-$300, the RX 9050 looks poorly positioned. The B570 is around $259, the B580 around $349, and moving up to an RX 9060 XT 8GB is roughly $419.

That gives us an actual discussion about value.

It does not, however, demonstrate that AMD engineers gathered around a conference table, twirled their mustaches and said, “How might we personally insult scoffer from TechSpot today?”

Sometimes a badly priced product is simply a badly priced product.

No corporate profanity required.

Although I admit, “**** you” is considerably easier to type than “the current entry level GPU market has become structurally unattractive for budget buyers.”

Less informative, certainly.

But wonderfully efficient.

 

[GhostLegion]

Quite a bit of ink has been spilled now on the rather unimpressive state of modern gaming. Here’s some more.

The high end stuff bores me. It’s not impressive to do what Intel and NVIDIA have done and just crank up the power draw to push more frames and higher settings. Yes, the 5090 is the current pinnacle of (generously using the term) consumer/prosumer hardware. Who cares when a high end system can and will pull enough power to max out an entire circuit for an American house. That’s stupid. Doubly so when your hobby has almost burned people’s houses down because your 90 class card has a stupidly designed power connector. I hear rumors about a 50+ core product in Nova Lake. It’ll draw some bananas power figure. Who asked for this? Who needs this? Name me a game that can use all that. You’d need to have a stupid amount of background tasks to make use of all that and really…you can just close your web browser, etc.

That’s before getting into pricing. This is a hobby and these are toys. Charge $16K for a data center GPU and I don’t really care. It’s a business expense and the price for business stuff has and always will be excessive. Maybe I’d change my tune if the 5090 cost less than $1K at MSRP but it doesn’t. It’s silly when the “mainstream” 60 class cards approach $500. Inflation has been bad but not that bad. $500 is still a chunk of change for most anybody.

I agree with Steve that budget gamers are getting screwed here. $280 is excessive for this. It should cost no more than $200 and really ought to be sold for $150 MSRP. If the fixed costs for a card don’t allow that…oh well. I’m looking forward to a future where APUs eat entry level discrete cards for lunch. We are getting there on laptop. If RAMeggedon hadn’t screwed pricing up, Panther Lake would be far more affordable and people could snatch them up next year at clearance prices for around $500 and have a decent gaming laptop even if it isn’t marketed as such.

I regularly did that before. Much like Miq I find more enjoyment in abusing hardware into performing minor miracles, milking every last inch of performance from undervolts, overclocks, cooling mods, etc. It just isn’t very clever to improve performance by throwing money/power at the issue.

Games themselves look great! I love the idea of ray tracing and I look forward to it being USABLE on modest hardware. When something like the 9050 can do ray tracing at 1080P/60FPS with no upscaling or framegen. Until then, I’m checked out. I just got a used 2080ti for my SIL to replace her 1080. At $250 it wasn’t a bad buy, especially since it’s about as powerful as a 5060, plus more VRAM.

I play older games and new indie titles because I detest the insanity of modern gaming. It’s infected everything. Movies won’t get made if they aren’t blockbusters. It’s not enough to turn a small profit, it must be huge. It must be an ongoing, recurring revenue stream. It’s also incredibly unrealistic. My attention span is a zero sum thing. If I’m playing one game I can’t be playing a different one at the same time. They can’t all be live service games.

I’m tired boss. I’m just looking to have some fun on the cheap.

 

[MiqWalsh]

@GhostLegion :-

Heh. Nice to see others agree with me. I'm well aware I've probably turned the usual "discussion" content on its head in this thread, but.....I just felt the actual 'human' side of things, individuals' own experiences AND how they, too, view the insanity of the whole, current tech 'scene' was worth exploring a bit further.

Yes, it's hardware, and yes, for most it's just a hobby. But to imply that folks really OUGHT to take out a second mortgage for hardware that's getting harder to justify on its own merits is, I feel, at best disingenuous.....and at bottom just greed. Pure & simple.

I’m tired boss. I’m just looking to have some fun on the cheap.

With ya there, bud. I've been doing just that for years. I couldn't care less if my hardware is a few generations 'out-of-date'. Not if it does what I want, and still runs OK.

Not all of us are rolling in spare income. And not all, by a long chalk, are only interested in "bragging rights".

It’s not enough to turn a small profit, it must be huge. It must be an ongoing, recurring revenue stream. It’s also incredibly unrealistic.

Jee-zus. DON'T get me started.

My old man ran his own animal feed supply business for decades. He was perfectly content to turn a 'reasonable' small, steady profit, so long as it covered the overheads & provided a decent standard of living. We weren't what you'd call rich, but we never went hungry, or went around in threadbare hand-me-downs.

Where on earth did the current "Expand or die" business motto come from? Who coined that, and started 'pushing' it as gospel? And how many small businesses get terminated before they even get a chance to make a name for themselves, simply because they don't fulfil the bank's expectations ('cos the banking industry is infected with the same mindset)?

It's not just 'gaming', or even the tech industry. Life itself is becoming insane, man.

<Mini-rant over!>


Miq.

 

[Rudyduu]

I hate it when you guys turn the settings all the way up on a budget card. People likely want to know can the card play games at settings that will give it decent frame rates. Yes the card sucks, but if its the only option available to someone for whatever reason it would be nice to know if it's viable at all.

 

[WhiteLeaff]

There's a reason for this: Nvidia's drivers offload some load to the CPU that AMD's drivers don't, so just using the GPU's power consumption doesn't tell the entire story of how much power it's use requires. The CPU also needs to be accounted for to assess the total power differences each GPU demands.

No. In the video, he refers to that information when he clearly states that AMD couldn't make a 75W version because of that total system power consumption. The product is terrible, but that point is just a narrative.