Doesn't hurt that you really don't need anything beyond it to basically play anything you'd ever want. Yes you might need to put down some settings to low on the newest games, beats having to put down the money you need for rent or food.
What makes me laugh is that it's not demonstrably faster than some cards that are three generations
older but people are paying the money to "upgrade", not realising that the performance will remain at about the same level as what they were already getting.
You just know both AMD and Nvidia could have released the 6500 and the 3050 for desktops months ago, they just don't because they will always much rather sell you the unnecessarily powerful cards first.
You're right about that. The thing is, in this case, it makes no sense because they don't even have any of those cards either.
It's also why for example Nvidia is so obsessed with Ray Tracing: it tanks performance so badly power GPUs become relevant again because otherwise well, you could just keep using the 1050 or 1650 until the 3050 comes out if it does at all, it's only when you want the fancy reflections you won't pay atention to in game anyway that you'd want to put down more than 150 bucks (300 now due to scarcity) for a GPU.
I couldn't agree more. I never understood the obsession that nVidia has with ray-tracing and I saw it for what it was, a gimmick at worst and a fancy frill at best. This GTX 1650 is similar in potency to the RX 580 and GTX 1060 cards. It makes me wonder what exactly people had before if the GTX 1650 is considered an
upgrade. My old R9 Fury was released 6½ years ago and just
annihilates the GTX 1650. Sure it uses more juice but who cares as long as the performance is there? One can play the games and one can't, it's as simple as that. People are upgrading TO a card that's blown out of the water by the card that I upgraded FROM! They're also paying MORE for the GTX 1650 than I paid for either of my R9 Furies! I swear, I can hear the theme from
The Twilight Zone playing in my head!
Also it's been said constantly already but apparently it needs to be repeated: AMD and Nvidia as the core manufacturers absolutely *can* control the situation because they *can* control who are their distributors or even sell direct to customers (Or greatly expand their direct sales channel that's already in place in the case of Nvidia for example) Sure it takes money but it doesn't means they need to avoid selling *any* allocation to miners and scalpers (And to distributors they know will sell to them direct) but pretending nobody can do anything about it is just abdicating responsibility.
Absolutely. In a situation like this, their actions have made zero sense because no matter what, they're going to sell them as fast as they can make them. On the one hand, you could keep a certain level of stock for gaming customers (limit one per customer) which would keep gamers happy and augment your brand's image in the consumer market (something that AMD USED to understand) while selling off the surplus to the miners. This kind of thing really hit AMD hard with the RX 470-580 because they let the miners buy them all up and nVidia was laughing all the way to the bank as the GTX 1060 became the card that everyone was buying. As a result, nVidia increased their already-extant lead in market presence and mindshare by a factor of at least three.
Now, to be fair to AMD, they were, at the time, absolutely desperate for money because they needed every dollar to bring Zen to market and their strategy was successful on the CPU side of things. ATi was their cash-cow for a long time because they weren't making all that much selling FX CPUs.
Feign ignorance about the blatantly obvious large scale bulk sells that distributors are pushing right now and just say "We can't control them!" when you basically control 100% of the supply of GPU chips and can cut as much as well, 100% of miner sales overnight if you wanted to: A quick example is MSI: After we found out an MSI employee was scalping their own products there shouldn't have been a single new GPU allocated to them by any of their vendors, I don't care how much money they bring in there's always going to be someone else willing to take on that allocation.
Yup. MSi has been a sleazy corporation for many years. The only motherboard that I've ever had fail on my while I was using it was, at the time, one of their FLAGSHIP models, the K9A2 Platinum:
This beauty was dead in less than 1½ years but since it only had a 1-year warranty, MSi would do NOTHING for me. I don't know about you, but if I'm a motherboard manufacturer and one of my flagship models dies that quickly, I'm embarrassed as hell and do what I can to preserve the perception of my brand lest I end up like BioStar. I told them that they'd just cost themselves far more than their cost of a single motherboard because I worked at Tiger Direct at the time and would be steering my customers AWAY from MSi products at all costs. Then I went and bought a cheap motherboard by (of all people) ECS/Elitegroup for under $50 (because this was an unexpected expense) and that thing STILL works to this day in my mother's PC:
I haven't owned anything by MSi since and I probably never will. There's just too many better choices out there for me.
What you call "annoying crybaby articles" I actually call consumer advocacy and well, journalism. If anything the articles are not frequent and not going far enough: They should be demanding AMD and Nvidia daily for comments, going undercover as bulk purchasers to publicly denounce distributors and AIB partners that sell directly to miners or known bot scalpers just to make sure none of them do any business ever again if Eth crashes.
Remember that not everyone cares about consumers, even if they are one themselves. Some people just like to worship big, wealthy corporations and think that they can do no wrong. What's ironic is that it's far more common to see a corporation that can do no right.