Back in the 80’s, Atari had a monopoly of games and charged absurd amounts of money for titles that pretty much had no quality control. The cost of each cartridge would easily go over $100 in today’s money and gamers began to pull back on purchasing anything. This eventually culminated in the infamous E.T. movie tie in that led to pallets of its unsold cartridges ending up in a landfill and crashing the industry.

Now that Nintendo’s signaled to the rest of the industry it’s okay to sell digital titles at $80 each, how soon do you see gamers collectively hold back on their purchases that will eventually collapse the AAA market? Will the current trade war play a role in the hardware side of things with the collapse? Will all major companies save Nintendo suffer the downturn?

  • Jesus_666@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    2 days ago

    Do you want a prediction? The current cost of graphic cards will crash the classic PC gaming market. There are some enthusiasts who are buying cards for thousands of dollars or building 4.000€ computers. But the majority of gamers will stay on their laptops or might go for cheaper devices like the SteamDeck. But if your game needs more power, needs a modern graphic card and a beefier PC, there are fewer and fewer people who can run it and many people can’t afford it. So devs will target lower system specs with to reach the bigger audience

    Also, there’s not as much value in high-powered GPUs right now because these days high-end graphics often mean Unreal Engine 5. UE5 is excellent for static and slow-moving graphics but has a tendency towards visible artifacts in situations where the picture and especially the camera position changes quickly (especially since it’s heavily reliant on TAA). These artifacts are largely independent of how good your GPU is.

    Unlike in previous generations, going for high-end graphics doesn’t necessarily mean you get a great visual experience – your games might look like smeary messes no matter what kind of GPU you use because that’s how modern engines work. Smeary messes with beautiful lighting, sure, but smeary messes nonetheless.

    My last GPU upgrade was from a Vega 56 to a 4080 (and then an XTX when the 4080 turned out to be a diva) and while the newer cards are nice I wouldn’t exactly call them 1000 bucks nice given that most modern games look pretty bad in motion and most older ones did 4K@60 on the Vega already. Given that I jumped three generations forward from a mid-tier product to a fairly high-end one, the actual benefit in terms of gaming was very modest.

    The fact that Nvidia are now selling fancy upscaling and frame interpolation as killer features also doesn’t inspire confidence. Picture quality in motion is already compromised; I don’t want to pay big money to compromise it even further.

    If someone asked me about what GPU to get I’d tell them to get whatever they can find for a couple hundred bucks because, quite frankly, the performance difference isn’t worth the price difference. RT is cool for a couple of days but I wouldn’t spend much on it either, not as long as the combination of TAA and upscaling will hide half of the details behind dithered motion trails and time-delayed shadows.