Idiotic tariffs, indifferent retailers, depraved flippers and AI mania are making the simple act of buying a graphics card the defining misery of PC gaming in 2025.
if you have been waiting since 2016, why do you want an 5080, though? 2-3 gens earlier will be a large improvement too, with half or even lower a price.
I did the same, but with AMD. I’m going Linux, and everything is good except nvidia’s utterly broken drivers. I mean, they always improve, today it’s usable if you don’t want to sleep/hibernate your PC, if you are sure you won’t run out of video memory (nvidia drivers are the only one in linux that can’t transfer some memory to system ram when it’s really needed), if you don’t need gamescope, and so on…
I expanded elsewhere in this post, but basically it’s a combination of:
I do own a laptop I bought in the pandemic which has a 2070 mobile GPU, and between that and my PS5, I am not truly in a rush.
Older hardware is also being price gouged. If I do buy something, I don’t want it to be more than 1 gen old, but at current prices I’d be paying more than the new stuff goes for at MSRP.
I budgeted to be able to buy something good, not just good enough. Since I’m not in a rush, I’m willing to wait and keep trying to buy something closer to top-of-the-line. I can afford scalper prices, but I just refuse to support scalping out of principle.
if you have been waiting since 2016, why do you want an 5080, though? 2-3 gens earlier will be a large improvement too, with half or even lower a price.
I did the same, but with AMD. I’m going Linux, and everything is good except nvidia’s utterly broken drivers. I mean, they always improve, today it’s usable if you don’t want to sleep/hibernate your PC, if you are sure you won’t run out of video memory (nvidia drivers are the only one in linux that can’t transfer some memory to system ram when it’s really needed), if you don’t need gamescope, and so on…
I expanded elsewhere in this post, but basically it’s a combination of:
I do own a laptop I bought in the pandemic which has a 2070 mobile GPU, and between that and my PS5, I am not truly in a rush.
Older hardware is also being price gouged. If I do buy something, I don’t want it to be more than 1 gen old, but at current prices I’d be paying more than the new stuff goes for at MSRP.
I budgeted to be able to buy something good, not just good enough. Since I’m not in a rush, I’m willing to wait and keep trying to buy something closer to top-of-the-line. I can afford scalper prices, but I just refuse to support scalping out of principle.
Aren’t you letting perfect be the enemy of good here? You are looking for a unicorn and likely will never find it.
I mean, I already have good. I just don’t need to waste money on something I don’t need if it’s not worth it.