I'm tempted to buy a backup GPU...anyone else panic-buying?

zandor said:

I'm just going to run my 5090 at stock and leave Asus GPU Tweak III running since it's a ROG Astral with per-pin power monitoring. Tweak III can shut down the system if a pin goes out of spec.

I don't think we'll be stuck for a decade, but it's going to be a rough few years. I just think 10 is too much. That's like 2 rounds of fab building.

Click to expand...

I wish this were true, but I honestly believe this time it's the (eventual) end for PC gaming.

Datacenters have cornered fab orders until at least 2030.
Hardware prices will not come down
Datacenters will provide streaming packages that include games for competitive prices.
Gamers best option will be buying a console or streaming titles.
Many AAA titles will start to be "stream only". Game companies will be able to make better deals with datacenters than with Steam.

Be honest. If a datacenter offers an "all inclusive" game streaming service for $49.99/mo, that includes any title you want to play, and you don't have to buy a gaming PC, 95% of consumers will take that deal. (most of them grudgingly at first).

its just a matter of time. There will never be a time again where fabs are prioritized for niche products like DIY computer hardware for PC builders.

Absalom said:

My 3080 is also still under an EVGA 10 extended year warranty - got about ~5 more years left on it. I'm morbidly curious what EVGA would do with the RMA now. They're still around today despite the naysayers. Hopefully I'll never find out.

Click to expand...

Magic 8 ball says, "fat chance".

Supposedly EVGA kept enough stock for their expected RMA rate. They were the absolute best RMA experience that I've ever had with a company, GPU or motherboard. Time will tell if they planned well enough.

nullptr69 said:

I wish this were true, but I honestly believe this time it's the (eventual) end for PC gaming.

Datacenters have cornered fab orders until at least 2030.
Hardware prices will not come down
Datacenters will provide streaming packages that include games for competitive prices.
Gamers best option will be buying a console or streaming titles.
Many AAA titles will start to be "stream only". Game companies will be able to make better deals with datacenters than with Steam.

Be honest. If a datacenter offers an "all inclusive" game streaming service for $49.99/mo, that includes any title you want to play, and you don't have to buy a gaming PC, 95% of consumers will take that deal. (most of them grudgingly at first).

its just a matter of time. There will never be a time again where fabs are prioritized for niche products like DIY computer hardware for PC builders.

Click to expand...

I don't believe this will happen. I don't think the PC gaming landscape will get much worse. I do think it will take years to recover, though, and the 'recovery' will not look like 'the good ol' days.'

That being said, I have spent quite a lot of money at GOG this year, and have a fully offline gaming PC with decades of games to fall back on if what you're outlining comes to fruition. I disdain renting anything.

nullptr69 said:

but I honestly believe this time it's the (eventual) end for PC gaming.

Click to expand...

I think china make this an bit of a big *, they have been historically not that into console gaming because of the long ban on them... while they recently made it legal to import consoles (10 years ago issh) and it is growing fast it is a decade behind PC gaming.

In 2025 PC gaming was almost 10x the console gaming market in China, growing super fast, but PC gaming was still an explosive +15% giant industry, e-sport is quite popular which naturally tend to make PC a relevant and popular platform has well in that market.

PC gaming built around spot price model like DIY or near equivalent of small custom build, could have an hard time, but Apple sales-margin and price point maintained quite well, i.e. a large player with a good supply chain making big order should be able to do well here.

A costco gaming pc desktop today offering is about 25-35% more than 2 years ago while apple achieved to keep performance per dollar parity (which is not ideal but nothing that terrible), if a big player take PC gaming seriously they will make it work and there is some of those in China and they do, an Apple, Valve, Nvidia, Asus could become an other one.

China is already around the USA as a pc gaming market and should become quicky the world biggest pc gaming market and need to be taken into account any analysis to what will happen to that industry in the near-mid futur seriously enough. I am not sure Tencent-Lenovo-Mechrevo is about to let the PC gaming market die without a fight.

With low-latency fiber, it could get much cheaper to stream than buy and that what people could choose in mass of course, but that would still be PC gaming on a rented one that let you mods game and so on (if it look like to what an Nvidia geforce propose or amazon), it could be a different by publisher more locked model too as they use this to make it easy enough to use their own app and avoid the steam tax.

One other possibility is Internet becoming good enough for Valve to let big users turn their steam machine-pc into a streaming cloud for casual gamers, that with some type of training-inference work being made on a gaming GPU could make the very expensive gaming machine purchase work for regular people, a bit like during crypto when PC were the most expensive and cheapest ever at the same time, yes they cost a $3500 like if it was 1999 again, but you make an average of $30 a month from them net of electricity during 45 months then you resell it $1200, that put them back into a $1000 for 3.5 years price point.

LukeTbk said:

I think china make this an bit of a big *, they have been historically not that into console gaming because of the long ban on them... while they recently made it legal to import consoles (10 years ago issh) and it is growing fast it is a decade behind PC gaming.

In 2025 PC gaming was almost 10x the console gaming market in China, growing super fast, but PC gaming was still an explosive +15% giant industry, e-sport is quite popular which naturally tend to make PC a relevant and popular platform has well in that market.

PC gaming built around spot price model like DIY or near equivalent of small custom build, could have an hard time, but Apple sales-margin and price point maintained quite well, i.e. a large player with a good supply chain making big order should be able to do well here.

A costco gaming pc desktop today offering is about 25-35% more than 2 years ago while apple achieved to keep performance per dollar parity (which is not ideal but nothing that terrible), if a big player take PC gaming seriously they will make it work and there is some of those in China and they do, an Apple, Valve, Nvidia, Asus could become an other one.

China is already around the USA as a pc gaming market and should become quicky the world biggest pc gaming market and need to be taken into account any analysis to what will happen to that industry in the near-mid futur seriously enough. I am not sure Tencent-Lenovo-Mechrevo is about to let the PC gaming market die without a fight.

With low-latency fiber, it could get much cheaper to stream than buy and that what people could choose in mass of course, but that would still be PC gaming on a rented one that let you mods game and so on (if it look like to what an Nvidia geforce propose or amazon), it could be a different by publisher more locked model too as they use this to make it easy enough to use their own app and avoid the steam tax.

Click to expand...

You are right. I had not even thought about China. Some quick research shows that in absolute numbers, there are more PC gamers in China than in the usa.

They are probably more resistant to having to purchase game services, and knowing chinese attitudes about piracy, each gamer's likely intent is to build a PC and then pirate games.

In this context, Chinese gpus (even though far behind) become quite important. In a decade chinese fabs could be backfilling the need. I wouldnt be surprised in there was a ban to importing chinese hardware (like there is currently with network and infrastructure.) Very interesting.

Its possible that in a decade that China has it's own domestic PC builder supply and US bans importation, to keep us reliant on datacenters and rented compute. Dystopian, but a possibility.

LukeTbk said:

One other possibility is Internet becoming good enough for Valve to let big users turn their steam machine-pc into a streaming cloud for casual gamers, that with some type of training-inference work being made on a gaming GPU could make the very expensive gaming machine purchase work for regular people, a bit like during crypto when PC were the most expensive and cheapest ever at the same time, yes they cost a $3500 like if it was 1999 again, but you make an average of $30 a month from them net of electricity during 45 months then you resell it $1200, that put them back into a $1000 for 3.5 years price point.

Click to expand...

Technically people can (time)share their own personal PC. I havent looked into it, but I'm pretty sure I can stream games from Steam to a television in my home. What would stop someone from streaming games from their own PC, or having other people do the same?

LukeTbk said:

One other possibility is Internet becoming good enough for Valve to let big users turn their steam machine-pc into a streaming cloud for casual gamers, that with some type of training-inference work being made on a gaming GPU could make the very expensive gaming machine purchase work for regular people, a bit like during crypto when PC were the most expensive and cheapest ever at the same time, yes they cost a $3500 like if it was 1999 again, but you make an average of $30 a month from them net of electricity during 45 months then you resell it $1200, that put them back into a $1000 for 3.5 years price point.

Click to expand...

$3500 in 1999 USD is a bit over $7000 today.

Wade88 said:

$3500 in 1999 USD is a bit over $7000 today.

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I mean in the sense they will be about the quivalent of payiing $1,650-1,700 in 1999 for a gaming PC.. https://preview.redd.it/computer-ad...bp&s=37c425c2217ed83c048cf887c1cdb10865340278, i.e. around $3,500 in 2028

"you guys have backups?"

My current: 2060 Super
Backup: 3050 6gb

nullptr69 said:

Technically people can (time)share their own personal PC. I havent looked into it, but I'm pretty sure I can stream games from Steam to a television in my home. What would stop someone from streaming games from their own PC, or having other people do the same?

Click to expand...

It is now (at least out of the box) a licensing nightmare, steam remote play anywhere do work for a shared account (never try-it myself, but if you have both fiber in the same local server and no wi-fi in the chain, would not surprise me if it is good enough for many games), it would need an AirBnB moment to moneytise that capability and a licensing reform, right now you cannot even play all games you own on a rented computer with GeForce Now.

One big issue, the Epyc CPU-8 virtual gpu used 24 hours a day could underprice things so much that it does not make it that interesting for GPU owner to start sharing them, but if it is a super easy to setup, with a simple reimbursement without a fine if you kill a promised session in the middle of it, in a strong secure enough Linux sandbox.... could see this being a bit of a nicehash in sector with good gigabit Internet.

LukeTbk said:

I mean in the sense they will be about the quivalent of payiing $1,650-1,700 in 1999 for a gaming PC.. https://preview.redd.it/computer-ad...bp&s=37c425c2217ed83c048cf887c1cdb10865340278, i.e. around $3,500 in 2028

Click to expand...

I don't know anyone that paid that little fora computer in the 90's, they were all >$3,000 plus monitors and hids.

no they werent and we have an inflation thread you can argue about it in....

Wade88 said:

I don't know anyone that paid that little fora computer in the 90's, they were all >$3,000 plus monitors and hids.

Click to expand...

1990-1996 and 1999 were quite different, my AMD 800 mhz Geforce 2 MX system in the fall of 2000 was reasonably priced enough (with a cheap 17 inch CRT, speaker,).

I have a 12GB 3080 as a backup for my 5080. But I also have all current gen consoles and a Steam Deck, and gaming is not my only hobby. So I'm nowhere desperate enough for a backup GPU even if I only had one at the moment and it died. IMO with all the retro console game decomps and the general slop being put out by many current (mostly western) AAA studios, it's a good time to get into playing older games again that you can play on any low-end/itegrated or an old GPU. I've been playing a ton of N64 and PS1 decomps lately and loving it.

Not panic buying, but I did the cheap version of a backup plan: I kept my previous card instead of selling it. It won't run new stuff at high settings, but if the main card dies I'm still gaming the same day instead of staring at a black screen for weeks.

Honestly the bigger risk for most of us isn't the GPU dying, it's the fans. I repasted my current card and swapped the fans this year for a few bucks, temps dropped about 10C. If you're worried about longevity, that's a much better use of money than a second $600 card sitting in a box losing value.

I

LukeTbk said:

It is now (at least out of the box) a licensing nightmare, steam remote play anywhere do work for a shared account (never try, but if you have both fiber in the same local server and no wi-fi in the chain, would not surprise me if it is good enough for many games), it would need an AirBnB moment to moneytise that capability and a licensing reform, right now you cannot even play all games you own on a rented computer with GeForce Now.

One big issue, the Epyc CPU-8 virtual gpu used 24 hours a day could underprice things so much that it does not make it that interesting for GPU owner to start sharing them, but if it is a super easy to setup, with a simple reimbursement without a fine if you kill a promised session in the middle of it, in a strong secure enough Linux sandbox.... could see this being a bit of a nicehash in sector with good gigabit Internet.

Click to expand...

I'm convinced that this is what Datacenters will be used for after the AI boom. It is technically feasible, as you say, as long as licensing is worked out. Datacenter would provide all inclusive packages or undercut steam allowing consumers to buy titles on their platform.

I haven't tried Geforce Now or Steam remote, but the technology exists. With faster internet, and prohibitive hardware prices, it will become pervasive.

LukeTbk said:

1990-1996 and 1999 were quite different, my AMD 800 mhz Geforce 2 MX system in the fall of 2000 was reasonably priced enough (with a cheap 17 inch CRT, speaker,).

Click to expand...

Computers for theoretical physics for my brother and all sorts of engineering for me.

nullptr69 said:

'm convinced that this is what Datacenters will be used for after the AI boom

Click to expand...

A lot of the hardware being installed in them is terrible at gaming and it is hard to imagine the install base being every too much for the AI compute demand.

Geforece now for example use regular GB202 RTX 6000 (cut into 2 virtual gpu) and epyc cpu, not the GB300 type of stuff, they do not have texture ability, raytracing ability, they are more and more for FP4-8 and not gaming bitsize operation, etc...

A lot of ai accelerator will no thave any fixed function pipeline to work you shaders with, no rasterisation pipeline, no TMU (texture mapping unit), no raytracing accelerator, display output modules, from Nvidia H100-GB200 to Google TPU to amazon to upcoming openai-anthropic custom chips.


GeForce now in 100 mbits mode is good enough that i cannot if i run both and all-tab between them know which game is the local one versus the streamed one... and that a common enough experience on fiber Internet-Skyrim type of gaming

LukeTbk said:

A lot of the hardware being installed in them is terrible at gaming and it is hard to imagine the install base being every too much for the AI compute demand.

Geforece now for example use regular GB202 RTX 6000 (cut into 2 virtual gpu) and epyc cpu, not the GB300 type of stuff, they do not have texture ability, raytracing ability, they are more and more for FP4-8 and not gaming bitsize operation, etc...

A lot of ai accelerator will no thave any fixed function pipeline to work you shaders with, no rasterisation pipeline, no TMU (texture mapping unit), no raytracing accelerator, display output modules, from Nvidia H100-GB200 to Google TPU to amazon to upcoming openai-anthropic custom chips.


GeForce now in 100 mbits mode is good enough that i cannot if i run both and all-tab between them know which game is the local one versus the streamed one... and that a common enough experience on fiber Internet-Skyrim type of gaming

Click to expand...

The facilities are probably significant% of the cost and can be repurposed. At the point they need to serve gaming customers they would retool.

I'm happy that I upgraded my backup computer to a 2080 Ti, even though I didn't really need to. It's still plenty powerful for what I would need it for and has enough VRam to handle my Ultrawide resolution. It also has a ton of overclocking headroom, bringing performance close to a 3080. The overclocking kills efficiency, but that's not really an issue for backup purposes.

If anything happens to my RTX 5090 FE, I can fall back to an RTX 4080, which is still good enough for most games, though VR stuff and modern AAA at 4K can still make it wince. (Only reason going from a 4080 to a 5090 even makes sense.)

If that fails, on the other hand, then I'm all the way back to an RTX 2070 SUPER I found for $20 (in a bin where everything else was Pascal or older, at that), and if that fails, I'm back to the GTX 980 that I was running for a good seven years until I caved in and bought an RX 7900 XTX that I traded for the 4080. At that point, might as well make my PS5 identify as a Steam Machine.

The fact that I held on to that GTX 980 for so long just goes to show how long the GPU market's been consistently inflated, and it just keeps getting worse and worse to the point that, now, you can't even buy the RTX 5090 because its GB202 can be sold to China for far more money as an RTX PRO 5500 (which weirdly isn't restricted the same way a 5090 or RTX PRO 6000 would be).

We're heading back to the days when people couldn't have cutting-edge graphics performance at home unless they had anywhere from new car money (not a cheap car, either, think sporty or luxury German car here) to house money like a SiliconGraphics workstation used to cost in the '90s - a company that is now ancient history because 3dfx (itself founded by ex-SGI engineers), NVIDIA and ATI all made them irrelevant by providing 3D acceleration tech to commodity PCs.

Even more insultingly with that example, most of the car money SGI workstations didn't have hardware texture mapping as a standard feature until the 2000s (read: when the GeForce 256 and Radeon already existed), so you had to pay up for a house money SGI Onyx and set aside a 240V power outlet for it. Who needs to wash and dry their clothes, anyway?

Can you imagine what kinda baseline rendering features they'd gatekeep to six-figure "graphics supercomputers" if they thought they could get away with it?

No you can still use the 1080 it’s good for 1080p I use my vega56 still…all good for 1080 around that time..it’s not like it’s much better still than 2014-2015 with parts.

I don’t plan on getting much just one system to have and my machinist esports b450m and Ryzen 2600x hexcore cpu..I’m power tripping really and have saved too..

And did the great officey stuff fixing my r36s and I guess the middle usb port don’t matter and was good for the sd card reader. I may start collecting retro handhelds and the scene is pretty big agian.

I had to do a lot heavy file transfers and the write/flash with Rufus usb tool and extracted ArkOS/k36 .image file and it booted the first time with blank screen and blinking red led like the screen panel driver so you back into the folders of the .boot partion and select out of 7 screen panel folders one of the .dtb file that boots it..the 4th folder booted mine

And I have the k36 menu and carousel wheel…I’m assuming an sd card is junk the first time I plugged it up said windows found errors scan repair..I did that first it still didn’t boot so it’s defective stock sd card..i still have easyroms partion of my old card and game libraries to dedicated consoles folders etc there in there for like Atari 2600 and the genesis etc..so I have to rebuild the game library.

So I’m not sure what china spin off model this r36 is it’s actually a k36 clone according to google ai it boots with the 4th folder booted mine.dtb file copied and pasted to the .boot root partion…so pretty straight forward with Rufus just flash the downloaded ArkOS/k36 os image from gethub or all the other ArkOS sites and firmware..

So cool I was greeted to the k36 splash logo and the all games carousel loads shortly after and sonic the hedgehog menu..and just drag drop your game roms into folders and rebuild the library in a organized way…it’s kinda moot you have your games but you don’t till you download something you don’t have or want to try to play..my old 80gb stock sd card had the bundled stuff on it and quite nostalgia collection of all the Atari 2600 and genesis games like Aladdin or all the jet plane arcade shooters…

So it’s impressive collection a lot of those mindless arcade games that still take coins and were single player or two player..still just like a big kid at the mall arcade ones back in the day at Lafayette mall in Louisiana and they still had a great collection.

So pretty much the pc takes a backseat and waiting on titles with alittle more triple AAA story modes..GTA V1 I kinda do want try out and suppose to be pretty good..I haven’t finished gta V though. So I know my vega56 will hold up so will my machinist b450m I really don’t use it that much.

I’m coming up on 3 years of wear on the Apevia Galaxy gold 650w though and hoping it don’t start tripping or frequent restarts cause I need my pc and internet for the r36 and rebuilding game library or the ArkOS/k36 download so I need the websites and connectivity..so I’m not really the better backup still..I need another sd card and playing sd card shoot out with the Onn 128gb v30 that came out of the micro sdxc packet.

So cool yes it’s an enthusiast time for it but like I said waiting on better hardware or titles..and just collect retro if I’m fixing them now…I guess could always gamble on another cheap r36s variant from China try to pick up one of the ones for 40-50dollars and as long it’s anything pretty standard arkos you can flash it..what I don’t know if the k36 version works on all of them and or just with the right screen panel driver file the .dtb file..it may work on all of them if you cycle through all 7-10 folders..my understanding suppose to be pretty universal.

But yeah I know long rant and sorry for some long rants just glad I got it recovered and appreciate windows behaving nicely and the a lot handy file transfers to get the new install and recovery done.

So cheers pick you up one of these little bad boys what I like to call them I can power trip with Rockchip rk3326 1.5ghz cpu too..pretty nice to have one that can run pass 8/16 bit consoles and emulators.

HeadRusch said:

I've got a 1080 Ti sitting around and I'm fine dialing things back, I've only been on my 50 series card since like February....but recently I've toyed with the idea of getting something for when either my 5080 (just upper power limit O/C as I lock to 60fps, my 4k TV is 60fps limited) or my other decent GPU (4070 TI) croak........so I've been considering something like a 9070 XT or under.....probably not the 5070 at that price....but I digress......this is the only reason I have my 5080 today, I panic-bought when I saw them last year after black friday at and slightly below MSRP......and now, well......it was luck, not skill, if that means anything.

Curious who else has gone down this path........I wouldn't even need a 9070 XT class card, I'd be buying something that could tide-me-over with RT cores as enough games now do not support that 1080 TI that I'd like my spend to at least be functional......and if the market gets looser in the future, I can always offload this at a loss before things drop too far.

Thoughts?

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You have a 1080 TI, 4070 TI, 5080 and.....you want a quad backup????

jspinks231 said:

No you can still use the 1080 it’s good for 1080p I use my vega56 still…all good for 1080 around that time..it’s not like it’s much better still than 2014-2015 with parts.

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Not for everything, and it'll get worse. We're starting to see ray tracing required games, like Doom the Dark Ages. ID says RT saved them millions in dev costs and shrank the download by 50-100GB. All it requires is RT global illumination, and that's one of the computationally less expensive RT effects. That said you're not going to need a really big card for 1080p gaming for quite some time. Nah, game devs are going to support those 8GB 4060s for years to come. 3060 will probably remain tolerable for some time yet. But make no mistake - RT is going to kill off a bunch of old cards. The mainstream cards from the Pascal generation aren't good for much, and game devs aren't going to do a bunch of extra work just to make a 1080Ti work.

Are we really to this point now?

jordan12 said:

Are we really to this point now?

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Yep. I am officially a GPU hoarder.

(RTX 5090 laptop, RTX 4090, RX 9070 XT, ARC B580, RTX 3080 FE, RTX 2070 Super)

zandor said:

Not for everything, and it'll get worse. We're starting to see ray tracing required games, like Doom the Dark Ages. ID says RT saved them millions in dev costs and shrank the download by 50-100GB. All it requires is RT global illumination, and that's one of the computationally less expensive RT effects. That said you're not going to need a really big card for 1080p gaming for quite some time. Nah, game devs are going to support those 8GB 4060s for years to come. 3060 will probably remain tolerable for some time yet. But make no mistake - RT is going to kill off a bunch of old cards. The mainstream cards from the Pascal generation aren't good for much, and game devs aren't going to do a bunch of extra work just to make a 1080Ti work.

Click to expand...

It gets to that point where just don’t care and live like it’s 1993 is what I do in my trailer and just run something ez like the r36s k36 clone…mine is definitely generic box clone I think but either way it’s running ark0s-k36 just fine..some models will slow it some won’t so who knows..there’s 0 difference and still a pro/max with an Onn 128gb sd card.

So it’s what I do daily and rebuild some kinda library or just look for games that sound cool to play and drag and drop..I pretty much have like a 70-80gb vintage collections..so idk what to play..

I could spend just as much time talking about it and the success as much as playing I guess and my model suffered with horrible sd card..it’s the world of white handed china these days.

Idk the market is horrible though and going into 2027 with gta vi about the only thing big launching so just is what it is I’ll ride out sales through amazon and Newegg or something.

jspinks231 said:

Idk the market is horrible though and going into 2027 with gta vi about the only thing big launching

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What?