I just don't get whey they're so desperate to cripple the low end cards.
Like I'm sure the low RAM and speed is fine at 1080p, but my brother in Christ it is 2024. 4K displays have been standard for a decade. I'm not sure when PC gamers went from "behold thine might from thou potato boxes" to "I guess I'll play at 1080p with upscaling if I can have a nice reflection".
4k displays are not at all standard and certainly not for a decade. 1440p is. And it hasn't been that long since the market share of 1440p overtook that of 1080p according to the Steam Hardware survey IIRC.
I do wonder how much higher that would be if GPUs targeting 4K were £299 rather than £999.
Although some of it is down to monitors being on desks right in front of you and 4K not really being needed. It would also be interesting to for Valve to weight the results by hours spent gaming that month (and amount they actually spend on games), rather than just counting hardware numbers.
Have I said anything in favor of crippling lower end cards or that these high prices of the high end cards are good? My only argument was that 4K displays in the PC space being the standard was simply delusional because the stats say something wholly different.
I think it's just an upselling strategy, although I agree I don't think it makes much sense. Budget gamers really should look to AMD these days, but unfortunately Nvidia's brand power is ridiculous.
An the issue for PC gamers is that Nvidia has spent the last few years convincing devs to shovel DLSS into everything, rather than a generic upscaling solution that other vendors could just drop their own algorithms into, meaning there's a ton of games that won't upscale nicely on anything else.
I used to buy broken video cards on ebay for ~$25-50. The ones that run, but shut off have clogged heat sinks. No tools or parts required. Just blow out the dust. Obviously more risky, but sometimes you can hit gold.
If you can buy a ten and one works, you've saved money. Two work and you're making money. The only question is whether the tenth card really will work or not.
AMD will go back to the same strategy they had with the RX 580. They don't plan to release high end cards next generation. It seems they just want to pump out a higher volume of mid-tier (which is vague and subjective) while fixing hardware bugs plaguing the previous generation.
Hopefully, this means we can game on a budget while AMD is focusing primarily on marketshare.