That is a very positive outlook for a situation most people find frustrating. You must be a glass half full person which great!
Oh, that's totally not true. However, I always notice that I'm oddly positive during bad times and oddly negative during good times.
Before my current setup I used to own AMD FX 6300 and AMD RX 560 4GB. It was a good combo back then and it could run games really well. That RX 560 could run GTA 5 at 1440p medium-high settings with maxed out textures, CoD WW2 at 1440p, low settings + 2xAA + maxed out textures and mostly 50 fps. Most people dismissed RX 560 as sub 1080p card and yet that wasn't my experience at all. I got it in 2018, but soon it became clear that it wasn't going to cut it anymore. Once Far Cry 5 came out, it couldn't really do any adequate fps at 1080p and it was usable only at 1600x900 or less. It was a shame, because for me RX 560 defined Polaris. It was phenomenally cool card, that consumed around 40 watts (because I got a rarer version without 6 pin connector) and it could play games at 1440p and it was really cheap. It was a great card while it lasted, but when it ran out of steam I got RX 580. Of course it gets good fps at anything and runs games at 1440p without any problems, but imo my specific model (Powercolor Red Dragon V2) runs hot and loud and it was so stupidly loud that I could barely hear games over fan noise. I pretty much hated it since the day I bought it. It didn't help it any that it also consumes a lot of power. It basically delivers 2.5 times better performance, but at like 6 times the power consumption, when compared to RX 560. It really is a stupid card and I wish that I got some GTX 1060 6GB model instead of this.
And then once I bought a new motherboard, RAM and CPU I wanted to put the whole system together and accident happened. I pushed CPU cooler too strongly and not only that bent motherboard pins, but some of them fell off. And I couldn't go back to FX 6300 as for some reason motherboard was no longer stable and it was very picky with RAM until it eventually stopped booting at all. So during the worst of lockdowns, I started to use my "retro" gaming computer as my main computer and it had Athlon X4 870K, 8GB DDR3, GTX 650 Ti, 1TB HDD and Windows 7. It absolutely had to work, because I was relying on it to complete my university work, but when I didn't work, I played games and it turned out to be oddly capable machine. It could run GTA 4 at 1440p well, it ran Test Drive Unlimited at 1440p Ultra and got over 60 fps, Test Drive Unlimited 2 at 1440p Ultra, CoD 2 at 1440p Ultra, Colin McRae Rally 2005 at 1920x1440 Ultra, Victoria 2 at 1440p Ultra, SimCity (2013) at 1440p Ultra, UT 2004 at 1920x1440p Ultra, Monopoly Plus at 1440p Ultra, CS:GO 1440p High. It maybe even played FEAR at 1440p Ultra. I really didn't expect 650 Ti to run TDU2 at 1440p and Ultra settings, but it did and ran at over 60 fps. Seriously, that 650 Ti was surprisingly good at what I used it for. And the most surprising thing out of all is that that system could run GTA 5 at 1080p Normal and get 40-50 fps, also run Doom 4 at 1024x768 low and sort of run Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 640x480 low with some nV control panel tweaks. And yet that machine was never supposed to do so much. Knowing that GT 1030 GDDR5 runs GTA 5 at 1080 high settings and it gets 50-60 fps, buying and using something like that wouldn't be all that bad. It likely still runs all games, just at low settings and some lower resolution. It never really was out of stock in most of this world. If it's really faster than 650 Ti, then I'm 100% sure that during lockdown you could have had a decent gaming experience in older games and often good enough experience in new games. In my region, it was the fastest card that was still at acceptable price and mostly available (although at one point people got so desperate, that they bought out all GT 1030s, GT 730s and even GT 710s, strangely enough even GeForce 210 sold quite well. There was even a local short shortage of Quadros and Radeon Pros). Right now even RX 550 4GB is somewhat available and 190 Euros. It's over MSRP, but still quite sanely priced card and it's faster than GT 1030. If there was another lockdown and that's all you could afford for entertainment, it really wouldn't be all that bad. And if you stick to older or low spec friendly games like Overwatch, Valorant or Genshin Impact, it will be totally fine. I assume that in US, it was possible to get RX 560 or even GTX 1050 and in used market I saw some RX 570s at under 200 Euros. If you needed a card that could get you by during GPU apocalypse, there were some good options and most of that camping near Microcenter drama was utterly useless. At less than ideal settings, those cards can run any game at acceptable fps.
And now that my main computer is fixed, I can now suffer in RX 580 again. The stupid thing is that with wattage reduced by 35% it's cool and quiet. I tried to mess with vBIOS and permanently lock it at that, but after a month I started to get some random black lines on screen and once I lost video output at all and also fan behaviour was odd and broken. The main fault of my work was that I have no idea what is the real difference between TDP, small power limit and maximum power limit. I probably set one of them too low and once GPU core is loaded, there may not be enough power budget left for RAMDAC and fans, explaining their not so good behaviour. It's a bit hard to explain it that way as those faults mostly happened when computer was idling, although once that happened during a mild load.
Despite RX 580 being an awful card, I will wait until those times, when it won't be able to play games at 1080p low and maybe then I will think of upgrading it. Current hardware lasts quite a while, so there's no need to upgrade it often. RX 580 still runs most titles at 1080p high and 50-70 fps. It will probably take 5 years for RX 580 to become truly obsolete and FSR just made made it last quite a bit longer.
Everyone likes a glass half full-type person, but there's really gotta be a limit to what constitutes a "good time" like come on
are we gonna start picking positives out of SARS and coronaviruses and calling it a good time because people started working from home?
Most people didn't get C19 and about 50% of people actually preferred working from home, rather than in physical workplace. Due to special conditions I found time to spend about 1 hour outdoors and enjoy thick snow without seeing another almost any people during any day of the weak in middle of the city. That wasn't so bad at all and I sometimes walked for 3 hours and managed to reach some places on foot that I have never walked to. I also started growing small ginger root at home and managed to get Emerald badge at WCG's Open Pandemics project. I personally had a great time during lockdown. My relatives had either neutral or slightly negative experience. Some people certainly didn't like lockdowns, but some people loved them. It's complicated and depending on your specific conditions, it could have turned out well or awfully.
Yeah you see, now you're just dreaming. The Xbox and PS5 exist, Apple will continue pushing GPU efficiency and power, and GPU performance doesn't just stop for want of supply. If you think future AAA titles along the lines of Halo Infinite / next COD / BF2042 are going down in hardware requirements just because "gamers" can't buy graphics cards, you're in for a very, very nasty surprise.
Eh, who knows. I don't really expect that, but it would be rather logical step. And during GPU shortage sure those things exist, but you also have same limited supply issue and currently a pricing issue too. Obviously those AAA titles won't have any lower spec friendly settings as game development takes years and there's a lot of planning ahead and making some deals ahead of time. Pretty much everything about them is already pre-planned, so GPU shortage would need to be truly long and likely even more severe for games to become lower spec friendly. But who knows, maybe some devs will manage to make something easier to run on lower end hardware. Indie devs are more likely to react to such things, if their game development time is quite short.
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