Is the PC argument moot if GPU prices stay this high?

something else other than my pc******

Its definitely more cost effective right now to buy an x one x... AAA games don't get the same sales they used to unless we are talking about years later and GPU's aren't the only problem... silicon pricess have gone up... ESPECIALLY with memory... holy **** is it expensive to put a PC together right now.

@MonsieurX: yet you suddenly forget the X1X when it fits your agenda?

Lul

I suspect future consoles will be affected by cryptocurrency as well since those also use RAM, but yeah at the moment not looking great for PC (well to be specific GPUs and RAM, the rest is unaffected as far as I know)

@FLOPPAGE_50: what agenda?

Most people who care about visuals would get a GTX 1080 ti, because that will provide you with visuals the Xbox ONE X can only dream of coming close to, regardless of how much it costs, an Xbox ONE X would provide the best price to performance ratio with PCs of equal performance, which is nothing a visual enthusiast would be impressed with, so no when you want visuals PC is still the way to go

plus there is more to PCs than simply graphics, and thats something consoles will never touch, graphic cards price increase is just a minor set back in the grand scheme of things.

I can afford to upgrade even now with the superfluous income from even a single 2-week deposit, and even I won’t pay $1200 for a GPU....period.

I think you need to be pretty hardcore to pay that price. It definitely prices out the casual gaming market which is the majority of gamers.

You do realize that only the GPUs price increased right? nobody said anything about CPUs and other components. Besides you forget that higher end hardware with greater graphical capabilities are still exclusive to the PC. Prices on GPUS can go up as high as it wants and the Xbox ONE X will still not come close to a PC thats capable of actual 4k at 60fps, so if you are interested in that you would STILL go for PC, and again, there is more to PCs than simply graphics.

Thats not true, memory has gone up and in general silicon have gone up and will continue to go up this year in general... many silicon manufacturers have mentioned this. I just said it is more cost effective to by a console so the rest of your argument is stupid since it has nothing to do with cost effectiveness.

And at some point the best graphics cards eventually have diminishing returns... The best looking games tend to have the most consistent graphics on a technical level AND and art style that hides the ugly parts well. A 570 is not WORTH spending nearly $600 right now and ram for a PC has increased in cost as well. I do want to upgrade my GTX 980 but I'm going to probably buy an x one x this year and just wait for 7nm vega's next year.

Ram is expensive as are GPU's right now. It's making hard for a brother to upgrade his system without feeling like I've been taken to the cleaners.

@Dark_sageX: Not really considering the games with the best visuals are not even on PC. Im sorry but saying a 1080i gives you visuals you can only dream of is laugable when the vast majority of assets are the same. A pro/x1x stomps the pc on price to performance so why would i pay for a PC that has slightly better looking multiplats and never gets the best looking games?

Because it's the platform that has acceptable performance, the thing that actually affects gameplay.

@howmakewood: A steady 30 or 60 is acceptable performance.

I love how you always get the perfect, thread-ending post in first in so many threads.

Well, someone has to do it

i don't think 'the best specs at an affordable price' was ever the crux of the PC argument. its just the 'best specs' part. you want the best you gotta pay for it, as with many things in life.

the GPU price thing does suck though and make me less inclined to endorse getting gaming PCs to my friends

Yup, unless you scrape the bottom of barrel for current gen PC parts, then why bother? Playing Pc exclusives that have only gained 1 10/10 AAAAE Essential must play game in the history of game spot or the lack of a excluive GOTY in the last decade+ hardly makes it worth it.

Stick to the best of the best and by GS's account that's consoles.

It's not going anywhere. New coins are getting released everyday. The only way it crashes is if governments start regulating it.

This. I've been trying to get my hands on a 1070Ti or 1080 all month but haven't found even one. Nobody is restocking, and when they do, the stock sells out within 1-2 minutes.

And they can't regulate it.

Volta MSRP is probably going to be considerably higher than Pascal was because Nvidia can get away with it in this environment. Miners will also likely have huge orders already placed with most major suppliers, making it impossible for consumers to get their hands on a GPU for the first 6+ months.

of course they can , the wheels are already in motion.

Good luck with that.

Sure they can. China, Korea, Russia, and Germany/EU are already considering regulation options.

lol

It doesn't matter what they're considering. Governments are so out of the loop in terms of how the blockchain technology works it's not even funny. Short of banning it altogether they can't do a thing to "regulate" it. They can make it illegal if they want but they can't control it.

Nvidia/AMD are going to lose a lot of their core customers because they're pandering to the miners for quick profits right now.

oh but making it illegal will pretty much make that value plummet, they might still try to use it, but the less products that can be bought with it, the less value it will have, and by that it will simply disappear, at least enough for gpu's price to drop to normal values.

Don't know about the Chinese or other governments but I know the US government at least cannot make it illegal.

The 'PC is cheaper" was always over-stated anyway.

You know he means Xbox One S and regular PS4 right.

It's not illegal at the moment in europe either but I can't imagine this will keep on existing at the current value. There are not many shops where I can buy stuff with bitcoins. If I'm not mistaken, the value of bitcoins is dropping as we speak.

If it does come more popular , I can't see the government not intervene, taxes are a thing you know.

January has traditionally been a very bad month for Cryptocurrency mainly because of the proximity of the Chinese new year. Asia being the largest market, a lot of volume is lost from people selling cryptos for fiat currency in anticipation of the new year. Also, this year bitcoin and the entire market in general got so much publicity it caused it to be way overvalued. Everything had an inflated price. You could literally choose a coin with a blindfold in November and by January your value would have at least doubled. It was nonsensical and that growth rate couldn't be sustained. Now the coins are dropping back to what they should have been valued at. A shitload of traders entered the market, so much that many exchanges such as bittrex and cryptopia had to stop registering accounts because the demand was overwhelming. We're talking tens of thousands of requests for new accounts per day. ******** had to increase its workforce by something like 400% and still couldn't meet the demand and had to shut down registrations for a time. Things calmed down a bit but crypto isn't going anywhere.

As for taxes, the IRS already made its move in 2017 when it asked ******** to disclose the accounts of its biggest earners for tax purposes. You should already declare the revenue you're making off cryptocurrency but since it's untraceable to some extent, most don't bother doing it. When you start making big money, it becomes rather difficult to move all that currency around quickly and efficiently. Bitcoin transaction speed is painfully slow and extremely expensive. I made quite a nice profit from cryptocurrency so far and have never declared it. When I start making tons of it money, I'll probably start declaring it just to avoid the headache. Government can go back as many as 10 years here and I don't feel like being fined or even jailed for tax evasion. I tried coming up with a plan with my financial adviser but he just told me to declare it when I will have made a certain amount.

Also bitcoin sucks and need to die in a fire. That archaic technlogy wasn't made in anticipation of such large amounts of transactions and money being moved around. The fees are freaking ridiculous and there are much, much better technologies out there such as Ethereum(ETH), Nano(XRB) or Litecoin(LTC). Bitcoin has just the highest market cap and biggest names and noob trader flock to it(increasing its value and notoriety) but if factually sucks compared to the newer altcoins.

@Juub1990: So this pretty much means we're all screwed, I mean those who want gpu's at respectable prices. I still hope there comes a solution though, at this point, buying a decent gpu is close to madness.

I always understood the 'PC is cheaper' argument as an initially more expensive purchase of hardware, which was eventually counteracted in the long-term by the relatively cheaper price of games, compared to consoles. This is from a European perspective of course, I understand PC components are slightly more affordable over in the US.

For the foreseeable future yes. The difficulity of mining bitcoin is ever increasing but now people are mining altcoins in the hope the coin will gain value and they can eventually sell it at a profit. One day things should settle down and some cryptos should be mainstays. XRP which has the third highest market cap is not minable for instance so if it were to overtake bitcoin as the leading currency(in market cap and trading prominence at least), mining would take a huge blow. Other altcoins attempt to curb the power of asiic farms by using dynamic algorithms that do not necessairly give an advantage to the guys with the biggest guns which again. In general I would say mining for the next year at least will destroy the GPU market. As soon as Volta comes out, once the word is out that it is better for mining, it'll fly of the shelves and the prices will get crazy again.

The games with the best visuals are on PC, thats a fact and not something I'm going to bother arguing with you. And yeah you're right saying the GTX 1080 ti provides the best visuals was not accurate, I meant to say performance (the performance which will allow you to use advanced visual effects that would compromise on frame rate), but generally what I'm saying is true, there is a reason why things like Nvidia gameworks is only on PC, its because of hardware. And again, yes an Xbox ONE X would beat a PC at price to performance rate but that argument is only relevant if you want to build a PC that is equal to that of an Xbox ONE X, if I was interested in 4k (and I mean native 4k, not that checkerboard nonsense) at 60fps, the price to performance argument flies right out the window, because the Xbox ONE X cannot compete with a high end PC, it simply cannot.

I have been following the price trend for a while and I can confirm that RAM and GPU prices have increased in time (and HDDs but at a very insignificant rate, we are talking a few cents), as far as the rest of PC (CPU, MOBO, PSU, Storage, Case and extra peripherals) its fine. Of course that is not to say that GPUs are a small issue since thats the most important for gaming.

Yes a 570 or equivalent GPU is a bad deal in comparison to an Xbox ONE X at the moment, however, if you want 4k at 60fps you know that there is only a single option and its not the Xbox ONE X, is it a good deal? no (or atleast not at the moment), but what other options do you have?

also you think an Xbox ONE X is a step above a GTX 980? you will be disappointed if you think that, assuming your component isn't bottlenecking your GTX 980 you currently have roughly equivalent performance to an Xbox ONE X.

Cryptocurrency isn't going anywhere unless governments kill it (which is a possibility).

Otherwise, the ball is in Nvidia/AMD's court. They have the power to increase production, restrict sales, and release efficient mining-only cards.

There is no need for them to make it illegal, several major banks in the UK have just announced a ban on buying crypto-currencies with their credit cards after the value of Bit coin halved over night.

And so it begins.

I won't be shedding tears. ;)

China is also blocking access to cryptocurrency exchange sites: http://fortune.com/2018/02/05/bitcoin-china-website-ico-block-ban-firewall/

That's more widespread than I realised, I'd only heard about the UK banks on a radio news report.

I guess the people who actually own all of the money are pissed off now, you can't have undesirables getting rich on money they don't control.

Yuuuuuuuuuuuup.

I'm ready for the crypto crash after cashing out on 17k btc

@Dark_sageX: Except the best looking games are not on PC. Don't argue with me because you can't. Unchartrd 4, Horizon ZD, God of War, Tlou 2. The standards keep getting set on consoles while PC is stuck with multiplats. Nobody will invest the time and money to make a big budget PC exclusive outside of one game which doesn't even look that great. And 4k 60fps on PC puts you in a rig that cost over $1500.00.. so whats the point when its just multiplats?

And lol at herms hating the fake 4k when if its done correctly it barely noticeable.

no! its NOT about 'getting the best for the best price.

its who is the best...period.

This whole who is the best discount gaming platform is friggin silly. Food is not 'better' because its sold at a 3rd rate discount grocery store for less.

I hear you bruh, but the graphical difference on Stars Wars battlefront 2 on the PC and consoles was pretty dramatic. The PC version maxed out looked better than the console version on any and every level.

@ProjectPat187: Sure it does but lol at it being the best looking game overall. Or even a decent game to begin with.

what can I do to get gamers off of the discounted price argument when debating who is best.

Can i give money to some foundation that puts a stop to it? or just donate directly? please make it stop