Originally posted by uid313
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The bad thing about this of course is that the current gpu cartel from NVIDIA and AMD do not want to release current gen budget gpu SKUs in order to force gamers to more expensive solutions, not to mention the insane prices these days. It used to be that with every new generation of GPUs we also got some cut-down SKUs for the budget/mainstream market, and that kept prices down because gamers had more choices. Today the number of gamers is far larger but the total number of gaming cards on the market is far lesser because NVIDIA and AMD both do not produce smaller dies at all and instead produce larger dies because they can sell all of them to miners and rich gamers willing to pay anything for new cards. Waffers may be limited due to "shortages" but the larger dies you cut off from a waffer, the fewer you get in total. For every 6600XT AMD makes, for instance, they could cut it in half and sell 2 of them to more budget oriented gamers in need of a gpu, but this would make them less profit because they would get the same revenue from selling the same transistors to 2 buyers instead of 1, pushing demand for cards down.... It is better for the duopoly to starve the market. How long has it been since AMD has produced any budget SKU? Polaris? Nvidia? Pascal? Older? We are talking 5-6 years now... Yup this is intentional and their price fixing has been so blatant that they even allowed a 3rd player to justify the enormous costs to enter the market.... And i hope it bites them in the behind and steals all market share from them.
As for the couple of years old games thing, you need to remember that AAA games are console ports these days. So obviously with a new generation of consoles being out a year ago, AAA game requirements have gone way up. You can play past generation AAA games like Witcher 3 or Tomb Raider on igpus better, but still with lower settings i am afraid. But current ones i am afraid not. Even the Steam Deck which is going to have a beefier igpu + faster ram is only going to work because it has a 720p screen. And granted even on Intel at 720p and low settings most games can be playable. So if you are willing to sacrifice visual quality you can get by for now. But dgpu is a must if you want to seriously game.
As for the RAM CAS latency thing, it is overblown by people. As long as you get much better bandwidth, higher CAS latency is a nothingburger due to how memory works. Yes it has more latency to access the first ram cell of data but it delivers it at much faster ns times because of the faster data rate, evening it out. CPU caches can nullify any penalties most of the time anyway, and data transfers tend to be about larger collections of cells next to each other so every successive transfer is faster once the first address is accessed. ALL in all, if you have a 3200mhz vs 4800mhz kind of RAM kit, unless the latencies are literally insane, it won't make much of a difference and the 4800mhz kit is going to be much faster. Especially for igpus who are not latency intensive anyway, there is a reason they are using GDDR ram after all.
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