I've finally got enough disposable income to spend on a mid-high PC but graphics cards at that tier are just ludicrously priced, especially from Nvidia. I remember building my first computer in 2013 and being flabbergasted that people were paying $1000 for a GTX Titan, the best card in existence back then, at launch—that was probably twice the price of my entire build back then (Radeon 7770/FX-8350... simpler times). Now this generation's equivalent, the 4090, is $1599 at MSRP, and often pushed up to $2000 by resellers and scalpers. The next rungs down aren't far behind either, with the 4080 at $1200 and the new 4070ti at $799. AMD isn't as bad, but their software game is so far behind and DLSS is very appealing for extending the life of my card as long as I can.
I was excited to make a new build and leap to 1440p/144hz but the expense has sucked a lot of the appeal out of it. I might just bite the bullet and shoot for a 4070ti deal to see if I can mitigate the tax at least. I know I'm part of the problem for buying new but I just want to be done with all this and have something I can keep for the next like 6-8 years.
I built my pc in 2011, and other than an upgrade from 2GB VRAM to 4GB VRAM, I haven't made any significant upgrades. You buy that kind of high end card and you end up playing old (but good) games. And lots of other games were those kinds of cards are overkill.
I'd go with a mid-range GPU, somewhere in the 500-800$ and invest in a good CPU, lots of RAM, and two SSDs. The solid state drives, ram and cpu can often be worse bottlenecks for your games.
Good advice and way ahead of you comrade. Got a nutty deal for a 12600k from microcenter with mobo completely free, 32 gigs of good DDR4 ram with room to OC, and two 2tb NVME drives. Hoping to swap the mobo to an mATX equivalent for small form factor but it's mostly come together besides the GPU
That's always the answer except they're extremely not geographically dispersed :bawllin-sad:
I miss building Pcs XD. Have fun on my behalf.