Back in my childhood Nvidia was associated with games. Their videocards were the way how games were meant to be played. Radeon existed as well but their shallow marketing wasn’t as catchy as what Nvidia had.
Over a long period of time Nvidia was releasing a banger after a banger. 6xx series, 9xx series, 10xx series and despite controversial nature of the real time ray tracing technology 30xx series – all were the game changers.
RTX 4090 doubled the speed of RTX 3090. 2x 3090s working in SLI weren’t able to beat 4090 – that’s how fast RTX 4090 is but 40xx series isn’t popular for a reason.
Price. Even to this day.
You can get one used RTX 3090 for 450 euros. Sometimes even less. Two of them will cost you 900 euros when even used 4090 will cost you double of this price. That’s a simple math – 3090 is still affordable for an average consumer and considered low tier of high end GPUs when 4090 is something most of the people can’t justify to pay for.
We all went through the spike of the GPU prices related to crypto mining. The crisis is gone but the prices stayed and 40xx series became the first truly inaccessible bunch of videocards.
50xx series will be associated, in my opinion, with the misleading statements from the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang.
“The RTX 5070, 4090 performance at $549,” said Huang.
RTX 5070 none ti has only 12 Gigabytes of GDDR7. RTX 3090 that is even cheaper than RTX 5070 has 24 gigabytes of GDDR6X. It means in practice RTX 5070 will rely entirely on the fake frames to simulate high texture details that RTX 3090 is able to provide naturally with larger amount of memory without faking the picture. Higher resolution of textures doesn’t require more performance so it doesn’t matter if RTX 5070 in some cases is faster than RTX 3090.
Modern textures are big, levels are huge, optimizations sucks and more RAM you have more details you can observe in surrounding world. As simple as that. If noticing big pixels bothers you – you will have more of them in real frames produced by RTX 5070 and upscaling will barely hide them. In addition fake frames have a lot of artifacts and it’s not going to change soon.
Texture streaming is a technology that allows you to load and unload textures on the fly but it is limited by SSDs’ speed and we will experience shortages of high quality SSDs very soon as well. SSDs are probably the most vulnerable to aging component in the system after coolers.
With RTX 5070 a game engine will reload textures more frequently. This means you will notice more low resolution textures before they get updated to higher resolution.
Geometry of 3d objects is less relevant but it is being streamed as well so a game engine will load and unload geometry more frequently with less RAM. When you enter PUBG you can observe how textures and models are being loaded. That’s the effect of texture and geometry streaming.
AAA will be the first industry to feel the impact of the scale at which AI companies are buying RAM.
They started to heavily rely on fake frames in recent years and up-scaling to produce appealing pictures even on the expensive hardware because in the mindset of such big studios, like the ones being part of EA Games and Ubisoft and other big companies – picture still sells and there is definitely a shrinking, but big audience for that.
With time picture sells less and less and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is the great example. Gamers started being fed up by the nice picture with nothing in behind. It is surprising for me that it is happening only now.
Even worse – with the usage of AI such games become even sloppier than before.
“Picture sells, gameplay doesn’t” feels like a mantra for a long time. And instead of innovation we get remasters with different levels of quality.
The biggest impact will neither be the RAM shortages, nor inability to buy hardware, but the distrust to the many companies that shape modern gaming industry in general.
Ubisoft is actively trying to find even lower grounds.
Nvidia gave up on gaming. They reduce the production of consumer grade videocards in 2026.
AMD never misses the opportunity to screw up and in my opinion is intentionally choosing the strategy to always be the second in the GPU market and not even trying to beat NVidia. Besides they lean towards AI market so I believe they will screw up the consumers as well in the end.
I’m not sure anyone takes Intel seriously nowadays. Intel is in the position where if they succeed – good. If not – no one cares much. It’s just happened that their competitors are providing a silk road for Intel in the GPU market right now.
So the only big pillar of gaming that is currently left is Valve but they are not immune. If payment processors are able to force them to accept their rules then who knows what other third parties can affect them? I wouldn’t rely on a one company to build our gaming future.
Besides RAM prices will affect their future devices as well.
Nvidia already proposed the solution to the problem – cloud gaming. Where you own nothing, control nothing and pay the maximum price.
AI comes out to the scene and pretends to be the savior of the industry. Same high quality picture for the less money.
And that’s a lie. Corporations behind it are interested to make you to believe that it is truth not by the facts, but by the amount of bots on social media, ads and noise. Why? Money. A lot of people make money on AI with no benefits for the end user.
It’s easy to debunk AI claims by just thinking what consumers get. Cheaper games? No. Big titles are still 70 dollars. No one will make them cheaper.
Better graphics? No. AI can’t compete with professionals in the industry and human input. Besides if company reduces the amount of professionals it reduces the quality control as well. Call of Duty is a perfect example.
AI is just a tool? Another take of big corps. Modern research already determined that AI reduces your cognitive abilities according your usage. So it kills creativity of a creative person even if they use it for idea generation or mood boards and no generated assets get to the final build.
So, what do people receive with AI in the end? Promises. Quite a lot of promises, fake frames and worse visual design direction, reduced skill-set, reduced cognitive abilities.
Sounds promising, indeed.
With this premise more and more people find out about the world of old games and old systems where many old rules of gaming were just better. When category B existed with a lot of experimental games with bigger budgets than indies and still lower than AAA.
In the modern world A.I.M. 3 didn’t find funding to make the new release, when in 2000s it got 3 games in the franchise and a small but supportive community. This alone tells a lot.
It’s no doubt why more and more people find retro and just old games so attractive.
Old games, even not the best ones were just made differently. Had more charm and character.
Young people nowadays get inspired by the 2000s era for a reason.
Hardware restrictions forced people to be more creative.
Gaming culture was better.
Instead of playing online while being alone in your room people were visiting PC clubs or bringing PCs to each other.
Buying games was a ritual and a special kind of pleasure.
Game magazines were more interesting than social media by a margin.
We talked about games and games were designed in the way for people to talk about them.
That’s why young people who never lived through this era of gaming started to be interested in it.
Because with less graphics you often got more gameplay and more creativity. Imagine all of it with huge budgets modern indies simply don’t have. It’s an impossible cocktail that rarely happens in the modern age.
PSP, PSV, PS1, PS2, PS3 and PC of Windows XP and Windows 7 era received the best AAA titles.
When graphics was cheaper to make, general production was cheaper, it was simply easier to build bigger and deeper games. Especially in times when games didn’t compete with Netflix and TikTok for your attention.
To play old games and enjoy them you suddenly have no need for 16 gigabytes of RAM. You sometimes don’t even need 8. 4 gigs are well enough for Dragon Age: Origins or Mass Effect 2.
Vote with your wallet for the future you want.