The biggest annoyance is how AMD gimps their lower end RDNA 2 cards. Thanks to the low infinity cache, it's terrible at anything but 1080p and even at 1080p, it's terrible. Pair that with only 8 lanes, terrible ray tracing and little to no ML... It really becomes a card that has no reason to exist. Sure the MSRP might be alright in todays market but you are basically getting a dead end card that's prescapled from the factory as it really should be $200 or lower.

Quite the shame really. Last year, we saw the crazy potential this generation had of getting PC gaming back to its feet after Nvidia's Turing was terrible value and AMD took a dump with Vega and RDNA 1 felt like a card with limited use case. But little did we know how greatly mining would affect these cards.

Here's hoping Intel will bring something innovative to the table with budget cards. But them going TSMC with their GPUs is gonna be a cause for concern for me.

Just checked out of curiosity the prices of 6600 xt on Newegg Canadia. $1000 plus tax monopoly money. So around $800 USD or 700 Euros.

I really, really hope that at least one of the manufacturers comes up with a (preferably hardware) solution to stop this f*cking mining nightmare because right now it's our problem, but in the not too distant future it will also be theirs, After all, who the f*ck is going to spend 6-700 € on just a GPU to play videogames when they can get a console that's cheaper and more powerful than said card?

The fans would run at normal speed, but then the middle one would conk out and start clashing with the other two fans, causing the other two to ramp up in speed, then the middle one would die out for a while and try spinning back to life, only to clash with the other two fans again.

Now that the defective middle fan has been removed, the other two fans still ramp up on their own to full speed, even with/without MSI AB running (installed and uninstalled completely). 

The two fans remaining spin at the same speed btw and MSI Ab cannot control them.

Despite the fan speed claiming it's running at 40, the two fans are currently running at top speed, quite audibly at that. 

I mean, it's definitely a lot less noisier than when the middle fan clanked about like metal in a blender, but any GPU shouldn't really be running at max fan speed 24/7 (even if it is keeping it cool for now). 

With what's been going on around the world and the recent advances in tech, I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia/AMD don't really care what happens to us.

Nvidia has different avenues to choose from (like Ai cars for one), AMD has it's own avenues to go with as well, and while Low to medium end GPU's sell more in abundance than high/top end, we've also got the new consoles to content with, as well as stand-alone VR and now Cloud gaming and the ever present mobile gaming. 

Really wouldn't surprise me if they just let this shit get worse and then they suddenly turn around and mutter "we don't need you anymore", and then the platform gets fucked over, because some stupid fucks wanted their imaginary currency and two greedy companies (I'm not counting Intel because I don't expect them to be in this race for long) not valuing our money. 

Yeah they hate the way they intentially gimped it so they can segment the cards. These are super stripped down (from the bus, to the cache and memory) and cheap to make and yet are selling for previous mid range prices. Sadly there's no alternatives atm, even looking preowned. Sadly even their previous gen cards offer way more value then their current offering, when looking at respective launches.

True, these shouldn't be any more than $250 from AIB's and be closer to the $200 mark. The mining boom really has taken the wind out of consumer cards I feel but its also AMD and Nvidia making the most of the situation. Quite a shame really as AMD could offer some value in the market but they won't.

I hope Intel comes in swinging with Arc, but I'm going to keep my expectations at a minimum. With their stance on no restriction on mining and that they're also on TSMC means that availability will most likely be quite limited. Which probably means they won't price these too competitively. Though they are a new player so they could if they wanted to. Really want to see Intel make a dent in their future lineups.. because prices right now are terrible for lower tier and mid ranged.

EA Pulls Crysis, Command & Conquer 4 from Steam
https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/ea-pulls-crysis-command-conquer-4-from-steam
Electronic Arts has removed the original Crysis from Steam along with Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight, the latter of which was one of the worst-rated games on Steam.

Not surprising, but they could have given some notice in advance.

Thankfully for us, both AMD and Nvidia are competing with each other, which means that they won't leave the gaming business anytime soon in fear that the other one won't leave it and dominate it, reaping all the profits for itself.

And there's also shareholders that would like to know why they are exiting a very lucrative market.

As for not caring about us, well, of course they don't! They only care about our money! And as long as there's money to be made, they'll be interested in getting some of it. But with that said, Nvidia did try to do something about crypto and try to bring prices down to MSRP, while AMD did nothing and Intel seems to be following AMD's path (although for Intel, selling cards is their main objective right now, without caring who buys them).

Yea it's a disgrace and it could be setting a really bad precedent for future GPUs. Imo in the current market, if a person wants to buy a GPU alone, they should commit and get a 3060 Ti or above. Because that is what it takes to get above console level performance in Raster and should keep people gaming for a very long time. The best idea is probably going to be buying a prebuilt that's reasonably priced. Realistically it's hard to judge when it's going to stabilize but some people have been waiting for over a year to buy a new GPU and they do have to commit at some point. And they should commit to buying one that while priced above what it should be, will give them fap worthy performance for a long time.

Almost sounds like the GPU isn't detecting the correct readings from the fan rpm or something is interfering with them. What you can do is go into your PC BIOS and sit there for a bit and see if the fans ramp up there as well. If it doesn't ramp up while in BIOS, then it could be something software/windows related as BIOS is preboot.

Yea exactly. I kind wanted Intel's GPU to be based off of their 7nm (rebranded 10nm) as that could be one of the ways Alder Lake S can have an advantage over AMD Ryzen since Intel doesn't need to pay TSMC their fees. But with Intel Arc, they are in the same position as everyone else.

I guess I better start saving up for the RTX 4000 series starting now lol cause I get the feeling Nvidia/AMD and probably Intel will probably raise their prices again.

Maybe they've removed Crysis because people bought the original and modded it instead of buying the remaster. It won't surprise me if they do the same with 2 & 3 one the remasters launch. 

Only the biggest fans will miss C&C 4.

I don't know if you've posted the last graph, but GPU prices have kept going up this past month. No point in waiting for a price drop that won't happen.

At this point is either waiting for Black Friday, hoping that a store will go insane and put a card at MSRP, which would actually be a quite big discount, or simply skip this gen and pray that things go back to "normal" with the next ones.