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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

3080s are buyable at essentially MSRP these days.

These days I've lost interest. My point was that availability affected what I ultimately spent (and did not spend) my money on.

You couldn't have been interested for that long. Crypto mining took a big hit in 2018. The market was flooded with used GTX 10-series GPUs. When Nvidia's RTX cards launched in August, they were somewhat difficult to find for a couple of months but by the start of 2019 they were actually struggling to move inventory because used mining GPUs were still flooding the market for so little money. GPUs were not hard to buy again until the pandemic started and demand skyrocketed during lockdowns.

Half a decade is a long wait for entertainment, people will find other interests to replace them, like bass guitar - at which point there is less mind-space available for interactive entertainment. It's taken time for people to grow space for video games in their lives over ~40 years, the opposite can happen too , people had fun before video games.

The wait wasn't half a decade. There was like a 6-month period where GTX 10-series cards were hard to get, and there were nearly two years where GPUs were plentiful before the chip shortages.

Basically I'm questioning the commenter's claim that they kept trying to get their hands on a 10-series, then 20-series, then 30-series card before giving up. They must not have tried at all in 2019.

They were talking about inflated price, not lack of availability

The prices weren't inflated in 2019 though.

Yes, which for most people == lack of availability.

I don't care about nVidia (might more if the OSS driver matures); and that's now an old year model. I'd like to be able to buy a new generation AMD stack (new CPU, new board, new GPU) within 3-6 months of the parts hitting shelves.

* AMD has even better GPU availability right now.

* There's always new product releasing in the future, and the hardware you buy will inevitably depreciate. If you can get value from buying now and using now, then it's not worth waiting. If you can't, then you didn't have to buy in the first place.

* Futhermore, new product releases are staggered. Taking the RX 6000 series as an example, the high-end 6800 XT and 6900 XT released several months before the 6700 XT, and the 6600 XT came a few months after that.

You missed the important part at the end. At _this_ point I've waited another 2 years and really want the new stuff rather than what I missed out on.

Why? More future proof interfaces. DDR5, PCIe 5, AM5(?) etc.

> If you can get value from buying now and using now, then it's not worth waiting. If you can't, then you didn't have to buy in the first place.

It sound like you're in the second category, then. If you really belong there, that's fine.

But honestly, I got a DDR3 machine towards the end of DDR3's lifecycle, and I have no regrets. I used the CPU/Mobo/RAM for more than 5 years, and by the time I upgraded, DDR4 got fast and cheap enough where I felt I got my money's worth from both my initial purchase and my upgrade.

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