Buying a GPU in 2023 almost makes me miss the shortage | Digital Trends

The days of the GPU shortage are long over, but somehow, buying a GPU is harder than ever — and that sentiment has very little to do with stock levels. It’s just that there are no obvious candidates when shopping anymore.

By the time the GPU shortage eased up, many people were already waiting for the next generation to come out instead of shopping for cards from the RTX 30-series and Radeon RX 6000. The hype was definitely there, but now, close to 10 months after the launch of the RTX 4090, I can say this: This generation is all over the place, and that makes buying a GPU a lot less straightforward than it seems.

Nvidia started out strong with the RTX 4090, which is one beast of a GPU, but it was too expensive for many to consider. The overclocked models often sold for around $2,000, and even the base price of $1,599 is a lot to spend. Most people have no need for an RTX 4090 anyway, so while the GPU offered one of the largest jumps in performance we’d ever seen, it wasn’t even on my radar.

Unfortunately, Nvidia may have fumbled the whole thing by limiting the card’s VRAM to just 8GB. At a time when low VRAM is a hot topic, Nvidia launched two cards with just 8GB and a narrow memory bus, resulting in disappointing bandwidth. As a result, the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB is barely any faster than the last-gen RTX 3060 Ti in some games, but of course, it’s still pretty pricey.

AMD’s presence in this generation hasn’t been as prominent as I had hoped. We got the two flagships last year, followed by months and months of silence — and while the RX 7900 XTX makes for a strong alternative to the RTX 4080, it only recently managed to crawl its way into the Steam Hardware Survey. That doesn’t bode well for the adoption of AMD’s pride and joy.

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