Prices haven't risen THAT much and are quite affordable. And if you look at the improved quality of upscalers (DLLS 4.5 for example), gaming is now more affordable than ever, despite the increased cost of components.
Of course, the 5090 prices are insane, as are for SOME memory models, but that's nothing new and represents a fairly small market share.
> When I started building gaming pcs, the top top card was 750$ (NZD)
When I started building gaming PC, the top $700 cards didn't even provide comfortable performance or graphics. Back then, you were supposed to have several of this connected SLI or somethin. And even then, it wasn't always reliable, and it resulted in stuttering, lags, and graphical artifacts (in cases when it worked). Today, even $700 graphics cards are a much better product from a user perspective than the high-end cards of that time (and that's not even taking into account that $700 cards back then were much more expensive).
> When I started building gaming PC, the top $700 cards didn't even provide comfortable performance or graphics.
When would this have been? I can not remember a time this was accurate for the games of the time, outside of a handful of meme titles like the original crysis that made bad hardware bets. Most of them fulfilled the needs of the software and hardware of the time. I'd say the biggest issue was that for a time, software and hardware were advancing so rapidly that you wouldnt get very long out of your hardware, but that's just the reality of rapid development and not the fault or failure of any specific hardware release.
> Back then, you were supposed to have several of this connected SLI or somethin.
SLI was aimed squarely at enthusiasts, not at joe-average PC gamer and it was certainly never a requirement. It existed as a halo feature for people chasing maximum performance, benchmark scores, and bragging rights.
Improved quality used to be the justification for buying new hardware at a similar price to the old hardware when it came out new. Now the 5060/70s are 4 figure cards.
As for how much the prices have actually risen, it’s not hard to see if this is true or not. If doubling of prices doesn’t raise your eyebrows, I’m not sure what will.
Prices haven't risen THAT much and are quite affordable. And if you look at the improved quality of upscalers (DLLS 4.5 for example), gaming is now more affordable than ever, despite the increased cost of components.
Of course, the 5090 prices are insane, as are for SOME memory models, but that's nothing new and represents a fairly small market share.
> When I started building gaming pcs, the top top card was 750$ (NZD)
When I started building gaming PC, the top $700 cards didn't even provide comfortable performance or graphics. Back then, you were supposed to have several of this connected SLI or somethin. And even then, it wasn't always reliable, and it resulted in stuttering, lags, and graphical artifacts (in cases when it worked). Today, even $700 graphics cards are a much better product from a user perspective than the high-end cards of that time (and that's not even taking into account that $700 cards back then were much more expensive).