I recently looked at the prices of pre built desktop in my country and the PS5 offers better price to performance, if it is jailbroken that is. The prices are ridiculous. I wanted a desktop to play games, the price isn't worth it. Every month I see an increase in the price.

Maybe AI will make bizarre hardware usable with novel, stripped down and adapted OSs even as traditional PCs become rarer.

Edit: Am I getting downvoted for being wrong, or for saying something positive about AI? I mean, if you could run Linux on a PS5.... wait a minute.

https://linuxstans.com/turn-your-ps5-into-a-powerful-linux-gaming-pc/

You can run Linux on a PS5. And probably thanks to AI.

So this is why microcenter is making people sign waivers. Because everyone knows it's happening they just need to prove their not taking part.

Maybe Jesus will kiss me on the cheek and I'll be able to perfectly render GTA 6 rtx in my mind.

But maybe we live in reality.

(science side of my opnion, LLMs are almost the same algorithm as a search engine in the background, making true novelty impossible. No one has yet created another novel OS like you describe for the AI companied to scrape, repackage, and resell yet, so its impossible for the LLMs to output such an OS.)

(The other other side of it is what do you even mean by a novel, stripped down, adapted OS? Like what has FOSS been developing for the past 40 years lmao? Anyone in the OS dev world knows usually the system itself is the most optimised part of the whole computer. Let's shit on uncompressed 140gig games if we want to shit on someone)

Probably should have said novel, stripped down, OR adapted OSs. That is to say they could be novel, OR they could be stripped down OR adapted to work on more limitted h/w. So, really, more likely stripped down or adapted; novel is the least likely. In the case of Linux on PS5, adapted.

I see that, and with the new ZRAM/CRAM developments its reasonable (to me) to assume more optimisation is on the horizon.

Unfortunately the problem of novelty is very much a difficult area with AI, as inheritly it is defined by its training data - so finding a new optimisation (which tends to have the greatest performance benefits) is generally out of the question.

This leaves it to reshuffle is training data in ways that appear novel, like running Linux on a PS5, but that just means these options were already possible just unexploited.

I feel like that brings me to the same "benefits through adaptation" conclusion as you reached, but with less optimism. I'm confident enough that existing devs and humans are capable enough to find 99% of these adaptations independently, which leaves any AI devs stuck trend chasing well past an ideas expiration date.

Why is everyone so obsessed with the 5090? It was always a luxury item. The real tragedy are the cards that used to be between $150-$350, you know, the ones people actually buy to play games with. That was the GPU market. For the first time I can remember "build a PC to save money" is bad advice. And it's sad for the hobby.

All GPUs are luxury items

If you consider playing modern games a luxury yeah.

My computer that was made in 2019 went 2x in price because I bought SSDs and RAM and maxed it out. Crazy times.

I put a PC together in June-July 2024. The RAM I got (okay, pretty exotic, 2x48GB DDR5-6600 cl32) went 6x the price. Got the kit for £329, current price, IF you can find it, £1899. My 4090 FE would go for 2x the price I got it for.

That price range hasn't changed much.

The RTX3050 released around $300 MSRP.

The current gen 5050 goes around $300 today.

If anything, the prices of that range went down due to inflation...

That price range was for the XX60 and on a good sale the XX70. The fact that $300 gets you an XX50 is a tragedy.

I mean technically they are. In the sense that any hobby is.

But I have no clue what point they were actually trying to make here other than being technically correct or just to be an ass.

The 3060 released at $329, the 3070 came out at $499...

The 2060 released at $349, 2070 also at 499.

The 16xx series stood out for being incredibly low priced, but it had no real high end cards.

GTX10 midrange ended at 1060, at $299, 1070 was high-end, at 449.

Meanwhile....

4060 release price was $299, 4070 $599.

5060 release price $299, 5070 $549.

So no, the entry level you're saying people are mainly buying for gaming... it actually went down in price.

Yes because release price=price people actually buy it at.
Also show me a 5060 at $300. The release price used to be the price early adopters had to pay as a premium. Now it's a discounted price that you can never actually get.

Why am I arguing with you. You're seriously claiming Graphic card prices didn't increase. That should have been enough to make me block you and ignore your nonsense.

Idk, I think it has changed a lot.

I purchased Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070XT early in 2026 for $950. I ended up returning it due to issues with it passing through in Proxmox. I figured out the issue and purchased it again about 4 months ago for $750. Right now it is going for $1,100.

That seems like a pretty huge swing to me—$350 swinging range within a single calendar year.

Ha! Just noticed the downvotes. My eyeballs are examining the top of my skull right now. 🙄🙄

Why don't y'all go explain your right to cheap GPUs to a skeletonized Palestinian child.

Because game development has worsened, optimization is seen as a waste of investor money, so unoptimized games release that are built with insane graphics on test boxes with massive headroom.

When released, consumer grade equipment can barely handle it. So, the 5090, being the top tier card, becomes the only option to some people who want to enjoy the best fidelity in their games, like 60fps on their 4k monitors. Could it be excessive? Of course. But if a game was actually optimized as well, 60fps on 4k should be achievable by the 70 lines, not just the 90

Every month I see an increase in the price.

Prices on memory are not going to come down prior to 2028.

Hell, the RTX 3050 is still expensive.

My 3090 costs more than it was new… that is messed up.

I mean, no. It will not. Some neat features or hacks may be LLM assisted, but it isn’t a miracle.

Besides, we can’t even convince people to switch to Linux, even with the RAMpocalypse in full swing. The vast majority still run Windows (or OSX/iOS/Android). How can we get even a fraction of them to hack a PS5 or something like that?

The other side is… what’s even out there to hack?

Old PS5s? Old PCs? Old Macs? Old servers? All these are skyrocketing in cost, and the instructions/features they physically support are aging. The only thing that’s plentiful are old smartphones, and you can already turn those into Linux boxes.

Shortly before these fucking price hikes I upgraded my servers with 5090s and 256GB each. Plus my gaming rig with 5090 and 128GB.

For the ram alone I could now buy a used compact car and for the 5090s another one.

If this isn't total madness... And I once thought that 300 moneyz for a 3dfx is "a bit exaggerated". Haha haha h haha haha.

SO much worse than the SAME THING (but different) in Virginia /s

5090 is a consumer GPU. Feels different.

What you run in a desktop that needs 128gb ram before the bus width isn't good no more. Server things I can see somewhat. But a desktop.

I won‘t hold my breath. Because even if prices are coming down in 2028 they will still be much higher than now. Because they will just keep climbing until then.

I think we‘ll have to endure until the early 2030s to see if owning hardware will be realistic in the long run or if mega corporations and the mass surveillance state won and we‘re essentially forced to move to the cloud.

Ever used one of them handheld 3D scanners that create huge point clouds and derive a mesh from them? Yeah, I regularly hit the ceiling at 64GB with bigger scans at high resolution.

"Need" is a strong word 😁
Mostly I totally don't. But running a windows-vm for some stubborn games takes a lot and still leaves plenty e.g.

5090 is a consumer GPU kinda like a Bugatti Veyron is a consumer car, technically true, but if your goal is to get any sort of reasonable value for your money you really shouldn't buy either of them.

Something like a 5070 is 25% slower, but you can buy seven of them for the price of one 5090.

That's just an argument to not buy shitty unoptimized games. I've been going through my backlog with the occasional Indy game.

Now hear me out.. there was a time when we didn't have to ask "do I actually need this much" because it didn't cost a fortune to have a nice computer.

Exactly. Don't need a 5090 for indie. And they don't treat you as more of a wallet than a person.

I was an Assassin's Creed diehard fan, up until they fucked up the mechanics in Odyssey. Now, I wouldn't give 'Buggysoft' 2 dollars for their whole lineup. So, I decided to pirate every single AC game I could find, put it on my Steam Deck, and I'm only at around 40% of Black Flag right now after about 27 hours of gameplay. Going over all of them will provide me with at least 5 years of having something to play that I really enjoy. I'm hoping that by that time I can finally afford to build a console-like rig to plug into my TV and forget Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft ever made video game consoles.

Then there's the indie games I really enjoy playing, like Shipbreaker for example, that can run me over an hour for taking apart 1 ship alone.

None of those large studios will ever see my money again, and I sure as hell won't be playing GTA6 unless/until it is available in the high seas.

Yeah, I'm betting on, at least, 2030 as well.

Personally, I am all right with this. Eventually those cards will be obsolete at the data farms, and be resold to everyday people. We little folk will want all the local AI power we can muster, and odds are these cards will get modded to have more VRAM onboard and slim enough to only take double-width slots.

My own RTX 4090 takes one and a half double-width slots, preventing me from having a third RTX 3060 to support my projects.

How much is one of these ive always wanted one for reverse engineering.

Got mine, an Einstar Gen1 for about 1000€ two years ago. They are cheaper now, new.