Current GPU situation is really bad

[UtwigMU]

nVidia 4070 Super and above cards are all but sold out. The ones remaining cost € 900+ 4060 Ti is priced at around midrange but performs like previous generation.
3090 launched 5 years ago is still a good AI and editing card because of 24GB, capable of 4k costs € 900+ This is as if in 2004 when 256MB Radon x850 and Geforce 6800 launched, the 1999 top 32MB cards like G400 MAX, Rage Fury MAXX, TNT2 Ultra and Voodoo 3 would cost and perform like 6600GT or Radeon X1700 (128MB cards).
50 series apart from top 5090 are really just improved versions of 40 series with better AI, video, without physx, missing ROPs, burning cables, poor board design.

For some reason this reminds me of GeForce FX 5000 series which performed worse than 4200-4600 series.

Radon 9070 XT and 9070 have seen improvement and will be available in quantity, but lack of nVidia supply means people who would buy nVidia will also buy some of them, so price and availability might become an issue.

Intel's Arc was targeting 3070-3080 performance with die size but managed to only get 3060. Because of that Intel has been selling cards at a loss and since they are bleeding money, laid of 15k people, cut dividend, further GPUs are canceled, except for integrated graphics. Matrox hasn't announced any Battlemage based cards. At current price Intel cards are good but since future versions will be phased out, we won't get next generation.

[UtwigMU]

Furthermore nVidia f'ed over AIBs by reducing their profit margin from 30% to sub 10% over the years while the GPU prices crept up. EVGA which was one of best makers exited the market before 40 series. Other AIBs cut corners. On AMD side it's a bit better. Sapphire, traditionally good ATI/AMD AIB is still around.

Decent cards around 2000 cost around $200 ($300-400 adjusted for inflation) but today you need to pay 5 times that.

[Umfriend]

I am so happy with iGPU performance nowadays. If only AMD could supply their top-end APU in volume, we could have even more amazing laptops/mini-PCs. I just got a GMKTec K8 Plus, it is awesome.

[UtwigMU]

APUs are good but there are some cases where they don't cut it.
Modern games on Unreal engine 5 are so un-optimized that even top 4080 GPUs struggle at high resolution. For 4k good settings and high FPS you need 600-1000+ GPU
Next local models, the more VRAM the better. You can run some of the AI models locally and it's quite interesting.
Video editing - most phones and cameras now do 4k and you need beefy GPU with lots of VRAM.

Also so called AI PCs that Microsoft is hyping are really under-powered.
See one example how you could use local AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFgyOucIFuk

[Umfriend]

I agree. Some use-cases require dedicated hardware. But the use-cases where iGPU perform well has expanded considerably over the past 5 years and there is some to come. It is just really shit that supply of the current high-end is limited and there are few laptops sporting these. There still is not, by a long shot, the diversity in designs you get for Intel, even though the AMD APUs allow for some designs that Intel simply does not facilitate.

[VJ]

For the first couple of years when I had my core i7 4970k, I used the iGPU for everything. And that was 10 years ago. I only added a GPU as some games were not performing well (at that time: the Tombraider reboot). So I tend to agree that for most normal use, an iGPU suffices.

I honestly wonder how many people use AI for real necessities. Recently, on a Dutch technology blog there was a competition where you had to answer some multiple-choice questions relating to a sponsored article to gain a chance to win a headphone. People apparently even used ChatGPT and other AIs for that, even though it is very fast to just skim through the text (or use a find function) as the answers were literally in the text. Some others on that website also expressed some worry that people are not using/developing basic skills. One argument was that currently, many people believe what they see on social media, and soon they will just blindly believe what an AI tells them. The generation of texts/images that are barely used/looked, but just generated for fun also is such a wasteful use. I fully understand that there good uses to AI, but seeing the drop in the level of the students entering universities (not just in Poland, I hear the same from colleagues everywhere), it is getting worrying: this group managed to get through school before AI was a hot item...

Anyway... back to videocards: prices of nVidia Founders Editions are apparently dropping due to the increase of the value of the Euro compared to the dollar...

[TransformX]

Well, some people rushed to use calculators back then, even though not all calculators followed math rules of operand priority...

Anyway, big fan of the GMKtec mini pc. Recent models come with oculink if you must have a real GPU.
Otherwise, the latest AMD HX370 with 890M offer near 1050TI performance plus dedicated small NPU.