The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 hit the market earlier today, and if you haven’t noticed, it’s already sold out all over the place. So, just like every other graphics card that Nvidia has released over the past year or so, it’s going to start showing up on third-party retailers at a much higher price, because that’s just the world we live in.
It’s really a shame because in my review, I found it was a huge jump in performance over the GTX 1650, introducing ray tracing to an xx50 graphics card for the first time. But even on MSRP of $249 in the US, it actually costs twice as much as its last-generation counterpart. Once you start calculating the price increases from the lack of supply, it looks like you’re going to hit over $400 for Cheaper versions.
In the past, though, this card would have fallen in the $100-120 price range and would be the subject of hundreds of Reddit posts where nerds (I love 💖💖) tell people to build a cheap gaming PC instead of a PS5. It was always obnoxious, but being able to do that is something I will miss.
PCPartPicker is not just fun anymore
In the past, people would always reach out to me and ask them to help build a cheap gaming PC – usually their first. While some people may be put off with people constantly asking for advice, I like to go to PCPartPicker and try to put together a gaming PC that plays the games they want to play without breaking the bank.
But these days, I’ve stopped even trying to do that. Just looking at it now I put together what would normally have been around a $500-550 build. I set it up with an Intel Core i3-10100F, Cooler Master Hyper T2, B560, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, cheap case, 400W 80+ Gold PSU and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650. Now, at Canon January 2, 2022, that’s $800.
If it comes to paying that or just falling apart and trying to buy a PS5 or Xbox Series X for half that price, I’d recommend the console every time.
Especially as more popular games become more difficult to run, I’m not sure how long a relatively weak GPU like the GTX 1650 will last.
Unless you’re satisfied with indie games and esports—and to be fair to a lot of people—the $500-600 gaming PC isn’t in the cards right now. It’s a pity that the most expensive gaming PCs are better than ever, while most people struggle to get anything they can realistically afford.
The rise of streaming games
Game streaming services like Google Stadia and Nvidia’s GeForce Now started hitting the market in late 2019 and early 2020, before the pandemic drove everyone home, where they’d be playing PC games more than ever. Before the release of the latest graphics cards, I did not take these services seriously. Why pay a monthly fee to rent devices you can’t even touch?
But now, I’m starting to receive the appeal – even if that probably isn’t what Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft intended. Especially since GeForce Now lets you access a gaming machine with an RTX 3080 as long as your internet is strong enough, it’s a good way to play PC games that your system wouldn’t otherwise work.
In the case of GeForce Now, you’ll pay $99 every 6 months for an RTX 3080 subscription. That sounds steep, but when you consider that the RTX 3080 still hits $1,600 on StockX, that’s only One Ingredient, the price starts to get more attractive – but you feel like the endless deluge of subscriptions we have these days.
Even if you look at the newly released RTX 3050 in their site Retail At $249, that’s still a year more expensive than GeForce Now with the RTX 3080. It literally pains me to say this, but if you don’t have the money for a $1,000 system, I think you’re better off getting a GeForce Now subscription instead.
Will this ever end?
With all the money AMD and Nvidia are definitely making, not just with the sale of graphics cards, but with Nvidia subscriptions and console sales for AMD, it’s easy to be a bit pessimistic about the future of budget PC gaming.
We saw graphics card prices generally rise with the launch of Nvidia Turing back in 2018, and they haven’t really gone down since then. Even AMD, the company that used to be the champion of budget gaming hardware, has ditched this segment of the desktop PC market — both with its own CPUs. And the Graphics processing units.
Now that both companies note that their products will sell no matter how much they cost, it’s hard to believe we’ll see prices drop in the future, even when the supply problem is resolved.
This is clearly just speculation on my part, and I would be wrong. I know I’ve never been into PC games with a $1000-1500 PC, and I probably would never have done so if that was my handicap.
I’m probably getting emotional here, but it looks as if we’re going to lose an entire generation of would-be PC gamers – at least the kind found in PC builders – to graphics card price inflation. Well, that’s just kind of bad.