I just fear that there's an entire generation of potential PC gamers that are being priced out of a wonderful hobby.

I know I wasn't able to afford a $329 graphics card when I first started getting into PC gaming, and literally no one else I knew growing up could either. And now that we're more than a year past the initial launch of Nvidia Ampere, and we're approaching that for AMD Big Navi, neither of the GPU manufacturers have released a budget GPU. But it felt special because it was nicer than other graphics cards I could have bought at the time.īecause even though the GTX 970 was just as expensive as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is supposed to be today, there was a whole range of graphics cards below it that were more affordable.

I had to save up for months to be able to afford that graphics card, and it was worth it. That was the nicest GPU I'd ever had, and for the first time I was able to max out a Witcher game at launch – hell, it even came with The Witcher 3 (and also Arkham Knight, but we don't talk about that game). In fact, the GPU I have the fondest memories of isn't the RTX 2080 Ti I was eventually able to afford in 2018, but the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970. I've been building my own gaming PC since I was about 15 years old, and the entire time I've never been able to afford a flagship card. If Intel could provide an affordable graphics card, even in the face of the shortage, it could win the GPU market by default. If these leaks are to be believed, showstopping 4K performance won't be Intel's hook, but price might be. This probably won't happen, like, right as Intel's lineup hits the street – it never does – but Intel is going to need a hook to get people to jump on its graphics brand when it was simply never a force in the discrete GPU market before. If the Intel Alchemist flagship only matches the RTX 3070, that means its whole range of GPUs will naturally filter in beneath that performance tier, which is exactly what I want.

Intel new gpu