There's a drought in Taiwan right now too, and semiconductor manufacturing is a water-intensive process.uziq wrote:
the whole semiconductor supply chain was fucked by the pandemic, afaik. cryto mining is definitely a big factor in the price gouging but ...
i think like 60% of all the world's semiconductors comes from one company in taiwan. not only have they had interruptions due to covid, but also entire production lines had to be torn down and set-up again to cope with shifting demand during the pandemic. and that includes catering to demands for semiconductors in things like cars or white appliances, not just GPUs.
due to the nature of the manufacturing, it's not easy to start-and-stop production on highly sensitive semiconductors. some of the major manufacturers have been trying to pivot to other semiconductor applications in response to pandemic demand shifts (cars, white goods, pc parts, etc) and it takes a significant amount of time and investment each time to do so.
perfect storm. no GPU or modern game is worth $2000. zero.
good point about the drought and water resources. didn't think of that. it really is a perfect storm ... climate change, pandemic, supply chain management ...KEN-JENNINGS wrote:
There's a drought in Taiwan right now too, and semiconductor manufacturing is a water-intensive process.uziq wrote:
the whole semiconductor supply chain was fucked by the pandemic, afaik. cryto mining is definitely a big factor in the price gouging but ...
i think like 60% of all the world's semiconductors comes from one company in taiwan. not only have they had interruptions due to covid, but also entire production lines had to be torn down and set-up again to cope with shifting demand during the pandemic. and that includes catering to demands for semiconductors in things like cars or white appliances, not just GPUs.
due to the nature of the manufacturing, it's not easy to start-and-stop production on highly sensitive semiconductors. some of the major manufacturers have been trying to pivot to other semiconductor applications in response to pandemic demand shifts (cars, white goods, pc parts, etc) and it takes a significant amount of time and investment each time to do so.
perfect storm. no GPU or modern game is worth $2000. zero.
Most of my company's chip suppliers are quoting 52 week plus lead times to us right now. Some are quoting 78 weeks. And we are probably in the top 5 customers for non-memory suppliers.
This kind of thing happens when the prevailing philosophy of global supply chain management is driven primarily by financial concerns. Lean manufacturing is basic financial risk management and the reality is no amount of forecasting can accurately predict market demand well enough to properly account for dips and surges, no matter how much data you feed the models.
Yup.but transitioning hell-hole emissions factories like the LA road system to public/green transport is probably a better idea than limiting the max PSU size on some teenager's Fortnite rig from 1100W to 750W or whatever.
Some of that is in consoles too. Cash shop, micro, f2p/p2skip, but in addition to annual fee for online play. Day 1 patches, pay to beta test. Multiplatform games that come early access on PC can be available in a console's online store. 7 Days to Die was on console ages ago before development for that was more or less shuttered with focus moved purely to the PC version (which btw is still in alpha).uziq wrote:
these prices are here to stay, imo.
hugely inflated hardware costs + current-gen games basically being published with a model of 'you pay for the alpha version and we'll maybe finish the game at some point in the future. oh by the way: cash shop and microtransactions' signals a death knell for PC gaming.
These full machines go for like $199. Can't beat that.Dilbert_X wrote:
You can buy kits which will let you build any arcade game you want for peanuts.
https://diyarcade.com.au/
3000 games in one rig - A$400 all you need is a box and a monitor
Really depends on a lot.uziq wrote:
there’s something really tacky about arcade machines to me. i guess i can’t dissociate them from their usual environment with the smell of body odour and sticky floors. no chance do i want that loud, garish shit in my house.
it’s like an essential man cave item. cant all those games be played on an emulator with a USB game pad?
