Talking about 400$ gpus as budget is the problem with today’s market. My whole set up down to monitor and peripherals was maybe 850 bucks, for reference my last car was a grand. Spending 1500 plus to have a PC set up is insane to me.

It's a crazy world, but unfortunately the market is how it is, and the AI Boom...ubble is making it a lot worse.

By sales volume, despite their price hikes, the various skus are getting similar to their prior number spreads. You'd think something like the 5090 would be getting half the sales of the 5080, and the 5080 half the sales of the 5070ti and so on and so forth (not quite following that steep an increase) but they aren't, at least according to steam survey results and then you have to remember a bunch of 5090s are going straight off to AI racks.

Basically what I'm saying is... they price at what the market can bear (roughly, as of course AI skus the optimization math).

I think one economic theory Ive seen that seems plausible, is that many who would otherwise be saving up for houses have given up and buy the small luxuries to make life less shit.

Also find it ironic your crying about drivers for the rx6600

Why be incendiary/hostile about... I'm not even sure what, on a hardware forum post discussing a company's anti consumer practices???

You think I care about other consumers purely out of self interest? Maybe you think I'm an AMD fanatic? My current GPUs are a RX 580 (In a linux box), RTX 4070 and RTX 5090, and I've had an Intel A770 too. I have no allegiances.

that while technically a faster card, is regularly out performed by the rx6600 due to superior driver support.

I specifically listed that this was for new cards at the budget end. The 6600 is a gen old and may be out of production.

Also the B580, especially now, is definitely faster (6600 was only 3/4ths as powerful at launch).