rmay635703 wrote on 2026-04-06, 17:01:

Agreed and it’s worth noting how we got here, lots of countries made very poor decisions in the past, and have played a role in […]
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Hoping wrote on 2026-04-06, 16:52:

This might not be the right section of the forum. But I suppose there’s only very strict moderation here when it comes to discussing illegal topics. I’d like to think that Vogons is free and apolitical. Anyone can talk about whatever they like; whether they get a reply or not, there’s a section for that. If the topic has come up, it’s because more than one person links what’s happening and being done in a certain country to the current global unrest. In other words, what a certain psychopath does affects the world of computing. For example, the way he attacked Anthropic and how OpenAI caved in. The problem with RAM prices – many of us say it’s down to LLMs.
So, yes, it does affect computers.

Agreed and it’s worth noting how we got here, lots of countries made very poor decisions in the past, and have played a role in moving the bar so extremely low as to allow for the problems affecting us all.

The bright shiny object is just the tip of the iceberg and hides the real source of issues today.

If and when we crawl out there will probably be decades of work to fix what’s broken.

And that includes helium, the situation with that and things as dumb as copper are FAR worse than most folks understand.

Not worried about Helium, its bromine that's the killer most of the worlds supply for electronics comes from Israel, there are other sources but none are of the required purity or quantity for chip fabbing..

And with Israel currently tied up in a war the supply of Bromine is not great, worse than Helium currently.

swaaye wrote on 2026-04-06, 18:13:

It will be interesting to see how the value of RTX 5xxx holds considering DLSS 5 and the neural texture compression being hyped. Both seem likely to need a new architecture to perform.

Nvidia is pushing to have the next gen of GPUs be nothing but AI and neural cores .. zero raster or RT cores, all rendering will be done via the AI with it emulating raster as required.

100% AI hallucination rendering, why bother with real frames when you can have 100% fake ones.

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-04-06, 22:02:

100% AI hallucination rendering, why bother with real frames when you can have 100% fake ones.

ughhh, wonderful <sarc>

Well.. On the more entertaining side of things.... I found an old piece of junk that might be fun to turn into a DOS + NT4 machine in a recent "returned to me" delivery.
Also found some suitable ram for it in the basement at work, that nobody there will ever miss. (It being DDR2 and all. 4gb of it.)

Emachines E1300G. 1.6ghz AM2 Athlon, with nvidia GeForce 6150SE IGP. (which happens to have NT4 drivers in the 77.72 NT4 Geforce pack.)

I might try that out, and see if that hot garbage GPU's OpenGL ICD is up to running Wine's DX libs on NT4. From inital investigations, it's OGL 2.0 ICD, which is "barely enough", so might be fun to try to ham-fist having DX7,8,9 provided by Wine DLLs on actual hardware.

Be a nice break from seeing the prices of DDR4 and DDR5 memory approaching that of a single family home.

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-04-06, 21:59:

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-04-06, 17:01:

Agreed and it’s worth noting how we got here, lots of countries made very poor decisions in the past, and have played a role in […]
Show full quote

Hoping wrote on 2026-04-06, 16:52:

This might not be the right section of the forum. But I suppose there’s only very strict moderation here when it comes to discussing illegal topics. I’d like to think that Vogons is free and apolitical. Anyone can talk about whatever they like; whether they get a reply or not, there’s a section for that. If the topic has come up, it’s because more than one person links what’s happening and being done in a certain country to the current global unrest. In other words, what a certain psychopath does affects the world of computing. For example, the way he attacked Anthropic and how OpenAI caved in. The problem with RAM prices – many of us say it’s down to LLMs.
So, yes, it does affect computers.

Agreed and it’s worth noting how we got here, lots of countries made very poor decisions in the past, and have played a role in moving the bar so extremely low as to allow for the problems affecting us all.

The bright shiny object is just the tip of the iceberg and hides the real source of issues today.

If and when we crawl out there will probably be decades of work to fix what’s broken.

And that includes helium, the situation with that and things as dumb as copper are FAR worse than most folks understand.

And with Israel currently tied up in a war the supply of Bromine is not great, worse than Helium currently.

It’s been a revolving door of shortages of various raw materials for a while.

My concern is less the specific item but the fact we have been hours from the military production act locking down due to dumb shortages.

If that happens on anything things are going to get a lot worse.

They are already hinting there won’t be enough fertilizer supply to fullfill “paid for” supplies in various regions.

Famine hitting randomly changes the math.

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-04-06, 22:33:

It’s been a revolving door of shortages of various raw materials for a while. […]
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Trashbytes wrote on 2026-04-06, 21:59:

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-04-06, 17:01:

Agreed and it’s worth noting how we got here, lots of countries made very poor decisions in the past, and have played a role in […]
Show full quote

Agreed and it’s worth noting how we got here, lots of countries made very poor decisions in the past, and have played a role in moving the bar so extremely low as to allow for the problems affecting us all.

The bright shiny object is just the tip of the iceberg and hides the real source of issues today.

If and when we crawl out there will probably be decades of work to fix what’s broken.

And that includes helium, the situation with that and things as dumb as copper are FAR worse than most folks understand.

And with Israel currently tied up in a war the supply of Bromine is not great, worse than Helium currently.

It’s been a revolving door of shortages of various raw materials for a while.

My concern is less the specific item but the fact we have been hours from the military production act locking down due to dumb shortages.

If that happens on anything things are going to get a lot worse.

They are already hinting there won’t be enough fertilizer supply to fullfill “paid for” supplies in various regions.

Famine hitting randomly changes the math.

When you look back at all teh billionaires building underground bunkers and island fortresses you gotta wonder just who is pulling the strings here to get these wars going. They obviously have a plan and I don't think us plebs are part of it, the mega rich have for a long time wanted to get rid of the middle class.

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-04-06, 22:37:

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-04-06, 22:33:

It’s been a revolving door of shortages of various raw materials for a while. […]
Show full quote

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-04-06, 21:59:

And with Israel currently tied up in a war the supply of Bromine is not great, worse than Helium currently.

It’s been a revolving door of shortages of various raw materials for a while.

My concern is less the specific item but the fact we have been hours from the military production act locking down due to dumb shortages.

If that happens on anything things are going to get a lot worse.

They are already hinting there won’t be enough fertilizer supply to fullfill “paid for” supplies in various regions.

Famine hitting randomly changes the math.

When you look back at all teh billionaires building underground bunkers and island fortresses you gotta wonder just who is pulling the strings here to get these wars going. They obviously have a plan and I don't think us plebs are part of it, the mega rich have for a long time wanted to get rid of the middle class.

Many of the folks who think they are the “in crowd” are going to get completely wiped out.

Most going along with this building bunkers are going to loose the most.

Lots of naivety to the max going around

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2026-04-06, 16:27:

All I can say, is that if and when this situation passes, I'm gonna be stockpiling parts. No more "when I need it" waiting.

There won't be any possibility to stockpile. Artificial scarcity = continuous outrageous prices and no room in the budget for buying extras.

You just have to find the stuff that isn't on everyone else's radar as well. 2008-2016 hardware is looking pretty cheap to me yet. Core 2 might be inching upward because I was buying E8600s for like $16 a few years ago. That could just be due to shipping costs increasing though.

I would say I'm flustered about new hardware being expensive, but then I remember that most of what I'm interested in these days is rather indie. I don't even like the RT and path tracing stuff very much, and I am cool with 60 Hz too! 🤣 VR is the most demanding thing I've been doing in recent years but that is stagnating.

swaaye wrote on 2026-04-07, 03:19:

You just have to find the stuff that isn't on everyone else's radar as well. 2008-2016 hardware is looking pretty cheap to me yet. Core 2 might be inching upward because I was buying E8600s for like $16 a few years ago. That could just be due to shipping costs increasing though.

I would say I'm flustered about new hardware being expensive, but then I remember that most of what I'm interested in these days is rather indie. I don't even like the RT and path tracing stuff very much, and I am cool with 60 Hz too! 🤣 VR is the most demanding thing I've been doing in recent years but that is stagnating.

X58 and X79 / X99 stuff is still cheap and plentiful and the X99 stuff is still more than capable of powering a reasonable system even with a 2000/3000 series RTX GPU in it.

Even better is the X299 stuff, most people ignore it but the 7000 series X299 CPUs and the Xeons are actually very reasonable price wise and you can usually get an entire CPU+Mobo+Ram kits at prices that wont make you upset for having bought it. X299 is still more than capable for everything you might want to use it for, I run a X299 system and it handles everything just fine, even handles Crimson Desert with the 5060Ti I threw in it.

Plenty of older stuff out there worth a look if you want something a little more modern, like older Ryzen B350/B450 kits or the older Intel 11th and 12th gen setups both of which support TMP2 if that's your thing and both of which are not priced at eye watering prices.

As for GPUs .. if you dont want to pay high prices but still want something modern the Intel ARC GPUs are worth a look at, they are not priced stupidly like AMD or Nvidia.

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-04-07, 04:48:

As for GPUs .. if you dont want to pay high prices but still want something modern the Intel ARC GPUs are worth a look at, they are not priced stupidly like AMD or Nvidia.

I'm not sure about Intel ARC series. IIRC those Intel video cards implement only the most current graphics standards, and rely on first-party (D3D9on12) or third-party wrappers for older stuffs.

LSS10999 wrote on 2026-04-07, 07:50:

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-04-07, 04:48:

As for GPUs .. if you dont want to pay high prices but still want something modern the Intel ARC GPUs are worth a look at, they are not priced stupidly like AMD or Nvidia.

I'm not sure about Intel ARC series. IIRC those Intel video cards implement only the most current graphics standards, and rely on first-party (D3D9on12) or third-party wrappers for older stuffs.

My post was about modern hardware that is still more than capable for current day stuff and tends to get looked over but wont make you cry at the checkout, if you want a GPU for older DX9/DX10 stuff then you cant go past the old reliable GTX 1080Ti or GTX Titan X and neither is that expensive now, they both have ample VRam to play with too*. Personally I grabbed a GTX 1660Ti which is a great little GPU for DX9/DX10 stuff but they still fetch a bit secondhand.

You can if you want something from team red you can grab a RX580 or 5700XT.

*Picked the Titan X over the 980Ti as the 980 is limited to 6gb of Vram which limits what you can do with it with more modern software.

ARC requires ReBAR and 100% compatible UEFI or you get instability and problems. Many old boards have wonky UEFI and no ReBAR. Also, basic ARC cards are hard to find and have been discontinued, as Intel advances their GPUs.

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-04-06, 22:02:

100% AI hallucination rendering, why bother with real frames when you can have 100% fake ones.

Something I was wondering about is the use of generative AI for rendering also means that output images may be inconsistent over time. If the AI algorithms or data set is continuously updated, it may generate different imagery each time one does a playthrough.

We may not even be able to get a consistent experience.

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2026-04-06, 16:27:

All I can say, is that if and when this situation passes, I'm gonna be stockpiling parts. No more "when I need it" waiting.

Same. I adopted this approach a couple years ago when I noticed certain hardware would stop being manufactured and sold.

For instance, I stocked up on cheap 128GB SSD drives because I assumed they might stop being available. What I didn't expect was their price to go up by 250%.

Adding Rebar to an AMI BIOS isn’t particularly difficult, and fairly common, although the result depends heavily on the motherboard. I added Rebar to two X99 motherboards, on one, it worked without any issues, whilst on the other, the display was lost until the OS booted up, even though Rebar worked on both. On a Z270, whether or not the display remained visible in the BIOS until boot-up depended on the graphics card.

Shponglefan wrote on 2026-04-07, 14:02:

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2026-04-06, 16:27:

All I can say, is that if and when this situation passes, I'm gonna be stockpiling parts. No more "when I need it" waiting.

Same. I adopted this approach a couple years ago when I noticed certain hardware would stop being manufactured and sold.

For instance, I stocked up on cheap 128GB SSD drives because I assumed they might stop being available. What I didn't expect was their price to go up by 250%.

I just noticed the same 4TB Samsung 990 Pro is now $1000 and I paid $300 for it last July. Holy crap. Did price increases hit SSDs worse than RAM?

sunkindly wrote on 2026-04-19, 16:19:

Shponglefan wrote on 2026-04-07, 14:02:

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2026-04-06, 16:27:

All I can say, is that if and when this situation passes, I'm gonna be stockpiling parts. No more "when I need it" waiting.

Same. I adopted this approach a couple years ago when I noticed certain hardware would stop being manufactured and sold.

For instance, I stocked up on cheap 128GB SSD drives because I assumed they might stop being available. What I didn't expect was their price to go up by 250%.

I just noticed the same 4TB Samsung 990 Pro is now $1000 and I paid $300 for it last July. Holy crap. Did price increases hit SSDs worse than RAM?

Yes, because the AI bros need Nand storage for some reason, the likely reason is hoarding of current supply as the Fabs are not producing as much Nand as HBM is worth more and both ICs require the same production lines and materials to produce.

sunkindly wrote on 2026-04-19, 16:19:

I just noticed the same 4TB Samsung 990 Pro is now $1000 and I paid $300 for it last July. Holy crap. Did price increases hit SSDs worse than RAM?

I've been tracking price increases since I did my PC upgrade last September. As of right now, the RAM I bought increased 300%, while SSD costs went up 250%.

So while SSDs increases aren't quite as bad as RAM, they are still ridiculously high.

It's wild to me that the upgrade I did last Sept would cost twice as much today just because of RAM and SSD increases. 😳

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-04-20, 00:13:

sunkindly wrote on 2026-04-19, 16:19:

Shponglefan wrote on 2026-04-07, 14:02:

Same. I adopted this approach a couple years ago when I noticed certain hardware would stop being manufactured and sold.

For instance, I stocked up on cheap 128GB SSD drives because I assumed they might stop being available. What I didn't expect was their price to go up by 250%.

I just noticed the same 4TB Samsung 990 Pro is now $1000 and I paid $300 for it last July. Holy crap. Did price increases hit SSDs worse than RAM?

Yes, because the AI bros need Nand storage for some reason, the likely reason is hoarding of current supply as the Fabs are not producing as much Nand as HBM is worth more and both ICs require the same production lines and materials to produce.

More than likely they reserved more than they actually need considering they can't power on whatever data centers they currently have while building so many more...

Anyway, it should also be added that HDD prices are getting silly at this point, and there's been some rumblings regarding CPU supply every now and then. Some GPU price increases, but not too bad all things considered. For now, at least.

This is the time to enjoy what you have. And to take very good care of it.