MEDIUM WELL DONE

GPU upgrades aren't coming soon—time to make peace with average performance

- Phil Iwaniuk

Here are three things that recently happened to me: Until Dawn released in remastered form for PC. NBA 2K25 happened. Nvidia launched its new generation of GPUs, but then forgot to manufacture any. To the untrained eye, these might appear to be unrelated, but I see them for what they are, a triumvirate of conspirators hellbent on forcing me to come to terms with playing things at 40fps and/ or some graphics options turned down to medium.

Supermassive's interactive teen slasher flick was never exactly esports-grade optimized over on PlayStation, so I shouldn't have been surprised that my RTX 2080 Ti would have its work cut out to render all those snowy footprints and blood smears at max settings. This alone would not have been a significant event.

For NBA 2K's part, it's not that the pixel fidelity's screaming out 'I need absolutely all your CUDA cores!' when it hits my monitor. It just... doesn't run very well. Some say it's about the DRM. Whatever the root cause, it's pretty hard to nail those perfect jumpshot releases when the game freezes this often.

My plan was to finally retire the long-serving 2080 Ti and buy a 5090. That was before the benchmarks landed, and the focus was placed so squarely on multi-frame gen. And, of course, before UK retailers were reporting single figure stocks of the card at launch.