I grew up on PC games. I didn’t own a game console until the Sony PlayStation 3 when I was in my late twenties. But between the bitcoin mining craze, a global pandemic, and the AI boom, the price of building a PC — in particular the cost of a graphics card or GPU — has ballooned so much that it’s much cheaper to start gaming on a console nowadays.
Take the recent launch of AMD’s latest Radeon RX 9070 series of graphics cards, for example. It’s the latest attempt by AMD to dethrone market leader Nvidia in the “mid-range segment”, with the GPUs starting at a MSRP of US$549. While the reviews for the RX 9070 cards have been glowing, and positive, there are caveats like “if supply is good”.
And that’s the crux of it. GPUs have been stymied by supply issues for a while now. They are difficult to make — the latest ones use a 4nm manufacturing process that can only …
