Even The Used Market Is Getting Expensive

The eternal dev cycle of adulthood: First, you fantasize about building that ultimate gaming rig with liquid cooling and RGB everything. Then you meticulously install 17 different launchers (Steam, Epic, GOG, Origin, Ubisoft Connect...) because each one has that one exclusive you absolutely need. Next, you frantically buy games during every sale because "80% off is basically free money." Finally, the crushing reality hits - you spend your precious free time scrolling through your 300+ game library for 45 minutes before giving up and watching YouTube videos about games instead.

The GPU shortage has driven us to new lows. Someone thought they scored an RTX 2080 graphics card for under $10, but ended up with... toothpaste. The "Power Shield" is protecting your teeth, not your frame rates. At least your breath will render in 4K while you're sobbing over crypto miners buying actual GPUs at 300% markup. The only ray tracing this provides is the trail of mint as you spit it into the sink.

Oh sweet digital victory! This meme is playing with the file extension .asm (assembly code files) and how it looks suspiciously like another word that rhymes with "enthusiasm." 😏 When your assembly code finally compiles after hours of bit-twiddling madness, that feeling is basically the programmer's equivalent of... well, pure ecstasy! Anyone who's ever wrestled with low-level programming knows that moment when your assembly finally works is basically a religious experience. The compiler gods have smiled upon you!

DARLING, it's the TRAGEDY of our TIMES! There you are, clutching your ancient GTX 1080 Ti like it's the last slice of pizza at a hackathon, peering through the blinds at the ray-tracing elite playing DOOM with their fancy-schmancy GPUs! The AUDACITY of game developers requiring hardware from this DECADE! Meanwhile, you're over there convincing yourself that Minecraft's blocky graphics are "an artistic choice" and that frame rates above 30 are "just showing off." The digital equivalent of watching the cool kids' party from outside while pretending you didn't want to go anyway! But honey, keep huffing that copium - those 2012 indie games aren't going to play themselves! 💅

Nvidia's gone from "graphics card company" to "AI overlord" so fast that gamers are getting dumped like last year's Steam sale impulse buys. Remember when GPUs were for rendering Skyrim mods? Now they're calculating the probability of human extinction while costing more than your first car. The relationship status between gamers and Nvidia has officially changed to "it's complicated" – or rather, "it's computing" the next trillion-parameter model. Your RTX 4090 isn't rendering Cyberpunk anymore; it's rendering humanity obsolete.

The AUDACITY of modern game devs! Back in the golden era, we had absolute LEGENDS writing entire rendering pipelines IN ASSEMBLY like some kind of coding demigods! Meanwhile, today's devs are just throwing 999 dynamic lights and a MILLION blades of grass into their games, then having the NERVE to wonder why their masterpiece runs at a pathetic 20FPS on a $1500 graphics card! But don't worry, sweetie! DLSS will magically fix your horrifically optimized code! Because who needs actual optimization when you can just let AI upscale your disaster?! The optimization apocalypse is upon us!