How The Graphics Card Market Actually Works

Nothing will drive you to the brink of madness faster than trying to install Nvidia drivers on Linux. What should be a simple task becomes a descent into dependency hell, kernel module nightmares, and cryptic error messages that make you question your life choices. The true origin story of every supervillain isn't childhood trauma—it's just a sysadmin who tried to get CUDA working on Ubuntu.

The joke that never gets old, unlike your GPU! When Nvidia "displays their entire stock" of RTX 3080s in 2020, they're literally showing the ONE card they had available. Four years later and we're still experiencing the same supply chain theater - fancy press releases followed by six months of "out of stock" notifications. Scalpers continue to be the real GPU architects, designing elaborate systems to separate you from your money while you desperately try to run Cyberpunk above 30fps. The crypto bros may have moved on, but somehow graphics cards remain as elusive as documentation that actually matches the codebase.

Who needs sketchy "Download More RAM" websites when Windows lets you create a 600GB paging file? For the uninitiated, a paging file is Windows' way of pretending your slow hard drive is actually RAM when you run out of the real thing. It's like replacing your sports car with a tricycle but insisting it's the same thing. The joke here is that someone's setting up a massive virtual memory file and calling it "600 Gb of RAM for free!!?" – as if they've discovered some brilliant hack, when they're actually just creating the computing equivalent of writing IOU notes to yourself. Your computer will technically function, but it'll run with all the speed and grace of a sloth swimming through molasses. But hey, at least the Task Manager will be impressed!

When your high-end AMD Ryzen 7 1800X decides it's too good for benchmarking software. Nothing says "professional computing experience" quite like your PC literally calling itself ass and rage-quitting the benchmark. The error message wasn't programmed by developers—it was written by the computer's bruised ego after seeing its own performance metrics. That AMD chip has 8 cores but apparently zero chill.

THE ABSOLUTE HORROR of admitting you're still using an HDD in 2023! Everyone GASPS! The room falls SILENT! Your developer friends look at you with such PITY and DISGUST, like you just confessed to coding in Notepad or still using Internet Explorer! DARLING, the loading times! THE LOADING TIMES! How do you even FUNCTION waiting those EXCRUCIATING extra seconds for your IDE to open?! It's basically technological TORTURE at this point! Next thing you'll tell me is that you don't have RGB lighting on your keyboard either! *faints dramatically*

The eternal hardware arms race strikes again! Console gamers (depicted as happy little Squirtles) are devastated when a game is next-gen only, meaning they need to shell out $500 for a new console. Meanwhile, PC gamers are practically having a Victorian death scene when a new game requires RTX GPUs - because that's not just $500, that's potentially $1500+ for a graphics card that's perpetually "out of stock" or "slightly cheaper than a kidney on the black market." The irony? Both groups will still find a way to buy the hardware while complaining about ramen dinners for the next six months.