The Great GPU Price Mirage

So you spent three weeks learning trigonometry, diving into DDA algorithms, and debugging why your walls look like a Salvador Dalí painting, only to realize John Carmack did this in 1992 on hardware that had less computing power than your smart toaster. And he did it while probably eating pizza and writing assembly like it was a casual Tuesday. The "box of triangles" bit hits different when you realize modern game engines abstract all this pain away with their fancy rendering pipelines, but back then? Carmack was literally casting rays and doing trigonometric calculations per pixel to fake 3D in Wolfenstein 3D. No GPU acceleration, no Unity, no "just import Three.js"—just raw math and the will to make demons shootable. Meanwhile, you're here in 2024 with Stack Overflow, ChatGPT, and 64GB of RAM, still struggling to get your raycaster to not crash when you look at a corner. Humbling stuff.

The PC hardware market is basically a self-destructive ouroboros at this point. Steam releases a new hardware category, and instead of celebrating innovation, the entire industry collectively panics and implodes like a poorly optimized recursive function with no base case. RAM prices skyrocket? Check. SSD manufacturers forming cartels? Check. Nvidia treating GPU pricing like it's a cryptocurrency bubble? Double check. And now Steam drops literally anything new into the ecosystem and suddenly manufacturers are cutting production, prices are collapsing, and everyone's wondering if they should've just stuck with console gaming. It's like the hardware industry has the stability of a production server running on untested code at 3 AM on a Friday. One small change and the whole thing goes down harder than a null pointer exception.

OH. MY. GOD. The slurpee machine is literally having an existential crisis right now! Instead of serving up that sweet, sweet Mountain Dew, it's spewing out raw BIOS errors like it's having the digital equivalent of food poisoning! 💀 That error dump is the machine's way of screaming "I CANNOT EVEN RIGHT NOW!" The caption is pure gold - "bro I'm getting the BIOS flavor" - as if the machine decided debugging itself was more important than quenching someone's thirst. Honestly, I'd pay extra for a cup of pure, unfiltered computer anxiety. For the uninitiated: BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) is the firmware that runs when you first boot up a computer. Seeing it on a slurpee machine means something has gone CATASTROPHICALLY wrong. It's like ordering a coffee and watching the barista have a complete mental breakdown instead.

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!

Back in the day, game devs were out here coding ENTIRE ROLLERCOASTER TYCOONS in Assembly language like absolute psychopaths, fitting shooters into 97KB (yes, KILOBYTES), and somehow making games run on potatoes while also having bodies that could bench press a small car. They were built different, both literally and figuratively. Fast forward to now and we've got AAA studios crying about how they can't fix bugs because someone's allegedly stealing breast milk (?!), shipping 50GB games that require another 50GB day-one patch, telling you to buy a NASA-grade PC just so their unoptimized mess doesn't crash every 5 minutes, and blaming YOU—the player—for their always-online singleplayer game being broken. The devolution is REAL and it's SPECTACULAR in the worst way possible. We went from "I made this masterpiece fit on a floppy disk" to "Sorry, the game is 200GB and still doesn't work, also here's $70 worth of microtransactions." The bar went from the moon straight to the Earth's core.

Ah, Maslow's hierarchy of needs has been updated for the modern developer! Forget food and shelter—we've all collectively decided that affordable GPUs are the foundation of human existence. When your RTX 4090 costs more than your monthly rent, self-actualization becomes irrelevant. How can anyone achieve psychological stability when they're selling kidneys on the black market just to run machine learning models or play Cyberpunk at max settings? The crypto miners and AI boom have spoken—true enlightenment begins with affordable silicon. Everything else is just a luxury.