How concerned should I be about the latest PC parts shortages?

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So I’m sure many of you here read a lot of PC tech/gaming news, similar to me, and noticed an uptick in doom-and-gloom articles regarding RAM prices and companies like Micron simply deciding to no longer sell their wares to consumers for the painfully-straightforward and capitalist reason that they make far, far more money from multibillion dollar AI corporations than they could ever make from us “little people.”

I would like perspectives on this from people here who come across as more…experienced…who have “been around the block” regarding 3D art far longer than I have…okay, fine, 3D artists who are older and thus have likely experienced something like this many times before and won’t resort to the “doomerism” that a lot of Internet users younger and less experienced than even me tend to default to.

Is this really as “unprecedented” as websites like 80.lv, Creativebloq and PC World or PC Gamer are making it out to be, or is this just something 3D artists have always had to deal with and we’ll just have to deal with again?

Admittedly, I’m skeptical of all the “RAM-pocalypse” talk myself because it seems like we’ve ALWAYS had some sort of chip shortage or rise in electricity prices since I started paying attention around 2014, and yet somehow we’ve always managed and continued to buy the latest and greatest hardware we could afford–personally, the laptop I’m typing on right now is equipped with a mobile RTX 3060 and 16 GB of RAM (the AMD CPU isn’t really anything to write home about, CPU-only Cycles rendering is actually a smidge faster on my Steam Deck, of all things, but it gets the job done) that I arguably over-paid for during the 2021 chip and GPU shortages–just replace the current situation of “Generative AI data centers devouring the world’s RAM supplies with no happy ending for us ‘plebs’ in the near future” with “Crypto miners devouring the world’s GPU supplies with no happy ending for us ‘plebs’ in the near future.” I could have sworn we were freaking out about tariffs and GPU shortages earlier in the past year. It seems if I want to continue to do 3D art in Blender even as a mere hobby, I just need to accept the fact that I have to pay more than everyone else for decent hardware and live more modestly in other areas of my life to afford it.

If many of the “worst-case-scenarios” being posited by the media–the RAM shortages lasting well into the 2030’s, NVidia dropping out of the gaming/3D rendering market entirely just to exclusively sell to AI companies, AI making even hobbyist 3D/digital art no longer worth the effort, or God forbid, my current laptop dying on me within the next year even though it seems to have no real problems other than the battery is dead (which always tends to happen to laptop batteries after 3 or 4 years of constant use and charging) and I use it plugged-in at all times now–my second question is this:

How can I ensure my almost 5-year-old laptop lives and functions properly for gaming and Blender Cycles rendering for at least a couple more years?

Even before I got into playing modern-ish, more intensive PC games and Blender, I feel like I’ve never been very good at preserving my hardware, laptop or desktop, and may need extra advice on how to make my stuff last for more than 5 years. I do NOT want to upgrade my hardware this year, or possibly the next, and it probably would be good practice for me as an environmentalist-type anyway to learn to make my purchases last a decade instead of merely a half-decade.

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It is indeed unprecedented. No one has ever seen anything like this before. As the ancient curse says- “may you live in interesting times”

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As far as coping techniques go:
Be Patient - Don’t rush to buy the latest and greatest. a 5 year old computer is still perfectly capable. you might need to drop the resolution a bit in newer games or live with the fps sometimes hitting 40, but it will be fine. I just replaced my laptop that had a Gtx 970m in it. I’m not a hardcore gamer, but I could play games on it. I could run blender just fine on it. I have a new laptop now with a 4070, and it is certainly faster, but not lifechangingly so.

Be careful with the laptop you have, especially the power connector. Your battery will fade over time and eventually it may fail entirely. but as long as that power connector is still going strong, you can just keep it plugged in. Don’t drop it, or spill things in it. Treat it like it would cost $3000 to replace it. Consider your thermals, I prop my laptop up on two narrow scraps of plywood to give it breathing room for the cooling system to work more effectively. hot hardware dies faster.

If you do need to replace it, look around for used hardware. Buy something midrange and 1 or 2 generations old.

Learn optimization techniques. Reduce the demand on your hardware as much as possible, and it doesn’t matter if it isn’t state of the art.

There was a Great Depression era motto that got our grand parents and great grandparents through unprecedented times as well: Use it up, Wear it out, Make do, or Do without. the same applies here.

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You can’t predict when your computer will break. The way I go around this is with frequent backups of my projects on an external storage. I spent 7 years with my old computer and recently replaced it when it broke. I lost nothing as I had been keeping up with my backups well.

I got a pretty good price for my new computer. I don’t know if I got lucky and got it just in time, but the fact I didn’t go for the craziest system might have something to do with it.

There can seem to be some pressure to go for the expensive options in Blender communities. If you ask which system you should go for, you will be told that bigger is better. While that is true, I find that going for something a bit less crazy with a good price to quality ratio is perfectly fine if you know even the slightest bit about optimizing your scenes.

Maybe it’s easy for me to say this because I learnt years ago on much weaker computers, but lots of beginners in the Blender community have never had to learn how to work lightly and think you need the biggest possible GPU and 64 GB of RAM. My previous computer had 16 GB like your current system and I never filled it: even 16 is actually a pretty big amount if you don’t do something silly (and you would have problems well before reaching it anyway, as your GPU would give up first when it’s full).

The sudden price increase is unusual, but RAM used to be much more expensive. People started putting 32 GB as a standard amount in the last few years because of how cheap it had gotten. There used to be a time when that amount would seem ridiculous. The average computer user will only use a small fraction of it and even the average Blender user doesn’t come close to needing that (unless they are a noob and are using crazy polygon counts and texture resolutions that are way overkill).

Just a bit of speculation here, I don’t know if I’m right. I could see this situation ending either with AI companies eventually switching to dedicated AI chips, or with software improvements greatly reducing the need for massive data centers.

AI is currently built largely on gaming hardware and this happened as a bit of a coincidence. The same parts that are mass produced for consumers turned out to be able to run it, but this isn’t efficient. The current hardware is the reason AI needs ever increasing amounts of electricity to run and this isn’t going to be sustainable to keep scaling up in the short to medium term (so there are lots of incentives to solve this).

If chips that were actually designed for AI were the standard way, they would work much more efficiently and the consumer hardware wouldn’t be as attractive. It could also turn out that there is a much more efficient way to do AI on the software side of things, which could make the current building craze seem silly.

If either or both of those things happen though, AI probably will instantly get multiple times stronger and it’s very hard to tell what kind of world that creates.

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I was hoping for something more reassuring, but oh well. At least I frequently back up my current projects in case of the worst case scenario on external hard drives, and I’ve been learning new optimization techniques for my scenes in the past year, particularly by practicing 3D on my phone via Nomad or Valence3D. If I could make something decent-looking on my even-older phone without bells and whistles like path tracing or dynamic shadows, then I should be able to make lighter scenes on my computer as well.

It’s the attitude of “oh, we don’t need to sell to consumers anymore, their money is just a drop in the ocean compared to multibillion-dollar AI startups” that concerns me the most about this latest chip shortage. Like, they CAN increase production of consumer-grade RAM, they just don’t want to because our money is no longer valuable to them, is what I’m seeing with the likes of Micron abandoning the consumer market entirely.

It’s like when Maya or the Adobe Creative Suites pretended their switch to a subscription-based model was an attempt to get more indies and hobbyists using their software, with Maya even going as far as to create a separate “Maya Indie” license, but they seemed to have abandoned such a pretense, ended initiatives like “Maya Indie,” and quickly increased their subscription prices back to the point where only major studios that were already locked into their software suites could possibly justify the monthly costs. At least we have FOSS alternatives like Blender and Krita to fill the void left by the major companies abandoning all pretense of caring about less-wealthy potential customers, as of now it looks like I have no alternative if my current setup dies, or I may only afford a computer that is actually in some ways slower and less capable than what I have now.

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One interesting thing I’ve considered lately is studying textures and UV Maps from older video games on the “Textures Resource” website (a spin-off of my beloved Spriter’s Resource website from childhood, and apparently currently owned by the Did You Know Gaming YouTube channel).

I specifically focus on games from Japanese studios like Nintendo or Squaresoft/Square Enix, since Eastern studios and companies seem to take optimization a bit more seriously (or at least they have in the past–glares at recent Capcom games like Monster Hunter Wilds and Dragon’s Dogma 2)–for example, only painting one half of the texture, and then mirroring it on both sides of the model so that, for instance, a 256x256 texture essentially looks more like a doubly-sharp 512 x 512 texture in a way. A lot of relatively-modern games on the PS4 and Switch 1 still seem to still use compressed 1K textures, showing you don’t really need to go beyond 1K textures so long as you use the UV map space efficiently, even nowadays.

Squaresoft, and later Square Enix, particularly seemed to consistently perform visual miracles on the PS1 and Nintendo DS–turns out, unless I’m working on a project that HAS to be state-of-the-art and photorealistic, I don’t need a ton of fancy modern post-processing effects, I just need to get better at painting lighting, shadows and detail the same way SE’s artists crammed so much painterly lighting and shadow effects in their 128x128 textures in games like Final Fantasy IX, Chrono Cross and Final Fantasy IV Remake (DS). And since I mostly work alone, it’s probably asking too much of myself to make something as state-of-the-art as you see in Hollywood movies, anyway.

Speaking of older games, I don’t think you have to worry about me pushing my laptop with the latest AA or AAA games anymore–besides doing all my gaming on a separate PS5 or Steam Deck these days, I feel I am already getting rather jaded by modern games that prioritize shiny graphics over simply being fun and running well, and typically favor smaller indie games these days. My favorite games from the past year are Megabonk, which I actually play on the lowest settings possible on my Steam Deck to get more battery and play time out of it (it’s THAT addictive) and Deltarune, which, outside of a certain trippy effect in Chapter 4 so far, isn’t even a 3D game for the most part.

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Im my opinion - it is a unprecedented for sure. Is the situation
There was always some fluctuation in prices, shortages, but not even close to current situation. Is this a new reality and not just a temporary situation - i dont think so, but the question is how fast it will settle down.
The only most similar situation i may remember are covid times. I was build a new PC right at the door of covid and remember all the shortages, increases in prices in some local shops, but really tiny, i was able to notice it only because i was monitoring the prices. But that was different. Suppliers companys was more that happy to flood market again. Now part of those companys related to RAM - no longer care about customer market.
I was planning a platform upgrade in 2026, but prices for 64gig of ram… I have no idea for how long i would need to delayed this plans now.

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I would say there is more evidence of this being an unprecedented shortage and possibly a paradigm shift than something temporary or observed before.

The financial incentives are overwhelmingly skewed towards AI/server market. The new customers, that are corporate and government entities, have bottomless pockets (often funded by tax payers). The consumer can no longer compete. This is evident by Micron abandoning 30% of the market share, or Nvidia only making around 5-7% of their earnings from gaming hardware.

Consumer and AI/server needs do not align anymore and given the financial incentive, more and more RND will be focused to serve the more profitable customer. Previous shortages like the mining were in part consumer driven. Apart from industrial scale farms, there were plenty independents running a dozen GPU operation. The hardware that served miners and gamers were the same. It is no longer the case. AI is done by server grade GPUs and ASICS, using specialized memory.

There are talks of this AI rush being a bubble, but that is most likely false. AI can be seen as infrastructure for the world of the future. We are seeing increasing digitalization of everyday lives even now. Governments are working on digital IDs, digital currencies, digital services, increased surveillance, etc. All of which is data that will be stored and processed. There may come a time where a person will have no choice but to pay for these services, directly or indirectly, just to participate in society.

AI can also be seen as arms race between various nations. A relevant global player like the USA, or China, or Russia, or India, simply cannot afford to be left behind in this race as that will lower their standing in global power order.

There are various reports here and there that hint towards a transformation of consumer hardware. Smartphone manufacturers, for example, are allegedly scaling back on RAM and storage for future models. Both Nvidia and AMD are floating ideas of cancelling lower end hardware and increasing the prices of the remaining SKUs. Over time this could phase out DIY market and leave us with pre-built machines from corporations like Dell, Apple, etc. Worst case scenario, these machines will be low powered and rely heavily on the Cloud.

Looking at the short to medium term future, I would asses the state of the hardware I own, its condition and performance. There are ways to extend the life of what you own by optimizing your scenes and avoiding overheating. You could also offload some of the workload to a slave machine. There are deals to be had on refurbished workstations on eBay. Add a second hand GPU and you have a capable renderer for not a lot of money.

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And, if I may add, “don’t buy into the ‘A.I.’ hype.” This is just a wet-dream of hardware manufacturers. (And maybe also, “electric power companies.”) These are “Wall Street speculators” who really don’t know what they’re talking about – and, really don’t care. Their “next big thing,” which they are always mindlessly chasing, could just as easily be a brand-new variety of cabbage.

You probably don’t remember “Y2K,” which was the previous “computer-industry hype,” but it’s pretty much all the same. (It sure was a royal pain-in-the-ass for me!)

Furthermore, Chinese researchers recently developed some very significant (power and resource-saving) improvements to commonly used algorithms, and published them as open source. So, I say, just sit back, grab popcorn, and relax.

If you “chase the ‘latest hardware,’” you’ll wind up falling down in the snow. No point in doing that. Remember also that the people who will want to run your work-products certainly don’t have “latest hardware,” either!

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Hate to tell you this, but the ‘GPUs’ Nvidia are selling to the data centers more or less are dedicated AI chips. That’s what the tensor cores are.

No they aren’t and no, it wasn’t. Nvidia placed bets many years ago on ‘AI’ being a thing and they design/create there GPU architecture for data center ‘servers’ and then cut it down for the rest of us. Then based on that hardware, built out a software stack for gaming (graphics), hence DLSS that uses the same AI that is in the data centers running LLM’s.

Here’s another view of how bad it can get: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUrJVdF2me0

Do you believe in God? If so, start praying.

But really, it could all work just fine for another 5 years, or it could die tomorrow, you just never know. As pointed out, heat isn’t good (so keeping things somewhat cool is nice, along with dust free), but it’s a laptop, so only so much you can do.

The problem is it doesn’t matter if you or I buy the hype or not, Big Tech and the money is, so as long as that’s the case, we get screwed over either way.

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Very true. AI as a speculative investment only pays off if it will effectively displace as many workers as possible. Then and only then will the trillions of dollars invested into it pay off for those investors. If it doesn’t make enough workers unemployed, the stock prices will tank and the AI/Tech sector will drag down every sector with it, making lots of workers unemployed.

Either way, a lot of people are going to lose their livelihoods, so it’s a real Aliens Vs Predator situation. Being able to afford RAM doesn’t really matter when you can’t afford food.

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Nicely said.

As to the original thought - you know, I’m just not on the doom train with the RAM scenario. I’m old enough to have worked on systems that the major spec was measured in megabytes. And RAM was hell freaking expensive back then, not even accounting for inflation.

The PC i’m typing this on will - assuming no hardware failure - be quite sufficient for the next 5 years, easily. When 2030 arrives, that’s when I’ll decide if the RAM crises still is, and that’s when I’ll care about what I need to do about it.

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We used to dream of megabytes…
(apologies to the Four Yorkshiremen)

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We dreamed of megabytes, and the 640x480 renders took 5-20 minutes a frame.

And someone mentioned Covid - yeah, that just happened. Remember when a midrange GPU sold for… well, actually… didn’t matter what it sold for. You probably couldn’t even find one. I can buy a 5070ti NOW for $850 USD. People dreamed of that sort of thing in 2021. Only reason I haven’t is that it wouldn’t benefit me much at all.

I’m not trying to sound like “oh, kids today don’t know how bad things can be” - but rather, embrace the tools you have now and take a moment to appreciate what you can do with them. Scene doesn’t fit in your RAM, your GPU? Optimize it. Use view layers, multiple passes. Make it work.

Spend your mental energy there, not on worrying about PC parts shortages.

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I don’t think it’s the end of the world. RAM is not something I buy often, I can wait a few years. And since I am waiting a few years, I can save a few hundred euros even if it doesn’t get cheaper. I need a computer for work. It’s not like it costs more than what I earn from having one…

On the other hand the demand increased. It doesn’t matter why, but humanity is dealing with a problem. So that’s great. AI technologies are demanding and so that is pushing technology to improve. That’s awesome. Manufacturers have a reason to come up with solutions. I think in a couple of years we will have products with more and faster memory. OK OK, they might be more expensive… but better… I am optimistic.

I am way more concerned about prices of everything else increasing. I mean I eat every day and buy clothes more often than RAM.

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How concerned should I be about the latest PC parts shortages?

Not al all.

Life goes on, things go up and down.

One thing to take into account with all this AI hype is that the market is insatiable.

All those chips they buy today will be obsolete for them in the near future, so we can always eat the scraps :rofl:

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Let’s hope the bubble bursts soon!!!

I once bought a memory expander board. Never bought the chips to populate the board and use it because they were an extra $500 for 8 megabytes…

Anyway, are RAM prices expected to go higher? In May I bought 32 Gigs for $55, today the same item is $170. Money is not the problem. The problem is now I have to pay 3x the price for something I bought 7 months ago.

Randy

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I would wholeheartedly second this.

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Also considering the fact that the market for higher-end gaming and creating has always been a bit of a niche anyway.

The majority of PC users worldwide actually see smartphones, tablets, and Chromebooks as enough for the things they want to do (which is office work, email, internet, and media streaming). If anything, the need for ever more powerful hardware and ever-increasing amounts of memory might actually go down if this ends up serving as an indicator to start peeling away the layers of legacy frameworks and API’s that are using up a lot of cycles and memory that can otherwise be redirected to something more useful.

People are still finding untapped potential in machines from a few decades ago for instance. Jeffrey mentions consoles for instance, there is a Youtube channel by someone known as Kaze Emmanual who has been exploring low-level development on the Nintendo 64 and has actually discovered a lot of potential power that was never utilized before it was time to move to the next generation.

My guess then, is that if someone was to do a deep dive to figure out just how much computing power today is wasted on abstractions and cruft (across the whole software stack from the OS to the drivers to the user applications), that the conclusion will actually be quite surprising.

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the production lines switched to ram chips for the ai cards now, not what sdram sticks need. i fear all of that will be trash once obsolete. it’s unlikely you will get cheap ai cards that you will be able to use for rendering with cycles.

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