Don’t let bad code hit your wallet!

This is more of a rant than a post, so beware.

With the shocking rise of AI, and the way it is being forced upon us, hardware manufacturers are seeing a massive boom in profits. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1dzdndzlxqo

With many of the big players like nVidia, Intel and AMD all pushing up the prices of hardware due to a manufactured shortage of RAM. https://www.eurogamer.net/amd-and-nvidia-will-reportedly-raise-gpu-prices-significantly-in-2026

The BIG AI Data Centres are buying ram at ANY cost, which means the big manufacturers are only too happy to sell it to them, at what ever price the fools are willing to pay. Even declaring shortages to boost the price! https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/asus-announces-product-price-hikes-starting-from-january-5-and-ai-is-to-blame-ram-and-storage-cost-pressure-cited-as-main-trigger-for-pricing-increases

This means that the home hobbyist PC builder is now priced out, and locked out of getting new RAM, or cheap graphics cards. With even EBAY sellers absolutely fleecing people for USED RAM!!

It now means graphics cards, the higher end ones that you need to play games on, are now reaching a staggering $5000 for an RTX 5090. https://www.techpowerup.com/344578/leaks-predict-usd-5000-rtx-5090-gpus-in-2026-thanks-to-ai-industry-demand

But why do we need these graphic card goliaths that create enough heat to heat a small home on their own?

BAD CODE!!!!

Lazy CODE!!!!

Its less about making decent optimized code, that can easily run on earlier graphics cards, than it is about pushing code to the hundreds of CUDA cores on the latest cards and getting them to do the processing that could have been handled a lot better by the CPU if it had been optimized.

Massive 4K graphics are not easy to generate on the fly. But why do we need 4k? sure it looks great – but come on, should playing a game come at the cost of a back street kidney donation?

HD games are pretty much the normal now, a nice 1080p is as good as you need it. Especially in hi fps games, Battlefront, COD etc. Your brain can’t process ALL that imagery and to be honest who focuses beyond their sight for too long? Sure, look at the gorgeous mountains in 4K, and get taken out by a kid on a HD screen who does not care about the mountains and is happy to shoot whatever pops up in front of them!!

So back to my rant, when you look at the download size of some of these latest games, and then the size of the patch that means it will work, then the size of the patch that fixes the patch that came down after the initial install, you are looking at a few hundred GB’s of data being downloaded. This is a clear observation that code is not being optimized. It hits you in the pocket more than it hurts the developers. They want the game out the door an reaping millions in revenue, not coders optimizing code for a year.

You only need to look at Windows 11, how many versions are we on now? It’s still broken by the way!! Still not secure, still prone to being taken out by a windows update forced upon you.

When I was a programmer (yes, I did actually write code!) we spent an absolute age, not just in Alpha, or Beta, but in every aspect of testing BEFORE the code was sold to the public. This ensured our code worked as it was intended, fully optimized to ensure that it would run without a customer having to spend another $6k on a CPU/RAM/GPU upgrade, just to run the $69 package we sold them.

So – Do not rush out and spend a small fortune on a graphics card. Just play at a lower resolution and smirk that you have better response times!