24th August

For some reason, every couple of years I get it in my head that I need to
upgrade my PC, and typically I focus on the graphics card first. I'll spend
a few days looking at options, and ultimately come to the same conclusion
*most* of the time, that I simply don't need it.

Of course I do upgrade at times, and the last two upgrades have been 2nd
hand GPUs, choosing for a better bang-for-buck and a bit of risk over brand
new. The last upgrade was to an RTX 2080 Ti, which I picked up for a fraction
of it's original price, and the crazy thing is apart from missing some cutting
edge features that I don't use (I'll get onto that shortly) it's competitive
with most mid-range cards on the market today, eight years after it's launch.

In the last year that's arguably been down to the impact of AI to some extent,
but it's far from the entire reason. I genuinely struggle to find the time to
play games, and even less time to play the 'big' AAA games that often make use
of graphics cards to their full extent. I've got a back catalogue of games
that I've picked up cheap in sales, so I'm often playing things that are a few
years old anyway, and they happen to be the games that were pitched at my
aging GPU or it's immediate successors. A mid range card that gets similar
performance my GPU costs about 2-2.5x what it does second hand today, and so
in my mind, there's no upgrade that makes any kind of sense right now, and
doubly so when I don't play much.

On that front I started Red Dead Redemption II over the weekend; I bought and
installed it over a year ago, but never found a good time to get stuck in. So
far I'm enjoying it, though feels like there might be a bit too much 'busy
work' to do and don't want to play games to do chores in them, but man it
looks great, and it's nice and chilled exploring a new world on a horse.