AI Keeps Making Games Worse and More Expensive

We’re eight or nine months into the RAM crisis, depending on when you start counting, and it doesn’t look like gaming is going to get more affordable any time soon. Instead, the opposite is happening. Nvidia and AMD have both reportedly raised prices on graphics cards just this week, and the problem isn’t exclusive to PC gaming the way it’s been in the past.

Just looking back at previous hardware crunches, usually at the feet of cryptocurrency miners, one or two types of components would see big price jumps, just due to retail models selling out. The AI crunch is different. This time around, AI companies have made promises of future deals with Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix, promising to buy up memory chips before they even existed, according to Reuters.

And now, even after plenty of those lofty non-contracts have fallen through, the memory manufacturers are still funneling a huge portion of their capacity to AI and datacenters. It’s little wonder that there’s a class action lawsuit looking to rein in the memory companies, alleging price fixing, but it’s likely that case will take years to see any kind of resolution, if there’s even a positive resolution to come out of it.

Right now, every single little device that uses memory, from the PS5 to your car, is going up in price in order to expand AI capability as far as it can possibly stretch. But has any of it been worth it?

Looking back to the beginning of 2024, I was even a little optimistic about what AI could do for gaming. At CES that year, I spent a lot of time talking with Intel, AMD and Nvidia about what AI could do for video games. They all painted these utopian visions of NPCs that you could talk to naturally and inventory systems that managed themselves. But fast forward two and a half years and we mostly just have the constant need to check Steam store pages to see if developers used generative AI to add ugly art to their worlds.

And it’s not like we haven’t got anything useful out of AI. After all, Nvidia launched the RTX 2080 with DLSS, or deep learning super sampling (yeah, that’s AI), all the way back in 2018. And, yeah, that tech had a bit of a rough start – but at least in a vacuum, I still think it’s been a net positive for PC gaming. AMD, Intel and even Sony have followed up with their own AI upscaling tech in the years since, and I will never say that making games easier to run is a bad thing.

The problem is that the AI companies kept pushing. Nvidia added frame generation to its graphics cards starting with the RTX 4090 in 2023. Nearly three years later, that technology is divisive to say the least, even if it’s started to grow on me. But back in March, Team Green pushed DLSS to its breaking point with DLSS 5.

The technology, as it was presented back then, basically takes the final output of a rendered frame, and then uses it as input to present a new image to the user. In Jensen Huang’s presentation of the tech, it made Grace from Resident Evil Requiem to the point that she looked like she came out of a mobile game ad.

Nvidia isn’t the only company pushing new AI features onto gaming. When I was reviewing the Xbox Ally X back in October last year, I thought it was hilarious that Microsoft shoved Gaming Copilot into the Xbox Game Bar. To this day, you can set the handheld up so that when you hold down the library button on the right-hand side, you bring up a laggy AI companion that’ll give you outdated advice for the game you’re currently playing.

I’m sure that there are people who are fans of one or both of these features, and that’s fine. Hell, I’d probably be able to just ignore them if they weren’t coming at the same time that gaming is becoming prohibitively expensive. Because from where I’m sitting, it feels like the increased prices from the AI-fueled RAM crisis is the cost we’re paying for the privilege of using these slop features. I know that’s not how that works, but I can’t help but feel like we’re paying thousands of dollars for a ticket to an awful show that we just can’t leave.

I don’t know what the future holds, or when this RAM crisis is going to end. It’s even looking increasingly likely that wherever prices eventually land, that’ll just be the new price of admission for gaming. But the higher prices are only part of the problem. We’ve already seen big shots like Tim Sweeney throwing a fit that labeling AI usage on store pages is irrelevant because, he thinks, AI will simply be used everywhere. That doesn’t sound good to me though. If things keep going in this direction, games are only going to get worse, yet we’ll be forced into paying more and more to play them.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

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