Get RAM first before it spikes worse. I'll be real, modern games aren't that much more demanding than 10 year old games if you want those 10 year old games at ultra settings and the modern ones at medium settings. A used or refurbished GPU would suit basically anyone's gaming needs just fine nowadays.

RAM might be going up faster than GPU prices? It's hard to tell what the best move right now is. CPU prices are probably not going to change much, and motherboards and PSUs use much more standardized components that are unlikely to skyrocket in price. One of (RAM, SSD, GPU) is going to be the best choice, can't say more than that.

Nvidia has Linux support, it's just not open source. I run amd on windows with no real issues for gaming. I think amd for Linux and Nvidia for windows is probably not wrong per say but highly exaggerated. (unless open source everything is critical for you).

Intel also produces a good card for the price, but driver support is not ideal. Getting better but not ideal. Avoid Intel at the moment if you don't want to tinker.

Supertuxkart doesnt need a high end GPU.

More serious answer: recommend just getting a very powerful integrated CPU/GPU combo. It should be able to play most games. A GPU is overkill if the goal is to play games and not just stare at them.

Its most similar to what the steam deck uses (integrated amd).

No that’s probably a bad idea.

But if you were to get a gpu, the most recent and highest end ones are the ones that stay relevant the longest. People could still run shit on titans until nvidia dropped support from the latest driver package.

You could try doing without a gpu, in which case you save a lot of money you would have spent on one but now you have to spend more money on a motherboard/cpu/memory in order to squeeze maximum performance out of the onboard gpu and when one of them starts to be too slow you’re fucked.

If you do buy a gpu then you can reasonably expect only a 5% drop in frame rate when you use a very cheap 6-7 year old ddr4/pcie3/old cpu combo, which aren’t being hit quite as bad with ram pricing.

Gpus have grown significantly in the last two decades from components that often shipped with a half height bracket in case you wanted to stick it in a sff pc to the main geometric limitation of case choice. Use the “length” filter field in the pc part picker website to not end up with an unfortunate situation.

Amd or nvidia? People will say there are serious differences on linux, I’m not seeing it. The nvidia stuff tends to be performant longer but ymmv. The top end current generation amd cards can be had for under a grand, you’ll be lucky to get a 5090 for under two grand.

People will disagree with me, and they’re wrong, but the best gaming experience overall is nvidia. It may not be worth 1k to you, but it’s reality.

If I were feeling antsy and needed to pull the cost effective trigger on some parts I’d look at the area around me or eBay for a used professional workstation targeting pcie3/ddr4 and gpu mounting length and get a 9070. Once it’s up and running, mission accomplished, I’d still sock cash back and keep an eye out for an nvidia deal.