My rig still runs all of my favorite 2D indie games, so I’m good.
Yeah, the $80 dollar AAA games are presumably going to price enough people out that there’s no need to upgrade anyway. 😬
Thank goodness indies are usually more interesting anyway.
Perhaps some of them are betting on the AI bubble crashing in the next two years, bringing prices down, maybe, hopefully?
I’ll make plans to build a new PC if I win the lotto or get a better job. My rig went from everything running great maxed out to needing mods to hit 60 fps on low in new releases within the span of 3 months. But to be fair, most of those are horribly unoptimized UE5 games, which can get a significant performance boost just tweaking the Engine.ini file.
I just straight up refuse to play games running on UE5
I wanted to add more storage to my media mini server in the before times, but put it off at the time… It’s going to be put off just a little bit longer now…
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Both in the sense that you’ll be able to get a decent playable experience on fairly low end hardware and still have the option to turn on all the eye candy if your hardware supports it. A recent example is Pragmata that can be played on the switch but also looks worlds better on high end hardware.
Game devs will have to take optimization and scalability seriously for the next few years if they want to make any money at all.
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i’m a sw eng, doing most of my work on a macbook. unless i need to use vendor sw for servos, vfds, cameras.
i used to build pcs. stepped away. now all i have to game with is a legion go. i would love a gaming pc for even just 1080p. but shit’s so expensive. :(
back to factorio i go.
If a PC game is not on GeForce Now, I’m not buying it. My old gaming PC is on a 1080ti and 16gb of RAM. No way I am upgrading at these prices.
They really want to put us on hardware as a service. Eventually you won’t be able to buy hardware, digital ownership will be eroded, and you’ll pay more for it than if we’d kept the hardware market alive. Better to just cut the cord now and if it doesn’t run on your old pc just don’t run it. Don’t pay for streaming services.
I completely agree, and I guess I should have qualified that I meant AAA and multiplayer games. All my other games I play directly on either my Steam Deck or my old 1080ti box.
Fractal North is still the prettiest PC case I’ve ever seen. I’m very happy with mine.
I was about to comment about seeing my case in the thumbnail. Its classy and has such great airflow lol.
Just wish the front io cables were longer 😭
Same! I have the black one though
The case in the picture looks cool, but it doesn’t have an optical drive. I have a a Fractal case too though, but it was one of the only ones I could find that had an optical drive slot.
That’s fair. I have personally not bought a physical PC game in like two decades so I could just go for aesthetics. And luckily the airflow is great too.
Same, I don’t know if I’ll ever get another PC case. It just looks so good
I mean, I had plans (wanted to invest in a 4tb SSD to run Linux on, push up to a later i7 supported by my board, and upgrade from ddr4 to ddr5), but I no longer have plans due to the madness unleashed by the rampocalypse.
So instead I purchased a pico-calc and am looking at a luckfox-lyra upgrade so I can just enjoy old school games.
I’m surprised that so many (40%) have plans to build a new PC in next two years. Especially because we are talking about PC Gamers, who are already PC Gamers. I would assume that most either do not, or upgrade instead build a new PC. From those 40% of 1.5k tomshardware readers who participated in the survey, I wonder in what state their PC are and if they HAVE to build a new PC or they just have a lot of money around and can afford it. Do they sell the old system or parts of it? Unfortunately these are unanswered at the moment.
I recently built new to pass my current rig to my kid who is only interested in Roblox and other smaller games. And I mean the entire rig, including the desk.
I replaced my old PC only because I went from an i5 6600 to a ryzen 7800x3d and thus needed to replace the RAM as well.
Combone that with an old 4GB 960 and an older 2TB HDD and wanting another case the math was quite easy.It’s alao a quesrion how you interpret that? At what point is it a new PC vs upgrading? If you have replaced all parts from the original starting build?
Might explain the higher percentageI would imagine that 40% is saying that hoping for a best case scenario to occur. Prices haven’t even plateaued yet, they are still rising, so at some point regardless their enthusiasm they will be priced out of the market.
The thought that hardware prices will drop to normal levels in the next few years is just wishful thinking.
In online communities at least, people seem to be keen to stay on the cutting edge and always have the best and shiniest. Toms Hardware is going to attract this very audience.
I accept that I’m probably too far the other way on the spectrum of patient gamers…but people don’t seem to think of the utility of the item and rather stay obsessed with “10% performance gains”. For the vast majority of people, phones, laptops and computers can easily last over 5 years (sometimes 10 years depending on use case).
Although these frequent upgraders do give a good stock of items for people like me to pick up and stay in the sweetspot of positioning behind the frontline of cutting edge products on the secondhand market.
I just wish I could get my friends into ‘patient gaming’ for multiplayer stuff, rather than that 10% performance gain for the latest and greatest ‘’‘’‘AAA’‘’'. The patient gamers communities here seem a little slow for finding people who want to play the same genre, and linking the lemmy account to any other account, like steam, gog, epic, etc., just doesn’t seem kosher.
I’ve abandoned any hope of playing multiplayer games, old or new, with people I know. No friends play indie/old games. Few people play games at all. I wish there were more asynchronous games to play. Turn taking at your leisure or progressing a shared game whenever you are able. It would be so cool if Don’t Starve Together could have a persistent server with a small group and everyone could dip in or out at any time to contribute to the farming and base building.
I’d love to play don’t starve together just because I am trash at don’t starve. I think I get about three nights in and… starve.
The question is kind of weird. I want to build a new gaming computer, but that is nothing I’m doing at current prices and I can totally live without building a new one. If that one breaks, I might reconsider. But I really do not know if there are people around who are planning to build a new computer in May 2028.
Anecdotally but several of my friends build a new PC and then slide their old one to siblings who game but don’t need high end
It’s way easier to get rid of an entire computer second hand than it is bespoke parts that you’ve replaced, so this is what I do too. I used to be on a 4-year cadence with new PCs, but then I kept getting more and more mileage out of my machines, since graphics don’t leap forward so quickly like they used to. My current machine is 5 years old and still runs the latest games on high settings.
Heeeey, it’s me! Your sibling! You got any of that sweet sweet ddr5 ram??? Don’t hold out on me, boy!
I got my friends old box the same way. I’m into games that don’t require all that much. And will also use it to play minecraft with my kids.
Minecraft? MINECRAFT??? OH GOD NO!!! YOU WOULD NEED A $4,000 TOP OF THE LINE PC!!! 512GB RAM, 8 CORE, 16 THREAD AT 20GHZ EACH!!!
Gaming is too expensive. You should sell a kid.
Domated mine to the after school “day care”.
They helped me so much, I wanted to repay it in some capacityWell… I did upgrade mine progressively, I don’t think it still has any original parts, maybe some sata cables? I was able to get a smaller pc offspring out of this, ended up as my nephew’s gaming rig, does it count as my old rig? are both the same rig? damn computer of theseus causing philosophical problems!
It can be people budding into the genre. They’ve heard about how nice Steam is, and maybe play some games on a cheap laptop, but recognize a genuine desktop is the better experience.
One streamer I follow is in that situation. She streams off her PS5 and Switch, but has a donation incentive to help build her PC.
i built a monster pc in 2024 and maxed out the RAM and CPU the motherboard could handle. New 4k monitor and a 32gb RTX video card. I think I spent about $1.5k
no way could I get that stuff for the same price. I could probably sell the parts for more
it’s still a monster and in Linux, I can tweak it just a bit more to get everything it can give.
I’m thinking that the way games have progressed in the last 5 years, there’s nothing on the horizon that says prepare for the new technology that will blow my mind
32g vram gpu for less than 2k is unlikely. A 4090 itself would be close to 2k
“Oh yeah I got the video card for free”
That’s honestly the only explanation for that build at just 1.5k. More likely they’re just a stinking liar 😅
With the specs they’ve claimed and that price, they either got much of it for free or are… yeah, straight-up lying. That price will get the case, mobo, CPU, RAM, PSU, and storage, probably. Maybe not even that much, if it’s all high-end stuff, before prices inflated. GPU and high-end monitor? Nah.
A high end monitor alone cost fourth the 2k budget. (Edit: edited)
For real, especially a few years ago. Now though, the 1440p/OLED/240hz version of my Acer Predator 27” is like 350 or less! Incredible deal.
I can currently just barely figure out how to do a 9070 (non XT), 24gb DDR5, 1TB SSD via an AOOStar Gem 12 (soldered on 8745hs, iirc) total setup for the rig, at just a bit above $1500 before tax.
Without a monitor, of course.
That’s like the absolute most bang i can figure how to squeeze out of the least bucks, and its a non tradtional setup that works via a dock/cradle and Oculink (cost of that is included).
Doing the same specs in a traditional PC just ends up being more expensive, though its debatable as to whether the approximately 10% to 15% max performance hit on the GPU that OcuLink incurs in highly demanding scenarios makes that 100% true.
So yeah, this… this person is like, hilariously out of the realm of reality.
There… is only a single, mainline, broadly available RTX GPU with 32gb VRAM.
It’s the 5090 RTX.
Which came out in January of 2025.
At an MSRP of $2,000.
With many partner models considerably exceeding that, up to as high as $5,000.
Not only is the pricing ludicrous, the timing is not possible.
The only thing in 2024 or prior I can find with 32 gb vram is basically an unofficial mod or variant called the RTX 4090 D, that never left China, or, maybe it would be something like about as hard to find as a GRE variant AMD card in the US.
I guess unless this person’s uncle works at
NintendoNvidia, or something.Outside of that, we’re talking workstation/server type GPUs, generally with even more ludicrous pricing.
This person is either very confused or very bad at lying.
Also wtf does ‘maxed out the system ram’ even mean?
You can get 128gb of sys ram into… most middle to higher tier mobos with 4 dimm slots. Many higher tier pc mobos can do 256gb.
???
Don’t forget this market insanity started around COVID, and has basically been succeeded by consequent crises with few dips.
The typical release cadence of PC components is around 4-6 years, which requires new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
Adding in the GPU basically results in a new build, and that’s being generous assuming no upgrades/changes to other parts like PSU and storage.My take is that a lot of these people wishing to upgrade are those who have simply been holding out since 2020 or earlier. This seems to vaguely match up with the Steam Hardware results, with a fair number of people still using RTX 3000 series or RX 6000 series, of which even the top end cards are starting to become par/outperformed by their modern mid level counterparts.
Yeah I found that strange too most of my gaming PCs have lasted me somewhere between 7 and 10 years. Would seem completely unnecessary for most people
I just upgrade one or two parts every 2-4 years. seems to have worked fine for over a decade. dreading when I need to do a mobo update which will include ram
I think you may overestimate how many people build their PCs instead of buying a prebuilt.
That’s not my estimation, that is the direct result of the survey.
If we assume that PC gamers on average build a new PC every 5 years then each year 20% will build a new PC meaning over 2 years 40% will build a new PC therefore 60% not building one in 2 years is exactly as expected.
I feel bad for people working in manufacturing for parts like cases or cooling systems. When nobody builds PCs anymore, nobody buys their products either and they go out of business for good.
This whole AI mess is killing gaming as we know it.
A few companies or departments have already shuttered for this exact reason.
AI is killing people and civilization.
I’m looking at my AM4 system with Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and RX7900 XT and thinking it’ll be 4 years. Actually, to be honest it might be the last PC i build, my great hope is Steamdeck and Steamframes have a baby and i won’t need a big box under my desk anymore.
More than I expected. My theory was if only rich people can afford upgrades, video game tech stalls too or at the very least caters/scales down to commonly owned weaker hardware. Therefore I wouldn’t need to buy anything long term besides replacement parts for potential hardware failures which haven’t been common in my lived experience. We’ll see how it pans out.
My main concern is monopoly and permanent higher pricetags from many vendors going out of business as AI sucks the air out of the hobbyist room.
I would really want to see the company when even more people don’t buy computer parts., it’s not gonna be good for them.
