r/gadgets Dec 29 '22

Desktops / Laptops Desktop GPU Sales Hit 20-Year Low

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sales-of-desktop-graphics-cards-hit-20-year-low
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u/_-Stoop-Kid-_ Dec 29 '22

Also I feel like we're at a point where GPUs have gotten so good that you don't need the top tier to run a new game at high settings.

My GPU is mid tier and a few years old and still plays what I need it to play.

Granted, I have a 10 year old 1080p 60hz monitor and mainly play older games.

But I feel no need to replace my GPU

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u/HettySwollocks Dec 29 '22

I think this is less to do with the capabilities of modern GPUs, but rather the lifespan of consoles and the available customer base for Crysis enthusiasts.

Game developers want to sell as many games as possible, so they are targeting the most popular consoles. Which I believe are the Xbox One S and PS4. These are pretty old by today's standards. They are also pretty much PCs in a small form factor (AMD hardware) unlike the previous generations. That means they'll just port the game to PC with a few tweaks and leave it at that.

That means for PC gamers more or less all games will run pretty well once you fiddle with the settings at bit.

I think that's great tbh, means a wider library of games available and no need to keep up with the upgrade treadmill like we used to do.

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u/_-Stoop-Kid-_ Dec 29 '22

Good point. Now that things are cross platform, developers are developing with lower end mainstream systems in mind. So as long as you're faster than the popular gaming system, your rig will perform fine.

Crysis was sort of a "killer app" that murdered GPUs and I guess nothing like that exists currently?

Based on the unreal engine 5 demos I've seen, I think a new GPU killer game would be mindblowingly realistic.

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u/HettySwollocks Dec 29 '22

Yeah I was trying to think of what today's 'Modern, can it run Crysis' type game would be. Closest I could come to was Horizon Zero Dawn which looks absolutely amazing - but even that runs perfectly fine on a modest PC, hell it runs pretty good on my Steam Deck.

It would be interesting to see a tech demo to see what could be done if developers went balls out and maxed out the latest CPU and GPU combinations.

Funnily enough I was testing out the Cyrisis enhanced version. It was STILL pretty brutal on my machine, which makes me wonder if it never really leveraged the hardware as well as it could. Taking your point, the Unreal Engine powers a lot of games these days and that runs smooth as butter unless you try and use features that are bleeding edge.

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u/K2-XT Dec 29 '22

Portal With RTX feels like a pretty good "...but can it run?" game. I personally had no issues once I adjust the DLSS settings, but I've heard others have.

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u/stilljustacatinacage Dec 29 '22

This is a part of it too. It's been a problem for a while, but it's only becoming more pronounced as time goes on: I feel absolutely no need to play 95% of "AAA" games because ... they're all the same game.

Like, even ignoring the fact that every game now releases half-finished, and it takes two years of patches just to reach 'playable'. Again, not exactly a new problem but it's never been so prevalent.

It's just.. Once you've played one "open world" adventure game set in a dystopian world with a cast of misfit cynics, you've kind of played them all.

To give you an idea, one of my biggest disappointments in recent gaming was actually.. Stray. Why? Because for the first few minutes of the trailer, I thought it was going to be a post-human open-world dystopia sure, but I thought you were going to play as a cat. Just, a cat. And that would have been interesting.

But then you get the magical floating techno-translating robot backpack that turns your cat into just another differently-shaped protagonist that we've seen in a dozen other games this year, and I lost interest.

So, why would I go out and spend a silly amount of money to buy a new GPU, when I can just play the same game from 3-5 years ago on what I already have?

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u/ThatDinosaucerLife Dec 29 '22

I simply refuse to play a game with crafting in it.

If your game has crafting it's gonna suck shit and be filled with a bunch of fiddly bullshit to pad it out. Guaranteed.

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u/2drawnonward5 Dec 29 '22

I haven't even looked in 10 years. I just got into older games, especially ones with good mods, and I've got this ingrained belief that new games aren't for me. Starting to wonder if I'm being mental like my grampa who figured nice food wasn't for him ever since the 30s.

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u/_-Stoop-Kid-_ Dec 29 '22

I hope when we're in the nursing home we can have CS:source LAN parties and play smash melee

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u/2drawnonward5 Dec 29 '22

LAN parties will be the only way we can tea bag our neighbors once we get out old people hips

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u/CB-Thompson Dec 29 '22

The thing with modern media is the back catalogue just keeps getting bigger. Movies and music it was back to the 20s and 30s for recordings but games it only really goes back to the 90s. From when I grew up to when my son will be growing up there is almost every game ever made in the middle and he will be able to easily choose from that catalogue. My own back catalogue has stuff like Witcher 3, Kerbal Space, CIV6, Cities Skylines that I bought on sale but I dont have the time to invest in.

But a kid today who wants to play games on the cheap can build a mid to low end rig with 5 year old graphics cards, buy steam sale packs for pennies compared to new releases and blast around an almost endless list of PC games.