Is "PC Gaming" becoming too much of a money drain, now that it's "popular"?

[cmdrdredd]

Don't confuse marketing of expensive "gamer" grade products with traditional PC gaming for which the cost of ownership has not really changed IMO.

This. All the big name products with flashy colors and the "by gamers, for gamers" phrases plastered on the box etc don't represent the base price for products suitable for gaming. I don't have a $100+ mouse. My mechanical keyboard was barely $100. You don't need a gsync monitor or an ultrawide unless you want them. You can buy generic stuff that is still made for PC gaming but isn't endorsed by some esports team and stuff like that. Even video cards while not always exactly cheap, you don't need the G1 or FTW edition card that costs a premium. You can buy the step down model and get similar if not the same performance overall. Memory is another one. You don't need the big heatspreaders on Dominator Platinum sticks etc. There are lots of options that give the same performance for gaming and cost just a little less. I think peripherals like headsets, mice, and keyboards are the worst offenders of tossing flashy colors and trying to market to "hardcore gamers who demand the best".

 

[Sonikku]

Not really, I hate that prices have risen as much as the next guy but then again its hard to think of anything that hasn't went up in price.

A "gaming" PC could set you back $2000 back in the 90's when you account for inflation.

 

[TeknoBug]

I've been PC gaming since the late 80's with Tandy's and 386/486's, I don't think PC gaming has gotten more expensive- it's actualy been a bit cheaper lately with the Steam sales and PC parts averaging lower prices. Video card prices however has gotten out of hand but that's on Nvidia, AMD will probably stabilize that with their new releases at the end of the month.

A "gaming" PC could set you back $2000 back in the 90's when you account for inflation.

A non-gaming PC costed me $2500 (486/SX33 with 40MB HDD, 2MB RAM, 1MB Trident GPU).

 

[jlee]

A "gaming" PC could set you back $2000 back in the 90's when you account for inflation.

Easily. SLI Voodoo2's would be $877.78 in today's dollars, plus your primary GPU. RAM was ~$4/MB ($5-6 today). The Pentium II 450 was released at $655 ($961 today).

 

[XavierMace]

I guess so, but then there's the games out there that won't even operate with a dual-core CPU, no matter how fast it is.

Likewise, games that require a minimum of VRAM to play.

Ring Ring. 2007 called, they want their hardware back.

I'm sorry Larry but you once again you're acting like the only products in the stacks are the bottom end stuff you buy and $1,000 parts.

You use cheap and/or old hardware. Period. End of story. As long as it does what you want it to, there's nothing wrong with that. But it clearly doesn't but you continually refuse to admit you made a bad purchase. There's no shame in admitting that. We all do it. I've got a stack of bad choices sitting in my closet right now.

A Radeon 7950 was a decent when it was released. 4 years ago. The two year old GTX970 is 50%+ faster in every single benchmark, usually closer to 100% and uses about the same amount of power. The upcoming 1070's are another sizable leap.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1033?vs=1355

There's a guy in FS selling one RIGHT NOW for $200. You've been told repeatedly that if you bought better parts to begin with, they would last you longer. Assuming you bought the 7950's when they were new, I think most would agree 3-4 years out of a video card is pretty decent. If you bought them recently, you chose poorly. If you want to go "generation" wise, that card is what, 5 generations old now?

Regarding Dual Cores. I replaced my i7-920 with a 3770K shortly after their release in 2012. That's still going strong (4 years if we are counting) and I haven't found any compelling reason to replace it. I haven't had a Dual Core processor in my gaming system since the Q6600 came out in 2007. Dual Cores are fine for mom and pop computers. They are not for power users.

As other's have said, if anything PC gaming has gotten cheaper. 10 years ago, I wouldn't have dreamed of keeping my hardware for 4+ years and being happy with it. exdeath is currently playing Division at 1080p on my HTPC which is running a GTX960 and Xeon equivalent of like a 3570. That's like a $500 system at this point.

 

[dud]

PC gaming has been popular for decades and has never been more affordable. I just finished building an i5 system from mostly used parts. The last component was the vid card. I bought an EVGA GTX 950 that plays all the games/sims that I enjoy ... for a measly $120 AR. I remember paying $200 back in 2002 for a Radeon 9600 GT. Talk about value. I pulled all of the new/used parts together for $325. I couldn't touch that 10 or more years ago.

For those that who must have the bleeding-edge tech ... they will pay for it upfront and in HW depreciation once they try to sell it.

 

[desura]

Not at all.

I'm running a 750 ti Nvidia. I'm kinda itching for an upgrade, but watching a comparison between the 750ti and a 960 and I just can't justify it. The 960 is like 35% faster on average, but it isn't noticable, and to get parity all you need to do is dial down the graphics quality a little.

I have like an ivy bridge CPU i5. And I'm not going to upgrade until something breaks down.

The thing is it is definitely nice to be able to start up a game and put every single feature to maximum, but to be honest, medium quality graphics are good enough and you hardly notice once in game.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Its actually the most affordable it has ever been in history. And the popularity is due to a mixture of that and the robustness of the market. Yes most AAA console parts are junk at first (and plenty of them never get fixed, just better hardware makes performance issues less of a problem), but due to backward compatibility, mods, updates, and all the games that are PC only, the platform has the widest appeal.

The prices you're seeing for niche marketed is because that's what they are. In some instances it is simply marketing, while others there are technical reasons for the premium. But in general, the quality across the board has improved, or the perceived lack of quality is due to excess features (when in the past, things would be simpler, take mice, where you'd have fewer buttons, etc). Of course with changing markets there is some aspects where that's wonky (like keyboards, the average keyboard in the early 90s was possibly better quality in many aspects, but that's because they were still a major factor in the usability of the system so they had to still be good; over time keyboards became less important and other aspects namely design/minimal footprint became more important for most, so then quality keyboards became niche, but now we've seen a resurgence, and possibly the most robust keyboard market ever now).

 

[VirtualLarry]

but you continually refuse to admit you made a bad purchase. There's no shame in admitting that. We all do it. I've got a stack of bad choices sitting in my closet right now.

A Radeon 7950 was a decent when it was released. 4 years ago. The two year old GTX970 is 50%+ faster in every single benchmark, usually closer to 100% and uses about the same amount of power. The upcoming 1070's are another sizable leap.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1033?vs=1355

There's a guy in FS selling one RIGHT NOW for $200. You've been told repeatedly that if you bought better parts to begin with, they would last you longer. Assuming you bought the 7950's when they were new, I think most would agree 3-4 years out of a video card is pretty decent. If you bought them recently, you chose poorly. If you want to go "generation" wise, that card is what, 5 generations old now?

Well, I've only had my 7950 cards for a year or so. I bought them new for $130. Back then, the GTX970 cards were like $350, and way out of my price range. Are they 250% faster? They only have 0.5 more "usable" VRAM than the 7950, and I wanted to crunch Milkyway@Home in BOINC, which requires double-precision floating-point. I dare say, I believe that the 7950 is faster in DP FP than the GTX970. (Didn't NVidia strip pretty-much all compute capability out of the gaming-grade Maxwell cards?)

I don't think that I made a bad choice at all. I think that the 7950 is still a viable gaming card (thanks to AMD's far more forward-looking architecture). It was either that, or buy a GTX950 2GB card for around the same price. (Ok, which I did later on, I bought three of them.)

If I recall RussianSensation's posts correctly, NV basically shifted their product stack, so that their lower-end chips, became their higher-end higher-priced products. That's partially what I'm complaining about. The GTX970, is really more of a '60 card. I remember buying a pair of Gigabyte WindForce GTX460 1GB OC cards for $180 ea. from Newegg soon after release. (They would have been cheaper, had I sent in the rebates.)

Fast-forward to a year or two when GTX970 was released, instead of $180, it was $370.

That's what I'm complaining about, partially, in my OP.

If the GTX970 was called the GTX960, and sold for $200, I would have probably bought some of them.

 

[ControlD]

I don't think that I made a bad choice at all. I think that the 7950 is still a viable gaming card (thanks to AMD's far more forward-looking architecture). It was either that, or buy a GTX950 2GB card for around the same price. (Ok, which I did later on, I bought three of them.)

Well, you just disproved your original assertion then didn't you? You bought a cheap video card and feel it is still viable. How is PC gaming too much of a money drain then?

It has always been expensive to have a system that can run that latest game at ultra settings. It is no different now than it has ever been.

 

[rh71]

I'm sure there are people on the other side of the spectrum who think their 2005 gaming PC should be able to play new stuff too. Modern 'good enough' hardware is unbelievably cheap.

I have a ~2010 PC (Q6600) and I expected to play PvZ Garden Warfare 2 on it. I barely can, all settings on my Radeon 6850 low. Thankfully it's the only modern game I want to play on PC anyway. "Good enough" hardware still requires me to upgrade the GPU & CPU, which also means new mobo & RAM and that totals more than a new console. I wouldn't call it unbelievably cheap. $200 would be, not $500+. What's more is that I am reluctant to do that just to play 1 game since the PC is more than powerful enough for everything else I do on it.

In time perhaps - because I do want to pick up a new $250 Polaris 10 I'm hearing about.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You bought a cheap video card and feel it is still viable.

I guess I wouldn't have called it "cheap". To me, $150-200 range for video cards has always been "Midrange". To me, "cheap" is a $30 HD 5450 or GT610 special. Suitable for video output, some media decoding, but not gaming.

I mean, the HD4850 512MB cards were $200 list at release; I got mine at BestBuy on sale for $150.

The GTX460 1GB OC cards were $180 ea, soon after release, at Newegg.

The 7950 3GB cards I bought last year were $130 new, on fire-sale at Newegg.

The GTX950 2GB OC cards I bought off of Newegg's ebay site, were $120, marked down from $170. (Although the "going price" for GTX950 cards soon dropped to the sale price, more or less.)

I fault Nvidia for making "Midrange" video cards cost $400 nowadays. That used to be high-end! And five years ago, a $1000 high-end video card was unthinkable. (Unless maybe it was some sort of ultra-high-resolution card for specialized medical displays, like X-Ray viewers.)

 

[ControlD]

I guess I wouldn't have called it "cheap". To me, $150-200 range for video cards has always been "Midrange". To me, "cheap" is a $30 HD 5450 or GT610 special. Suitable for video output, some media decoding, but not gaming.

Yeah, I agree with that. My GTX970 was the most I have spent on a video card looking back on it. I'm pretty sure it was under $300, but yeah, it was a chunk of change. I figured I could buy two midrange cards in two years or the 970 which would last me the same amount of time for the same money. But, to your point, it was expensive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Maybe my recollection of GTX970's release is off. Or maybe I was just looking at BestBuy's prices. I thought that they released at $350-370, and that only with the 10-series NV card's imminent release, did they drop to $300.

If they were always only $300, then that's not quite as bad as I'm making it out to be, I guess, but my point still more-or-less stands.

Edit: And I'm ignoring the initial release price of the 7950 3GB cards, as I wasn't even in the market for one back then, so I wasn't paying attention to their release price.

 

[ControlD]

^

Somehow I feel like they were actually cheaper shortly after release and then they got expensive.

I know I got a really good rebate on the one I purchased (Asus). That was right when the card was released. When I looked at the price some time later it was much more expensive.

 

[XavierMace]

I guess I wouldn't have called it "cheap". To me, $150-200 range for video cards has always been "Midrange". To me, "cheap" is a $30 HD 5450 or GT610 special. Suitable for video output, some media decoding, but not gaming.

So your definition is wrong.

I mean, the HD4850 512MB cards were $200 list at release; I got mine at BestBuy on sale for $150.

The GTX460 1GB OC cards were $180 ea, soon after release, at Newegg.

Because the 1Gb cards were shitty but beyond that, I'm not even sure what your point is here. I also question your definition of "soon" because I recall them being more.

The 7950 3GB cards I bought last year were $130 new, on fire-sale at Newegg.

Because they were 3+ years old.

The GTX950 2GB OC cards I bought off of Newegg's ebay site, were $120, marked down from $170. (Although the "going price" for GTX950 cards soon dropped to the sale price, more or less.)

They marked them down because at $170 they were only $30 less than a GTX960.

I fault Nvidia for making "Midrange" video cards cost $400 nowadays. That used to be high-end! And five years ago, a $1000 high-end video card was unthinkable. (Unless maybe it was some sort of ultra-high-resolution card for specialized medical displays, like X-Ray viewers.)

No and no.

High End at it's release.

Mid at it's release.

Mid at it's release.

So basically you've come up with numbers in your head of what you want to spend and are mad because NVidia and AMD don't price based on that. Other references. GTX295 was $600, GTX590 was $700

 

[StrangerGuy]

This. All the big name products with flashy colors and the "by gamers, for gamers" phrases plastered on the box etc don't represent the base price for products suitable for gaming. I don't have a $100+ mouse. My mechanical keyboard was barely $100. You don't need a gsync monitor or an ultrawide unless you want them. You can buy generic stuff that is still made for PC gaming but isn't endorsed by some esports team and stuff like that. Even video cards while not always exactly cheap, you don't need the G1 or FTW edition card that costs a premium. You can buy the step down model and get similar if not the same performance overall. Memory is another one. You don't need the big heatspreaders on Dominator Platinum sticks etc. There are lots of options that give the same performance for gaming and cost just a little less. I think peripherals like headsets, mice, and keyboards are the worst offenders of tossing flashy colors and trying to market to "hardcore gamers who demand the best".

Agreed. Suckers for gamerz marketing who buy $200+ mobos, extreme OC RAM and $100+ cooling for a mere mainstream socket has no grounds to call PC gaming expensive.

Then on the other spectrum we have penny-wise, pound-foolishers who buys crap hardware and ends up spending more money in the long run. e.g "$183 for a E6300 OCed to 3GHz is too expensive, gonna save $15 for a shitty A64 X2"

 

[Fire&Blood]

Disagree with the OP.

Sure, video card prices have crept up over the past few years but that's got more to do with market share imbalance between AMD and Nvidia than anything else.

I remember spending $500 on a 4400+ X2, decent CPU's have been available for a lot less since Sandy Bridge, if not earlier. A 7950 from 2012 is still a competitive card @1080p.

There have always been overpriced hardware parts, peripherals and accessories but nowadays building a PC is cheap, especially if you buy a used part or two. The case selection and pricing alone, you can now buy awesome full tower cases for less. Good PSU's deals are out there and the average quality has been improving as well. SSD's have dropped in prices too, etc, etc.


Multi monitor/multi GPU setups push the ceiling and maybe that's what the OP was focused on. At the same time, the entry into PC gaming has never been lower. $300 to get in, $500 to get comfy, $1000 to get glorious.

 

[VirtualLarry]

So your definition is wrong.



Because the 1Gb cards were shitty but beyond that, I'm not even sure what your point is here. I also question your definition of "soon" because I recall them being more.



Because they were 3+ years old.



They marked them down because at $170 they were only $30 less than a GTX960.



No and no.

High End at it's release.

Mid at it's release.

Mid at it's release.

So basically you've come up with numbers in your head of what you want to spend and are mad because NVidia and AMD don't price based on that. Other references. GTX295 was $600, GTX590 was $700

Just no. Read this. High end = $500. Mid Range = $200.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3809/nvidias-geforce-gtx-460-the-200-king

Edit: Btw, way to cherry-pick an uber-rare 2GB GTX460, as if that was some kind of example of what the real mid-range cards of that time were. It wasn't.

Edit: And wasn't the GTX295, and GTX590, a multi-GPU card? Those aren't high-end, those are "halo cards". Like the Radeon Pro Duo. High-end would be a Fury X.

 

[bystander36]

I think the main issue the OP has, and the posters he's quoting, is that just because there are settings that push the highest end GPU's, does not mean you have to use those settings to enjoy the game. You gain no tactical advantage either. In many games, people on the lowest settings have the advantage as things that matter stand out.

Because PC games have varying hardware options, dev's give all gamers setting options so they can get the most out of the game with their PC. That means people with high end PC's get high end graphical settings, and those with average PC's get average settings.

Just because those settings exist, does not mean you have to use them. You are not missing out of much, especially today with diminishing returns on IQ. Don't fall into the trap of having to max out settings. It's great if your PC can handle it, but it is not at all necessary.

Think about this a second. What if the dev's stopped giving high end gamers settings for their PC. Would people with average PC's get a better looking game than they do now? No, they wouldn't. All that would happen is the high end gamer wouldn't get to use those settings, and you might feel better knowing someone else doesn't have it better than you. Don't be selfish, just enjoy what you have.

 

[motsm]

It always has been a money drain; having not read them, I can only assume that's what the rest of the replies say.

 

[jlee]

I have a ~2010 PC (Q6600) and I expected to play PvZ Garden Warfare 2 on it. I barely can, all settings on my Radeon 6850 low. Thankfully it's the only modern game I want to play on PC anyway. "Good enough" hardware still requires me to upgrade the GPU & CPU, which also means new mobo & RAM and that totals more than a new console. I wouldn't call it unbelievably cheap. $200 would be, not $500+. What's more is that I am reluctant to do that just to play 1 game since the PC is more than powerful enough for everything else I do on it.

In time perhaps - because I do want to pick up a new $250 Polaris 10 I'm hearing about.

A 4MB ATI 3D Rage Pro was $200. 20 years ago. $200 has never been a price point of entry for a gaming PC. Ever.

I stand by my original statement.

 

[StrangerGuy]

I think the main issue the OP has, and the posters he's quoting, is that just because there are settings that push the highest end GPU's, does not mean you have to use those settings to enjoy the game. You gain no tactical advantage either. In many games, people on the lowest settings have the advantage as things that matter stand out.

Because PC games have varying hardware options, dev's give all gamers setting options so they can get the most out of the game with their PC. That means people with high end PC's get high end graphical settings, and those with average PC's get average settings.

Just because those settings exist, does not mean you have to use them. You are not missing out of much, especially today with diminishing returns on IQ. Don't fall into the trap of having to max out settings. It's great if your PC can handle it, but it is not at all necessary.

Think about this a second. What if the dev's stopped giving high end gamers settings for their PC. Would people with average PC's get a better looking game than they do now? No, they wouldn't. All that would happen is the high end gamer wouldn't get to use those settings, and you might feel better knowing someone else doesn't have it better than you. Don't be selfish, just enjoy what you have.

I remember Bioshock Infinite where High shadows was only like slightly more jagged than Ultra between the two images of the same scene. I bet no one would even notice the difference when playing normally without pixel hunting with a magnifying glass on the screen.

 

[jlee]

Well, I've only had my 7950 cards for a year or so. I bought them new for $130. Back then, the GTX970 cards were like $350, and way out of my price range. Are they 250% faster? They only have 0.5 more "usable" VRAM than the 7950, and I wanted to crunch Milkyway@Home in BOINC, which requires double-precision floating-point. I dare say, I believe that the 7950 is faster in DP FP than the GTX970. (Didn't NVidia strip pretty-much all compute capability out of the gaming-grade Maxwell cards?)

I don't think that I made a bad choice at all. I think that the 7950 is still a viable gaming card (thanks to AMD's far more forward-looking architecture). It was either that, or buy a GTX950 2GB card for around the same price. (Ok, which I did later on, I bought three of them.)

If I recall RussianSensation's posts correctly, NV basically shifted their product stack, so that their lower-end chips, became their higher-end higher-priced products. That's partially what I'm complaining about. The GTX970, is really more of a '60 card. I remember buying a pair of Gigabyte WindForce GTX460 1GB OC cards for $180 ea. from Newegg soon after release. (They would have been cheaper, had I sent in the rebates.)

Fast-forward to a year or two when GTX970 was released, instead of $180, it was $370.

That's what I'm complaining about, partially, in my OP.

If the GTX970 was called the GTX960, and sold for $200, I would have probably bought some of them.

If by $370 you mean $329, ok. The GTX 460 launched at $229.

Now that we've erased $90 worth of inaccuracies from your post and the price gap has been decreased to $100, check the CPI for $229 in 2010 dollars ($251.27). $329 in 2014 dollars is $332.51. Your claimed price gap of $190 is now a price gap of $81.24. The GTX 460 was also released on July 12, 2010. The GTX 970 was released on September 18, 2014. By "a year or two," did you really mean four years and two months? Because...well, that'd be more accurate.

Regardless, if you think a 7950 is still a viable gaming card, you've refuted your own argument.

 

[videogames101]

idk, PC is a cheap hobby

Payed like $2k for baller PC that will last 3 years running things on max/near max, and that's like $60 a month. Most of my friends blow that on booze in one weekend.