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

[Craig234]

Absolutely not.

I've been a pc gamer since around 1995 and the price for the hardware to play all the games is probably bout 20% of what it was in the 90s. Back then you'd have to buy a $2000 cpu each year to keep up with the games, and sometimes drop $200-$300 for upgrades (a few mb of ram) just for a specific game (under a killing moon, total annihilation).

Nowadays, my PC is 4 years old (except the video card which is about 2 years old) and runs everything beautifully at 1600p on my 9 year old 30 inch monitor. Overwatch runs at 70 fps with high settings without even fully utilizing the videocard.

In fact, for the first 5-6 years of my pc gaming career most the games I played ran at under 20 fps (counterstrike 5-20 fps, 20 after upgrading videocard, 5 before, black and white around 5-10 fps, etc) and were borderline unplayable. I don't remember the last time that frames per second was a limiting factor in me enjoying a game...

I used to overclock my PC's hard because after a few years they would be useless, but now I view a PC as a 5-10 year investment and I don't overclock that hard anymore. The $$ savings are significant compared to 10, 15, 20 years ago. Some people will waste their money on l337 gam3rgearz like dropping 1000 bucks on an ASUS TN panel, or a sucker's edition 1080, but if you just want to play all the games at 60 fps it's cheaper than ever to do that.

Devil's advocate though, I will admit that video card prices have gone full retard in recent years, a direct result of Nvidia's greed IMO. However, if you can ignore the hype and don't care about topping the bar graphs, you can still play all the games for cheap.

Some truth and some errors. We NEVER had to spend $2000 for CPUs. And top new games have always had the $40-$60 price point with rare exception.

You mention Total Annihilation, I remember when it came out, my recollection is new $40.

Disk prices have sure changed. At a swap I got an INCREDIBLE deal of 300MB for $500.

I bought a 21" NEC CRT when they were over $2000.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Now you need to invest in a 2560x1440 @ 144 IPS G-Sync monitor for $700, get dual 1080 SLI cards for $1400, get a Broadwell-E for $1700, etc.

No, this is just very wrong. You don't NEED to do anything, that is a high spec set up and isn't required at all for getting a reasonably decent gaming experience nor is anyone pushing people to have this set up, some people have enough disposible income to afford it and that's great but it's a minority of people that have this kind of rig.

What do you think? Is PC Gaming only a sport for the elite now? Should retail prices of components be going up, just because of this subset of the population that can "afford the best"? Or should PC Gaming remain affordable and accessible to all that own a recent PC?

Absolutely not, retail prices of components aren't really going up, they've increased in price tag for the same reason that everything does, inflation (blame your government for that hidden tax as they print off more money) and not the gaming hardware manufacturers.

There has always since the dawn of PC gaming, been a wide range of hardware which runs from very basic and low performance parts, all the way through a decent and affordable middle range, right up to top tier products with insane premiums.

There's also a huge amount of competition between manufacturers and retailers/etailers for selling parts, so if you have some local shop pushing marked up hardware then just go online and have something posted next day.

What I would say is that back when I started PC gaming over 20 years ago, hardware cycles were much more aggressive than what we have now, mostly because we had a healthy PC only array of titles which pushed the boundaries and gave us those "killer apps" we needed to justify our upgrades, systems might only last 2 years before really seriously struggling.

Things slowly changed as consoles became mainstream with the general public and cross platform games became the norm, that has pushed the development of most games to fit into the console lifespan, which have become these elongated 7-8 year hardware cycles for which games primarily target that spec for most of the cycle. This has meant that PC ports requirements are generally not going up for long periods of time, and a decent PC bought around the time of a console launch can last you a good 4-5 years now.

I think that's precisely why we've seen the leap in high end PC hardware such as 1440/1600p, multi-monitor and now 4k. I remember not that long ago in the prior console cycle the frame rates were getting extremely high at just 1080p and AMDs new line of cards were so fast that they just started promoting eyefinity with 3x 1080p monitors, and I remember thinking to myself that we can sensibly power 3x1080p with a single card for many of our games, and AMD kinda had to push that because otherwise why the hell would you buy that much power, nothing needed it. Today that's 4k, PCs are already curb stomping consoles, I think the GTX1080 is 9 TFLOPS of calculating power and the Xbone is what, 1.3 TFLOPS? I mean 2x 1080s in SLI is literally more than 10x as powerful as an Xbone. So yeah, I think a decent PC bought now is going to last you the likely 5+ years we still have left of this console generation.

That's really an artificial limitation due to lazy developers wanting to make 1 size fits all games and drag the PC down to the console level but still it's a big hole in the narrative that PCs don't last very long, constant upgrades etc, it's just not what is happening in reality.

 

[XavierMace]

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.

And here we go with your classic moving the goal posts.

A) You said 5 years ago that $400 was the high end. You just proved yourself wrong.

B) Don't give me cherry picking BS when you're deliberately picking the cheapest SKU for that model and pretending the others don't exist. Every example you've given is the water down version that most people knew better than to buy. That also ignores the various OC'd and/or upgraded cooling models that again will be more. The article you linked to shows the better 460 at $229 the 465 at $249 (which means were already half way to $300) and it doesn't show the 470 but you can do the math and realize it was pretty close to $300. Or you can read the reviews and find out it was $349. This is even more important when you realize the 460 was a later addition (4 months) to the product stack. The 480 and 470 were the original cards from the series. That gives us the high end 480 at $500. Which makes the 470 the mid range card at launch with the price tag of $350. Meaning closer to $400 than the high end 480.,

C) "Halo Cards"? Oh, so now you're inventing new tiers to try to keep the card you want in your tier. Got it. Fortunately the rest of the internet uses the dictionary definition of high end, not your ever changing definition. So I'll just keep going with the definition everybody else uses. I gave you 5 examples proving your claim of the high end card NOT being $400 any time in recent history. Your own link also shows this. So, I'm back to your definition is wrong as there hasn't been a single example showing that your statement of $400 being high end was true any time in recent history.

 

[rh71]

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.

Parts prices have dropped in general.

My CPU is a considerable bottleneck at this point, and it's 6 years old, compared to the 2005 figure you threw out there. It's not just the GPU to upgrade as I outlined. Even with a $250 reasonably priced Polaris 10, I'm looking at well over $500. Do you consider $500+ "unbelievably cheap" just for an upgrade to "good enough"?

A few years ago I was able to upgrade only my GPU, and doing THAT was cheap enough.

 

[TeknoBug]

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

The fall time (Sept-Nov) is where PC parts goes up in price then drops again in the spring time (April-June), I've been seeing this pattern for years now. I'm guessing price goes up in the fall due to back to school shoppers. Keep an eye on RAM prices most especially.

But in your quote, that leads to be true because a lot of new PC parts releases in Q1-Q2 periods which are late winter and spring.

 

[jlee]

Parts prices have dropped in general.

My CPU is a considerable bottleneck at this point, and it's 6 years old, compared to the 2005 figure you threw out there. It's not just the GPU to upgrade as I outlined. Even with a $250 reasonably priced Polaris 10, I'm looking at well over $500. Do you consider $500+ "unbelievably cheap" just for an upgrade to "good enough"?

A few years ago I was able to upgrade only my GPU, and doing THAT was cheap enough.

The Q6600 was released in early January 2007. That's over 9.5 years ago.

Getting almost ten years out of a gaming CPU is a really long time - that's like running a Pentium P5 60Mhz CPU (March 1993) when the Northwood Pentium 4's were out (January 2002). Incidentally, the Pentium 60Mhz released at $878. That's $1,453.78 today.

Hopefully that puts a $150 (AMD) or $230 (Intel) motherboard/CPU/RAM upgrade into perspective. Unless, of course, you want more than 'good enough' -- in which case you gotta pay to play. That's how it's always been.

 

[digiram]

What?? I built a box for my daughter recently with used parts. Under 300 bucks, and she can play her leagues and OW stuff just fine.

 

[TidusZ]

Some truth and some errors. We NEVER had to spend $2000 for CPUs. And top new games have always had the $40-$60 price point with rare exception.

You mention Total Annihilation, I remember when it came out, my recollection is new $40.

I didn't mean the price of the game but the price of the ram I had to buy in order to fully enjoy the game when it came out. Many maps on TA required 32 mb of ram and some 64 or 128, and at the time i had 16 mb of ram which was typical. I ended up buying 32 and having 48.

 

[Sabrewings]

The Q6600 was released in early January 2007. That's over 9.5 years ago.

Getting almost ten years out of a gaming CPU is a really long time - that's like running a Pentium P5 60Mhz CPU (March 1993) when the Northwood Pentium 4's were out (January 2002). Incidentally, the Pentium 60Mhz released at $878. That's $1,453.78 today.

Hopefully that puts a $150 (AMD) or $230 (Intel) motherboard/CPU/RAM upgrade into perspective. Unless, of course, you want more than 'good enough' -- in which case you gotta pay to play. That's how it's always been.

I was running a Q6600 in my gaming machine up until a year ago. Fantastic processor, and still lives on as the wife's machine. That with a GTX275 was my gaming setup for about 5 years or so. It's not hard to get decent mileage by picking the right parts. I still have a P4 3.0C with a Nvidia 6800GT kicking around that I use for rather old games that don't like new hardware. Most of the time that box functions as a side table to my theater chairs.

Personally, I've never felt like PC gaming was all that expensive. Even moving it up a notch from my usual tiers and building the machine in my sig (and planning on updating it more frequently) the costs aren't that bad to stay near the bleeding edge.

 

[zinfamous]

It's not just the "PC Gaming" section at BestBuy, with overpriced video cards, headsets, and mice/keyboards.

Now that Intel officially recognizes that "PC Gamers" is an actual demographic to be targeted, and they appear to be bucking the trend of downward PC sales, instead, buying towards the top of the product stack for CPUs, GPUs, etc. - is this hobby becoming too expensive for the "common man"?

I've seen posts from people that literally want people that only have dual-cores (no matter how fast) to be "burned" - that only quad-cores are acceptable for a PC Gamer.

Likewise, I've seen trends that people seem to think that you have to upgrade to one (or more!) of the newest NVidia gaming cards EVERY GENERATION if you "want to game on PC".

When did the PC Gaming hobby stop being an all-inclusive club, if you had a PC and at least a moderate GPU, and a wired mouse / keyboard (even if it was from Walmart), that you could "Game", even if you had to turn down settings a little bit.

Now you need to invest in a 2560x1440 @ 144 IPS G-Sync monitor for $700, get dual 1080 SLI cards for $1400, get a Broadwell-E for $1700, etc.

Sure, maybe there are those few people out there that can afford that kind of stuff with their disposable income (and I don't hold that against them, more power to you).

But when a certain subset of those people start to spew on forums that other, less-hardware-intensive PC Gamers, "aren't true PC gamers... PC Master Race!!!", I have a problem with that.

I mean, I think I've read that on the Steam survey, most gamers have 1080P @ 60 monitors, and GTX970 or lower video cards.

What do you think? Is PC Gaming only a sport for the elite now? Should retail prices of components be going up, just because of this subset of the population that can "afford the best"? Or should PC Gaming remain affordable and accessible to all that own a recent PC?

This is probably less than 4-5% of PC gamers out there. And I imagine some percentage of that is them being hyperbolic; but even so, I find that this is true here as with politics: the loudest, most obnoxious voices are both the least-representative group and the one worth ignoring.

 

[ElFenix]

the vast majority of PC gamers are playing league on integrated graphics or on notebooks with the equivalent of a GT750.

 

[desura]

There's a video of this Microsoft nerd guy showing off his geek lair. Dude had like 3 46 inch screens hooked up to his PC. He fired up Diablo 3 to show off his rig. What did he get? In the middle screen is the game. On the left and right screen it displays environment which he doesn't even see and doesn't matter.

 

[Midwayman]

So long as the majority of games are ported from potatoes the cost of PC gaming is going to remain cheap. If it plays on a potato it can't have high minimums. The real issue is confusing being able to play at 4k on ultra with being able to play.

 

[StrangerGuy]

The Q6600 was released in early January 2007. That's over 9.5 years ago.

Getting almost ten years out of a gaming CPU is a really long time - that's like running a Pentium P5 60Mhz CPU (March 1993) when the Northwood Pentium 4's were out (January 2002). Incidentally, the Pentium 60Mhz released at $878. That's $1,453.78 today.

Hopefully that puts a $150 (AMD) or $230 (Intel) motherboard/CPU/RAM upgrade into perspective. Unless, of course, you want more than 'good enough' -- in which case you gotta pay to play. That's how it's always been.

I paid more for my E6300/965P/DDR2 2GB than my 4790K/H81/DDR3 8GB, X1800XT than my HD7950, even before taking inflation into account while every part is now lasting longer than ever in useful life.

Besides, did anyone complained how even the lowest $384 X2 3800+ was crazily overpriced compared to Athlon XP in 2005 era gaming and got owned badly in just 2 years (aka by the time games needed a dual core, C2D had wiped X2's floor clean in every point at perf/$)...but now a top-of-the-line $330 i7 quad that can easily last 5 years while HT brings appreciable gains in games is a bad deal? Which is why I can't take anybody seriously saying PC gaming has become expensive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

And here we go with your classic moving the goal posts.

A) You said 5 years ago that $400 was the high end. You just proved yourself wrong.

Yes, so I did. So let's call high-end $500 or more.

B) Don't give me cherry picking BS when you're deliberately picking the cheapest SKU for that model and pretending the others don't exist. Every example you've given is the water down version that most people knew better than to buy. That also ignores the various OC'd and/or upgraded cooling models that again will be more.

The example I originally gave, that of my $180 Gigabyte WindForce 1GB OC, was: Not a watered-down version, like the 768MB version was, and also: was an example of an OCed and upgraded cooling model. List price was $230, but I managed to get it on a good sale. It's possible that the $180 price was the AR price, because I don't think I sent in the rebates. It may have cost me $200 ea.

This is even more important when you realize the 460 was a later addition (4 months) to the product stack. The 480 and 470 were the original cards from the series.

I didn't realize that a delayed introduction of a few months, somehow made a card "not part of the product stack".

C) "Halo Cards"? Oh, so now you're inventing new tiers to try to keep the card you want in your tier. Got it. Fortunately the rest of the internet uses the dictionary definition of high end, not your ever changing definition. So I'll just keep going with the definition everybody else uses.

You've never heard of a "Halo card"?

A "Halo Card" is different from simply a high-end card, in that they are NOT designed / intended to sell in volume, like the rest of the product stack. In fact, their sole purpose in existing, is to win benchmarks by enthusiasts, and thus cast a "halo" over the rest of the product stack, the cards designed to sell in volume.

Or, using YOUR definition, the dual-GPU GTX590 was a "high-end" card, and because the 580 slotted in under that card, then it was "mid-range"?

Since most reviews considered the 580 to be the high-end GPU of the time, I'm going to stick with my definitions, thanks.

 

[VashHT]

This thread is pretty funny,if anything I feel like I get more out of high end hardware today than in the past. I remember getting a PII PC for $2300 after they first came out, thing had crap integrated graphics so my brother and I had to save up for a voodoo card to even play most 3D games.

I was using a I5 750 up until later last year, it was around 5 years old and it was still good enough to play games at higher settings. My brother is using my old core 2 duo and my old 8800gtx and it plays most games fine.

For me the only reason gaming is more expensive nowadays is because I have more disposable income and poor self control when new stuff comes out, I could have dragged out my purchases even longer if I was willing to play stuff on low or medium settings, which is what I used to do before I had a good job.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Yes, so I did. So let's call high-end $500 or more.

The example I originally gave, that of my $180 Gigabyte WindForce 1GB OC, was: Not a watered-down version, like the 768MB version was, and also: was an example of an OCed and upgraded cooling model. List price was $230, but I managed to get it on a good sale. It's possible that the $180 price was the AR price, because I don't think I sent in the rebates. It may have cost me $200 ea.


I didn't realize that a delayed introduction of a few months, somehow made a card "not part of the product stack".

You've never heard of a "Halo card"?

A "Halo Card" is different from simply a high-end card, in that they are NOT designed / intended to sell in volume, like the rest of the product stack. In fact, their sole purpose in existing, is to win benchmarks by enthusiasts, and thus cast a "halo" over the rest of the product stack, the cards designed to sell in volume.

Or, using YOUR definition, the dual-GPU GTX590 was a "high-end" card, and because the 580 slotted in under that card, then it was "mid-range"?

Since most reviews considered the 580 to be the high-end GPU of the time, I'm going to stick with my definitions, thanks.

My 5850 for $150 was a better card than your $180 460 1GB, yet you don't see me whining how overpriced my $230 7950B is, precisely because its more than 2x as fast.

Halo cards? They are completely irrelevant to anybody who values perf/$, and this been so since like forever. Unlike you, we do remember what happened in the past 2 decades.

 

[desura]

I definitely think that the graphical power of modern GPU's are really squandered and put to bad use. The game designers have to make the game playable for the low end while also giving high end users something to benchmark against. So you basically end up with check the box every dx11 feature being used even though you wouldn't notice or care if it were missing.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Halo cards? They are completely irrelevant to anybody who values perf/$, and this been so since like forever. Unlike you, we do remember what happened in the past 2 decades.

I agree with you. My beef was with XavierMace disagreeing that NV has raised prices on their cards, and using what used to be considered obscenely-expensive "Halo cards", as an example of a "standard, mere high-end card".

The GTX970, in previous generations, would have been akin to the GTX460 768MB, or the GTX550ti, with the crippled memory arrangement. The fact that the prior cards were around $150-180, and the GTX970 was what, $330, shows that NV has been raising prices on gaming equipment (more than inflation). Which was basically supporting my OP.

There's talk in the CPU forum about a wccftech leak, that KabyLake-K CPUs, are going to be re-named KabyLake-X, and the price raised from $330 (current list price of a 6700K), to $399.

All because of the "Gaming gold rush".

 

[jlee]

I agree with you. My beef was with XavierMace disagreeing that NV has raised prices on their cards, and using what used to be considered obscenely-expensive "Halo cards", as an example of a "standard, mere high-end card".

The GTX970, in previous generations, would have been akin to the GTX460 768MB, or the GTX550ti, with the crippled memory arrangement. The fact that the prior cards were around $150-180, and the GTX970 was what, $330, shows that NV has been raising prices on gaming equipment (more than inflation). Which was basically supporting my OP.

There's talk in the CPU forum about a wccftech leak, that KabyLake-K CPUs, are going to be re-named KabyLake-X, and the price raised from $330 (current list price of a 6700K), to $399.

All because of the "Gaming gold rush".

Except none of this matters, because in your own words:

I think that the 7950 is still a viable gaming card

Nothing here legitimately supports your OP, except your own efforts.

 

[TidusZ]

So, I'm back to your definition is wrong as there hasn't been a single example showing that your statement of $400 being high end was true any time in recent history.

$400 used to get you very close to the high end, I'd say $500 realistically used to be the high end for more than a decade. I'm not sure exactly when the prices started climbing, maybe after 680? Probably a bit before that.

I think that the 7950 is still a viable gaming card

I wouldn't really say that's the case. The current value on that card is around $140 CDN... If you want to play 99.9% of games at 1600p 60+ fps I'd say you need to maintain a videocard worth at least $200. When I upgraded from 680 to 980 the 680 was only worth a bit over $200.

 

[lupi]

It's not just the "PC Gaming" section at BestBuy, with overpriced video cards, headsets, and mice/keyboards.

Now that Intel officially recognizes that "PC Gamers" is an actual demographic to be targeted, and they appear to be bucking the trend of downward PC sales, instead, buying towards the top of the product stack for CPUs, GPUs, etc. - is this hobby becoming too expensive for the "common man"?

I've seen posts from people that literally want people that only have dual-cores (no matter how fast) to be "burned" - that only quad-cores are acceptable for a PC Gamer.

Likewise, I've seen trends that people seem to think that you have to upgrade to one (or more!) of the newest NVidia gaming cards EVERY GENERATION if you "want to game on PC".

When did the PC Gaming hobby stop being an all-inclusive club, if you had a PC and at least a moderate GPU, and a wired mouse / keyboard (even if it was from Walmart), that you could "Game", even if you had to turn down settings a little bit.

Now you need to invest in a 2560x1440 @ 144 IPS G-Sync monitor for $700, get dual 1080 SLI cards for $1400, get a Broadwell-E for $1700, etc.

Sure, maybe there are those few people out there that can afford that kind of stuff with their disposable income (and I don't hold that against them, more power to you).

But when a certain subset of those people start to spew on forums that other, less-hardware-intensive PC Gamers, "aren't true PC gamers... PC Master Race!!!", I have a problem with that.

I mean, I think I've read that on the Steam survey, most gamers have 1080P @ 60 monitors, and GTX970 or lower video cards.

What do you think? Is PC Gaming only a sport for the elite now? Should retail prices of components be going up, just because of this subset of the population that can "afford the best"? Or should PC Gaming remain affordable and accessible to all that own a recent PC?

First, those "needs" are quite higher than an actual need. Second, I've got 2 2600k rigs that other than just now getting new video cards have had zero cost since the build so per year it's not that high even neglected all the other things I use them for.

 

[jlee]

$400 used to get you very close to the high end, I'd say $500 realistically used to be the high end for more than a decade. I'm not sure exactly when the prices started climbing, maybe after 680? Probably a bit before that.



I wouldn't really say that's the case. The current value on that card is around $140 CDN... If you want to play 99.9% of games at 1600p 60+ fps I'd say you need to maintain a videocard worth at least $200. When I upgraded from 680 to 980 the 680 was only worth a bit over $200.

If it wasn't for the GTX 1080, the 1070 would be the fastest single-GPU card out there...released at $379. That's pretty close to high end, IMO.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Except none of this matters, because in your own words:

Nothing here legitimately supports your OP, except your own efforts.

I can't never understand his thought process, but I do understand some go great lengths to hide their entitlement syndrome.

I have never bought any >$230 GPU, but then again I also don't have weird ego problems of either to max out settings in AAA games or be despised by the stupid PC master race types for using an outdated GPU.

 

[alcoholbob]

You don't honestly have to upgrade that often. It's mostly the resolution race that's making hardware go obsolete quickly. If you are a still on 1080p then a 7970 from 2011 is a still a monster card that can max almost everything.