5 signs that PC gaming has changed forever

PC gaming has been one of the greatest joys of my life for as long as I can remember. From playing Blood Bath on a Pentium 3 pre-built from HP in the early 2000s to getting barely playable FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 on my RTX 3080 rig, it’s been a wild trip. For those new on the scene, PC gaming might seem perfectly fine or even better than ever. But for those like me who’ve seen the industry evolve over nearly three decades, the writing’s pretty much on the wall — PC gaming might never return to normal again.

This is not some hyperbolic rant or a doom-spelling “PC gaming is dead” post. Multiple trends emerging in the past few years have transformed the face of PC gaming, with 2022 being especially bad for desktop PCs. It seems the industry is hell-bent on leaving gamers behind in favor of chasing bigger and bigger numbers. PC gaming might be far from dead, but it sure looks radically different today.

1 Graphics cards have become a luxury commodity

Ah, yes, graphics cards — the holy grail of PC gaming. While they always have been the most critical and expensive part of gaming PCs, things have started to get out of hand in the last five years or so. Nvidia first touched the $1,000 mark for their flagship card with the RTX 2080 Ti in 2018, with things going completely haywire with the RTX 30-series as the 90-class cards were introduced. The RTX 40-series firmly cemented Nvidia’s new approach to treating GPUs as luxury products rather than gaming necessities.

Even if you view these halo products differently than the more mainstream 80- or 70-class cards, it doesn’t look any better for the latter. The RTX 4070 was little more than an RTX 3080 priced $100 higher at $600. And the less said about the RTX 4060 Ti, the better. AMD’s record hasn’t exactly been stellar either. They launched their flagship cards in 2022 and then nothing for almost six months. The RX 7800 XT and RX 7600 XT were better value cards, forcing Nvidia to cut prices, but not by much.

Thanks to these unprecedented GPU prices, desktop PC gaming is becoming too expensive to digest. There was a time when you could build a high-end gaming PC without worrying about where your GPU’s next installment would come from. Today, you’d have to spend a small fortune to build a PC capable of 1440p 100+ FPS in all modern titles, especially if you’re a ray tracing enthusiast. Graphics cards are the biggest contributors to this trend, but they’re not the only piece of the puzzle.

2 Even motherboards are ridiculously priced

Motherboards usually don’t receive the hype or hatred reserved for GPUs and CPUs. This is because they aren’t as exciting, but also because you didn’t have to think or spend too much on them before. Things have changed drastically this generation, as new motherboards, especially on the AM5 side, have shot up in price. Even if you exclude the best motherboards for gaming, you still need to spend at least $180 or even more to snag an ATX B650 motherboard for AMD’s latest processors.

Unless you wait it out for a sale, the days of sub-$100 motherboards are gone if you want to build a current system. Sure, mATX boards will work just fine, but in addition to the other compromises, you still need to spend at least $150 to avoid a barebone model. Adding to the woes of buying overpriced graphics cards, the motherboard costs are really starting to add up.

If you’re building a system for the long run, you’ll have to forego Intel and pay the AM5 platform tax to avoid buying a new motherboard the next time you switch between CPUs. Now, you might say that prices might go down in the future as AM5 becomes more mainstream. But it’s already been a year into the new platform and prices haven’t really dipped a lot. It appears that $200 motherboards represent the new normal for PC gaming.

3 Moore’s Law is dead, apparently

If Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is to be believed, Moore’s Law — the observation that predicts the doubling of computing performance every two years — is not possible anymore. Jensen has said this multiple times in an attempt to justify the price hikes of Nvidia’s gaming GPUs. It has also been used to justify the somewhat stagnating performance of Nvidia’s gaming chips in recent years. Intel tends to disagree with Nvidia on this, but that’s another matter.

Whichever side of the debate you’re on, the fact of the matter is that companies have stopped delivering significant generational improvements year-on-year. Even when they do manage to produce a truly groundbreaking product, the cost benefits aren’t passed on to the customer. The longevity of PC components like CPUs and GPUs has shrunk dramatically compared to only a few years ago.

CPU upgrades have started contributing less and less to gaming performance, $500 GPUs with 8GB VRAM have suddenly become commonplace, and shady naming schemes to dupe customers into spending more are cropping up again and again (looking at you, RTX 4080 12GB). So we need to accept the fact that spending the big bucks on a high-end gaming PC will not save you from the need to upgrade in the near future.

4 Native resolution doesn’t really exist anymore

When I first made the jump from 1080p to 1440p three years ago, I was truly impressed by the enhanced visual quality. I was rocking a GTX 1660 Ti at the time, so the resolution I was enjoying was actually 1440p. You can’t really say that in 2023 as upscaling technologies like DLSS and FSR have all but permeated PC gaming to the core. You can choose to run your games without it, but not if you want the high-end experience you actually paid for.

These upscaling and optimization techniques might be getting better every year, with the average gamer failing to spot any difference between native and upscaled output. But, game developers have started using upscaling tech as a crutch and doing a sub-par job at optimizing their games to run well in the first place. The list of terrible AAA game launches in 2023 alone is a testament to the fact that game studios have really dropped the ball when it comes to game performance.

It doesn’t look like there’s a reversal on the horizon, as Nvidia and AMD continue to focus on improving upscaling performance instead of giving gamers enough VRAM and respectable ray tracing capabilities. Just look at the downright shameful performance of the best graphics cards of today in Cyberpunk 2077 max settings without DLSS, and you’ll begin to get the picture.

5 And we’re welcoming this downfall

It might come as a surprise to some, but we, as gamers, are happily laying down the red carpet for this PC gaming downfall. The pandemic exposed the unfortunate reality that gamers will pay anything for a graphics card, and GPU companies never looked back. Despite many big-budget launches performing significantly better on consoles, PC gamers continue to flood forums and comments about the superiority of the “PCMR”.

You can easily find a large portion of the community justifying the atrocious prices of today’s PC hardware, with some simply resorting to comments like “just earn more.” Instead of voting with our wallet, we’ve put PC gaming, and graphics cards in particular, on a pedestal, bending over backward to come up with inane arguments to justify just about anything manufacturers do.

I remember building a first-gen Ryzen system with a GTX 1660 Ti in 2017 for around $700. Even with 2017 standards, it was a budget build but capable enough to generate impressive framerates at 1080p and even 1440p. Games get more demanding and inflation plays its part, yes, but that doesn’t mean you should have to spend the equivalent of a whole system on a graphics card after 6 years. Building a $1,500 gaming PC has, sadly, become the norm in 2023.

It was good while it lasted

It is believed that PC gaming goes through cycles, going from the best of times to the worst of times and back. For a multitude of reasons though, I feel the cycle has all but broken, and we’ll never really return to the good times again. PC gaming will flourish, sure, but not for the everyday gamer. The RTX 5090 might break all records and might sell like hot cakes at $2,000 a pop, but the rest of the community will likely remain ignored.

PC gamers might finally be convinced about the many things a console does better than a gaming PC, and make the switch. Gaming laptops, handhelds, and other categories might see a rise in the coming years. But I feel desktop PC gaming will become an elitist hobby, and we’ll all just have to be OK with it.