This might be the start of the end of high-end PC gaming, unless prices get back to a more reasonable level. Consoles (and phones) are very competitive and cost significantly less.
Or perhaps it just causes the games to have lower performance requirements. Is integrated graphics the future of PC gaming?
High-end PC gamers were always about money-is-no-object gaming. None of the tech they use has ever been strictly necessary.
The vast majority of gamers still use 1080p. More people login to Steam on a Mac than login to Steam with a 4K monitor attached.
Maybe the high-end is more expensive now, but you still see forums riddled with people paying $1000+ for cards. If nobody was paying for it the price would go back down. High-end PC gamers are the most price inelastic gamers on the market!
I'd say that integrated graphics are the present of PC gaming. eSports games, Minecraft, Fortnite and similar games dominate sales and play time, and they don't have any serious requirement for discrete graphics.
This is all to say that the high-end isn't going to just go away. The overall gaming market is bigger than ever, so high-end gaming along with other niches like VR are here to stay. These niches on their own are just large enough to support a variety of gaming markets, while in the past they might have been too obscure to warrant investment and development effort.
Depends on what you mean by high-end. If you want to run the latest AAA games then you will need a decent machine. If you want to do >1080p gaming then the requirements are even greater. But it's actually not that expensive, if you play 2 every day for 8/10 days, then you will play 584 hours/year. If your gaming setup costs $3000 every 5 years, that comes out to $1/hour. That's a lot cheaper than most hobbies.
The popularity of eSports is because pretty much anyone can play those games not that high end gaming is becoming a niche. Plus eSports & low-end gaming are super popular in less wealthy, non-western countries where as high-end gaming is going to be limited to developed countries. Within developed countries, high-end gaming is not a niche like VR.
I think it's interesting that we have three options now for sidestepping this by streaming games and yet none of them have made much of a dent.
Microsoft seems to have the best business model but you're stuck streaming the games on Game Pass, and their latency seems to be the worst in my experience.
Stadia seems to have the best tech in terms of latency, but the weird "it'll only work on these certain Chromecasts" launch situation put me off it for a bit, and then there's the business model - trusting Google to honor purchases on this service in perpetuity.
Luna is the one I haven't tried but seems to be going for an approach where they partner with publishers to sell catalog packs, even if they're not quite there yet.
The availability of the high bandwidth, low latency FTTP internet is lagging severly enough for these to have no impact.
The use cases where I, a high end gaming PC owner, would use streaming services are: travelling. Except unless you visit a city center, you aren't getting 5G, and you aren't getting WiFi 6 speeds. I'm in the UK, and here my parents live, where I live and where my friends live, none have the speeds capable for it. I imagine things are even worse in 95% of the US too.
Game streaming won't happen in a country unless most of the country has 100MBit down
I feel like high-end PC gaming, trying to maximize graphics of brand new titles has always been a silly dick-measuring competition.
For me the sweet spot of games is 2-8 years old. Reviews are out, so you can skip the crap. Patches have been released to fix bugs. And everything that has stood the test of time runs pretty well on low- to mid-tier hardware by now.
Dust off those games in your steam library that you never touched before.
Stadia doesn’t work “fairly well”. It’s also low-res (still) compared to a local GPU, which may be okay for some but certainly isn’t sufficient for serious gamers.
Yes it does? What issues do you have with it? It just works.
> It’s also low-res (still) compared to a local GPU
1080p for free or (upscaled) 4K for 10€/month is fairly decent, and on the latest games is better than most integrated or older GPUs.
> serious gamers
What percentage of the gamers' market is "serious gamers"? For the people that "must have" 8K low latency etc sure, cloud gaming isn't the best option. But IMHO they're the minority and vastly more people are "casual gamers" that are more than fine with playing 1080p/upscaled 4K for peanuts for multiple years ( how much does a RTX 3080 cost, and how many years of Stadia can we buy with the same amount of money?)
I had a gutfeel around 3080 launch it was going to be big, so grabbed one on launch day (had to wait for months for the local store to have stock though..). Now seeing them 2x the price. Crazy times.
I am in need of an upgrade but having a harder and harder time justifying the expense for what is a hobby.
I guess eventually my system will be old enough that I will be better off just ordering a prebuilt, where I'll get gouged a bit overall but not by some insane amount just for a GPU
That was my assumption - I managed to pick up a 3080 TI FE at MSRP in the UK a couple of weeks back. I would have gone for the 3080, better price/perf, but since the only ones available are AIB for the same price, or more, than the 3080 TI FE that made the decision for me.
