Is medium to high end Pc gaming becoming too niche ?

While I agree with the general sentiment of not being locked to a game service and the THEORY of physical games being a more lasting medium... the reality is that Steam has so far done a better job of making sure I can install any game I have every purchased from them and play it. There are a few of the very oldest that have issues, but for the most part I would have either lost the DVD by now, or the installers would have stopped working due to it being 10 OS and CPU/GPU generations old forcing me to see if there's even a way to end run an installer that doesn't work on a modern OS.

Most games on Steam and GOG STILL just run. It's a far better experience than I ever had putting in disks since the very beginning of disk based games.

So while there's always that fear of the game vanishing if Steam just blows up someday their business model and straightforward sales and install rules have worked very very well.

The single studio game services are where a real disaster will first happen someday soon. EA, Origin, Ubisoft, etc. They're always one bankruptcy or acquisition away from disappearing and they truly don't care.
 
I think that the rise of High End PC Gaming coincided with the decline of the post crash Arcade scene. At least in the US, also there's no denying that software plays an integral role here. After all there needs to be a killer app. However I believe that period is the most pronounced and easily recognizable combination of social and economic factors.
Ultimately I believe that gaming generations exist between those technological and economic cycles.
 
Tactlesss said:
I think that the rise of High End PC Gaming coincided with the decline of the post crash Arcade scene. At least in the US, also there's no denying that software plays an integral role here. After all there needs to be a killer app. However I believe that period is the most pronounced and easily recognizable combination of social and economic factors.
Ultimately I believe that gaming generations exist between those technological and economic cycles.
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Yep, same in the UK.
It was around when hardware for use at home improved a lot (Commodore Amiga onward) and enough people who played arcade games or home machines/consoles became programmers, many of which started their own programming houses or joined startups. Some coding at home in spare time for fun.

Also programming courses became university degrees, the push for more programmers was huge. Then a lot of Polytechnics expanded to become Universities ...
 
polonyc2 said:
... Is Low-end Gaming Dead?

<silly youtube thumbnail>
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Not going to watch that, but given the clickbaity nature of the thumbnail I'd venture to guess that the answer is no.

Prices have become much less silly in recent months, after all. Low-end gaming has become surprisingly affordable with the 5600g.
 
I guess the RX 6600 raised the bar on low end, been using it to play World of Tanks at 4K high settings for 89.5 fps avg on the B550/5600x rig.
 
No, PC gaming is not becoming too niche. PC gaming has seen a resurgence in recent years, with a huge increase in both the number of players and the quality of games available. PC gaming has become much more accessible and is no longer limited to the high-end market. There are now many affordable options for PC gamers, making it possible for a larger audience to enjoy PC gaming.
 
A few years ago Intel’s top of the line cpu’s cost $1400. Now they’re $600. Motherboards have gone up but you can still get a decent one with all the bells and whistles for around $200. Memory is a lot cheaper also. GPU’s is where it gets iffy. If you buy a used GPU or get last years, you can still put a nice rig together under $2000 that will run anything mainstream you can throw at it. I just put a 13900kf rig with a used 3090 together for about $3000. Corsair 7000D airflow case, h170i cpu cooler, 64gb Vengeance 5200mhz DDR, 2x Samsung 970 2tb EVO NVMe’s, Taichi 790 motherboard and 64gigs of ram. It could’ve been a lot cheaper for maybe a 5% in performance loss. Enthousiasts being who we are, pay a bit of a tax for that. Not needed for someone frugal who still needs performance.

8 years ago I needed a $580, 5930k and three 980ti’s ($2000 in gpu’s) to run my three 2560x1600 monitors in X-Plane 9, at 60fps. Had a separate computer running a two monitor instrument panel.

Today I’m running a $600, 13900kf with a $1500 msrp 3090 (got mine used for $800). Three, 4K monitors that give me 120fps in X-Plane 11. I have an old 980ti in there to run a two monitor instrument panel. No need for a second computer anymore.

From my perspective things have gotten cheaper. Mainstream solution now with one GPU compared to a three GPU setup to run three monitors back in 2014. One old extra GPU negating the need for an extra computer running the instrument panel.
 
Just be patient and buy used.

Most people have had zero reason to upgrade in the last 3-4 years. Frankly even the long in the tooth 1080Ti is more than sufficient for what most people want to do gaming wise if you're playing at 1080p. And those can be picked up on the second hand market at this point for a song.
5700XT's also sell for $200 or sometimes less on second hand markets.

nVidia and AMD both want to manufacturer ultra premium priced cards that only a very small amount of people want. It won't be this way forever. And definitely don't feel like you have to give them your money.
 
crazycrave said:
To me it's more about what you get for a 100watt card then what we wasted our money on in the past. RX 6600 is a piece of artwork for $200
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Just curious, did you mean to say RX 6500XT? Based on what I am reading, the RX 6600 is a 132W GPU with a $329 MSRP (although it does look like it is being sold for as cheap as $250 on Newegg).

I wish that I could have bought a RX 6600 for my 300W system. At this point in time, as sad as it is, I think that the 1650 Super is still the king of 6-pin connector 100W GPU's.
 
gvx64 said:
I wish that I could have bought a RX 6600 for my 300W system. At this point in time, as sad as it is, I think that the 1650 Super is still the king of 6-pin connector 100W GPU's.
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Have been running a 1660 Super (~130W) + i7 6700 in a Dell Optiplex 5040 MT without issues
Granted, the Dell is slightly modified but still (swapped out the stock 240W with another Dell 315W PSU, added a few Noctua 40mm fans)
 
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UnknownSouljer said:
Just be patient and buy used.

Most people have had zero reason to upgrade in the last 3-4 years. Frankly even the long in the tooth 1080Ti is more than sufficient for what most people want to do gaming wise if you're playing at 1080p. And those can be picked up on the second hand market at this point for a song.
5700XT's also sell for $200 or sometimes less on second hand markets.

nVidia and AMD both want to manufacturer ultra premium priced cards that only a very small amount of people want. It won't be this way forever. And definitely don't feel like you have to give them your money.
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With the exception of RT I agree.
My 1080ti is used on an UUW screen = 2x1440p monitors effective.
Some games run with decent framerate at full res.
Those games suffering perform great at 1080p vertical res. It also looks amazingly good too considering its not native res.
I still play games on my 1080ti even though I have a 3090 machine.
 
You people keep looking at the market from the DIY pov. Most people end up buying crappy over priced Dells or worst something from the big box stores. Most people don't understand computers outside the very basics.
 
vegeta535 said:
You people keep looking at the market from the DIY pov. Most people end up buying crappy over priced Dells or worst something from the big box stores. Most people don't understand computers outside the very basics.
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This is a very fair and accurate point...

Majority of us PC enthusiasts in these forums, are a small percentage of the PC gaming market...

A majority of gamers just want something that will play Fortnite, or whatever other free game on Steam is popular among the cool kids
 
Didn't read thread and I can only speak for myself though I have a feeling 15 people have already said this. The $$$ isn't the issue for me, time is. It's just easier to pick up my xbox controller and quick resume the game I put down a week ago with zero delay, setup or any other nonsense. Does it match the eye candy of the 3090ti I last owned? Nope. Does it matter to me after about 20 seconds of actually playing the game? Also nope. That same console also makes a fantastic YouTube/PLEX/insertyourfavoritestreamingplatform client, takes up very little room and stays permanently attached to the 70" HDR 4K TV in my office. No drivers to deal with. Patches automagically apply when I'm not there to care. The OS updates itself with zero drama. 1 power wire, 1 HDMI cable.
 
Of course none of this really addresses the actual topic.
Which kind of answers the question with a resounding yes.
High End PC Gaming became too niche.
 
Tactlesss said:
Which kind of answers the question with a resounding yes.
High End PC Gaming became too niche.
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I could see an argument for the exact opposite, it became extremely mainstream with a whole pundit industry around it and giant amount of hardware toward it instead of just some niche affair.

200K $1600-2300 halo cards and they sell out right away.

Maybe it should became way nicher and had just some irrelevant Titan card costing $1000 that nobody care about and when new generation launch the attention and release date goes more toward the low and mid end.

If we look how common place native 4k benchmark are, it is hard to call high end pc gaming niche, there is maybe more than 2.3 millions machine with a 3080Ti or higher right now. 30 millions PS5 were sold worldwide since 2020.

Anyway seem extremely hard to say with the little figure we have, but the giant Cyberpunk PC games sales, when was high end pc gaming had way more human following it, doing it than now, and by how much ?

How much AMD-Nvidia battleground of the last month was purely on the high end and how much attention it got make it look really mainstream.

We went from niche to having multiple SKU targeting that market.
 
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gvx64 said:
Just curious, did you mean to say RX 6500XT? Based on what I am reading, the RX 6600 is a 132W GPU with a $329 MSRP (although it does look like it is being sold for as cheap as $250 on Newegg).

I wish that I could have bought a RX 6600 for my 300W system. At this point in time, as sad as it is, I think that the 1650 Super is still the king of 6-pin connector 100W GPU's.
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No, the RX 6600 that I have is bios locked to 100watts, it can do up to 120watts if you slide the power level, you see the card and power level in this video, I was asked to test 1440p for someone on an RX 6600

 
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There aren't really any games to play that require them.

It's not that PC enthusiast isn't willing, but the software isn't available. Why invest in the hardware?
 
Inflation+Wage Gap+Supply Chain issues/Shortages, makes any hobby more niche.
 
I played through RDR2 at 1440p on a RTX 2080 which is neck and neck with a 6600 XT. The experience was memorably awesome... and that was before the days of FSR and DLSS being good.

I'm sure the RX 6600 with FSR2 on will pretty much still be awesome at 1440p. 60 to 75fps is real good for the price and the image quality looks totally acceptable. Native is always better, but this is a non-XT 6600 and that's real good results.
 
crazycrave said:
No, the RX 6600 that I have is bios locked to 100watts, it can do up to 120watts if you slide the power level, you see the card and power level in this video, I was asked to test 1440p for someone on an RX 6600

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Honestly, I didn't know that you could do that. Is that a driver setting or some utility that you downloaded? Is that an AMD only feature or can this be done with NVidia also?

I guess that there would still be the issue of using a 6-8 pin power adapter in my setup because my PSU only has a 6 pin which I read can have safety issues. That being said, I would have felt a lot more comfortable with using that kind of adapter if I had known that there was a way to lock the max power consumption at 100W. Heck, I could have bought a RTX 2060 for about the same price as the GTX 1650 Super over the summer and even if I ended up with approx the same performance as the 1650 Super by locking the 2060 at 100W, it would still be a much better GPU since it wouldn't be held back with the 4GB of VRAM.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
Just be patient and buy used.
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This isn't going to work. Remember that we're at the point of the lowest discrete GPU sales in 20 years. That means the number of newer but used cards out there is smaller. On top of that the terrible high prices of most new cards will stop a lot of people from buying new meaning there are even more people looking to the used market. Additionally there are the people who aren't going to be selling their cards because they're not buying new cards which decreases the number on the used market and even if some people get new cards there is no guarantee they're going to sell the old card. I've seen quite a few people already state they're not selling their old cards because they need to make sure they have some sort of backup. All of this is going to lead to higher than normal demand with a lower than normal supply of used cards. The original price for these used cards were already high and people selling them will want the most they can get out of them. Do not expect to see a large number of used cards for sale anytime soon but do expect the used cards you see to be priced quite high relatively speaking.

There's a reason I finally replaced my Radeon RX570 (which I bought new for $120) with a Radeon RX6750xt for $400 new recently. That was the max I could afford to spend and for the most part it was a steal of a deal in the current market. I still need to get a 1440p monitor eventually but there's a very good chance the 6750xt will last me several years. Here's to hoping that in that time period some sanity comes back to pricing in the GPU market.
 
SmokeRngs, PCI Express 4 and SAM are enabled, my display is just a cheap Hisense 43" Class 4K UHD LED LCD Roku Smart TV HDR R6 Series 43R6E3 $228 @ Wal -Mart via HDMI @ 60Hz with game mode on.

The RX 6600 flexing on Fortnite in 4K




gvx64 ask, Honestly, I didn't know that you could do that. Is that a driver setting or some utility that you downloaded? Is that an AMD only feature or can this be done with NVidia also?

Nvidia can use FSR 1 and 2, also Intel's tech also works on Nvidia, AMD can only use their tech and Intel's tech, same for Intel being like AMD

Nvidia does not share DLSS with AMD or Intel.

I picked up a cheap Best Buy Evga 650watt power supply on sale for like $39, a few years ago and still going strong with that RX 6600.
 
SmokeRngs said:
This isn't going to work. Remember that we're at the point of the lowest discrete GPU sales in 20 years. That means the number of newer but used cards out there is smaller. On top of that the terrible high prices of most new cards will stop a lot of people from buying new meaning there are even more people looking to the used market. Additionally there are the people who aren't going to be selling their cards because they're not buying new cards which decreases the number on the used market and even if some people get new cards there is no guarantee they're going to sell the old card. I've seen quite a few people already state they're not selling their old cards because they need to make sure they have some sort of backup. All of this is going to lead to higher than normal demand with a lower than normal supply of used cards. The original price for these used cards were already high and people selling them will want the most they can get out of them. Do not expect to see a large number of used cards for sale anytime soon but do expect the used cards you see to be priced quite high relatively speaking.

There's a reason I finally replaced my Radeon RX570 (which I bought new for $120) with a Radeon RX6750xt for $400 new recently. That was the max I could afford to spend and for the most part it was a steal of a deal in the current market. I still need to get a 1440p monitor eventually but there's a very good chance the 6750xt will last me several years. Here's to hoping that in that time period some sanity comes back to pricing in the GPU market.
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This is a lot of words for: you waited and figured it out.

Tons of stuff also on the used market. Just perusing our own boards shows stuff in there as is there plenty of things on CL/FB.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
This is a lot of words for: you waited and figured it out.

Tons of stuff also on the used market. Just perusing our own boards shows stuff in there as is there plenty of things on CL/FB.
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No, I didn't wait and figure it out. I had no choice and with some luck found a good deal when I happened to have more cash than usual. Besides that I spent more than I wanted to.

And what are the prices on the used stuff? Are there really any "deals"? Something that isn't already 4+ years old? There is the occasional person who talks about a deal they got on a used card but it's generally quite rare and likely to become even more rare.
 
SmokeRngs said:
No, I didn't wait and figure it out. I had no choice and with some luck found a good deal when I happened to have more cash than usual. Besides that I spent more than I wanted to.
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Life or death?
SmokeRngs said:
And what are the prices on the used stuff? Are there really any "deals"? Something that isn't already 4+ years old? There is the occasional person who talks about a deal they got on a used card but it's generally quite rare and likely to become even more rare.
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Everything you're describing is a choice, based around some level of desperation as if things won't ever change. Just last year used cars costed as much as new cars. Now the used car market is trying to hold, but no one is buying. CarMax is already letting investors know that sales are down 40% and auctions are down by more than half. They're actively NOT buying (used) inventory because they recognize that buying right now is a bad idea as cars will drop in price and that market will bottom out.

If you can't wait a year, IE: "be patient" then yeah sure, you're going to eat it. Just like everyone who bought a used car in 2020-2022 or anyone that grabbed a card during the last crypto boom. I see zero reason to panic buy. Waiting another year doesn't affect me at all. Maybe even 2.
 
GotNoRice said:
It seems kind of silly to buy an entire PC unless you're basically starting from scratch, but I doubt that applies to anyone here. The last time I got a brand new complete PC was 1997, a first-generation Intel Pentium. Prior to that I had been using a combo of hand-me-down Macintosh computers combined with hand-me-down 386 computers. I had to start from somewhere. But ever since then, every "new" PC I've built has involved bringing over many significant parts from my previous computer. I usually stagger the big purchases. CPU + Mobo (if necessary) + RAM (if necessary), and then 1-3 years later upgrade my GPU, then 1-3 years later upgrade my CPU, etc, again. Hard drives, case, etc, get upgraded when needed. Basically a continuous rolling-upgrade that almost never involves me having to spend more than half of what it would cost to build a new PC at any one time.
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I typically do a complete new build once every 5 years. MB/CPU/RAM being the three components that stick around for that 5 year span. previous system was a 3770k which I kept around for 7 years. CPU advances were so stagnant back then I just didn’t feel the desire to upgrade. Thankful that isn’t the case today. I could upgrade now with my CPU being just under 3 years old and still see significant gains.
 
I think maybe the push to 4K gaming has caused the high-end gaming market to become more niche than in the past. If you stick to 1440P or Ultra-wide, you're fine with a mid-tier gaming rig in most games at 1440P. Its the step up to 4K and especially 4K 120hz that makes the price and frequency for required upgrades skyrocket.

That being said, I will always stand behind the fact that PC gaming when compared to other hobbies, is a much cheaper hobby, even today with $1500+ video cards.
 
HumanBias said:
My 4090 cost me less than my 3090, stop with the hyperbole.
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Just because you paid a scalper for a 3090 and got lucky and didn't have to pay a scalper for a 4090 doesn't make the 4090 cheaper.
 
SmokeRngs said:
Just because you paid a scalper for a 3090 and got lucky and didn't have to pay a scalper for a 4090 doesn't make the 4090 cheaper.
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1673208990116.png


From: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/evga-geforce-rtx-3090-ftw3-ultra/

I paid $1800 for the FTW3 3090, I paid $1800 for this Asus TUF Gaming OC 4090.
 
I assume there’s more margin in the higher end cards but still it’s pretty surprising to me that there’s so little innovation trying to get new card sales from amd and nvidia in the “old midrange” price bracket of around $300. The last cards that really struck me as being great at the price was the gtx 970 at $329 (and the 960 below it at 199). Nvidia in particular seems to want this price bracket to go away so people are just buying old cards and used cards - doesn’t seem very profitable for them.
 
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