Apart from this, if you're an enthusiast who likes to build their own PC, component prices have gone insane. A flagship GPU is 2000 dollars, and motherboards are priced so high that Gamer's Nexus decided to do a 25 minute video rant about it.
The returns are diminishing, it's not worth to get a 4090 RTX with DDR5 and a compatible mobo, if for 1/3 of the price you can get 90% of the performance with a used 3090 and DDR4.
The GPUs are what kills it. I started looking into building a performant 4K@60FPS SFFPC as an upgrade to my five year old gaming PC and it easily reaches $2000+ with taxes after adding the GPU. The build I’m looking at now, without a crazy motherboard, is $2500.
Nah, the chipset doesn't have much to do with that anymore. AMD's current desktop CPUs provide 16 PCIe lanes for the GPU and 8 lanes for a pair of NVMe drives; the PCIe lanes provided by the chipset are in addition to those (routed through another 4 lanes from the CPU). Intel's current desktop platform provides 16+4 direct from the CPU, and routes 8 lanes to the chipset.
The high-end chipsets are for people who think they still need lots of SATA ports, or lots of high-speed USB ports. Or for people who want features that are artificially restricted to only be available on boards using the high-end chipsets.
Overclocking capabilities (if you're into that), better build quality overall (primarily to facilitate overclocking), and more nice-to-have features and luxuries (eg: PCIE lanes) in general.
It's not just about the chipset, due to market segmentation and companies trying to squeeze the most out of the consumer, basic features like 7 segment displays are missing on mobos which aren't the highest tier.
reckon we're also entering the territory where even older hardware is "good enough", especially since so much work is now in the browser. My 4 year old Thinkpad runs fast enough that I won't feel the need to upgrade for a while. My other 5 year old Macbook is the same.
I also built a desktop 2 years ago and that's so smooth and fast that unless something physically breaks, I can easily stretch it out for 5 years.
This. My gaming computer is a 10 or 11 year old machine, whenever the first motherboards with PCIE 3 came out. Only the GPU is relatively recent (an AMD RX5000 series). It works well enough even for recent games. The limiting factor is the GPU VRAM if I want to play in 4k.
Sure, my work zen 3 laptop is somewhat faster for compiling and stuff and only eats a fraction of the power, but for what I do, it wouldn't make enough of a difference to justify buying a new computer.
Always has been. Buying top of the line technology is paying an early adopter penalty. People talk about FPS (frames per second) with gaming PC's and I think its an unnoticeable arms race about numbers. If the human eye can't observe more than 60 FPS and you aren't playing competitively (aka professionally) what will that extra FPS boost get you? Paying for bragging rights (ironic observation for gamers)?
I've extensively tested framerates and times across a lot of monitors over the years. The 60FPS human eye limit is either incorrect, or the display of frames on a monitor affects how movement interpolation is handled.
After about 160Hz/FPS you start to not be able to tell the difference.
The difference between 60hz and 120hz is night and day.
The difference between 120hz and 144hz is noticably better,
the difference between 144hz and 165hz is very slightly better,
the difference between 165hz and 240hz is not really noticable,
the difference between 240hz and 360hz is imperceptible.
I agree that there are diminishing returns, but I can promise you that it's easy to stop a difference between 60 FPS and 144 FPS if you have a 144hz monitor. I don't think anyone actually believes that 60 FPS is the "limit of the human eye"
Paying for that difference makes sense for some games/genres. For some that doesn't matter.
Yeah you can. One of the dumbest things I did was spend too much money on a nice pair of 4k@60hz monitors for computer, then mount a 4k@120hz OLED TV right next to them for couch gaming. The quality difference is staggering. Even on games that only run at 80-90fps.
Seconded. Fast games specially benefit from >60Hz refresh rates. My wife has a 300Hz laptop and playing OW2 on it is amazing, I can track shots better and I can do quick flick shots better than on a 60Hz monitor.
The returns are diminishing, it's not worth to get a 4090 RTX with DDR5 and a compatible mobo, if for 1/3 of the price you can get 90% of the performance with a used 3090 and DDR4.