this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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I don’t like the “hardware is becoming more expensive so gaming is going to die” argument because it assumes that we need bleeding edge hardware to play games. The gaming hardware treadmill was only ever designed to make people spend more money on increasingly-diminishing gains instead of getting the most out of the hardware everyone already has.
We’ve long-since passed the point of diminishing returns on graphical performance. AAA games released today don’t look that much better than they did 5 years ago, and AAA is no longer the main driver of gameplay innovation. Many of the best games of the last few years don’t require high-performance hardware, leaning more on art, music, writing, controls, unique gameplay elements, etc.
Point being, I think that hardware becoming more expensive just means that people will opt for cheaper hardware, or hold onto their existing hardware longer, which will force developers to design games that can run on mid-range hardware. There is no reason that gaming needs ever-increasing hardware perfomance to deliver great experiences. The gaming industry is in for a rough go as they have to adapt to very different circumstances, but gaming is going to be fine.
It’s hilarious—I spent a bucket of cash on a high end gfx card year and a half ago to upgrade and have proceeded to play almost exclusively games that I could have run on my early 2000s computer. Feel silly about it but basically just saying you’re correct, you mostly dont need the super cards for most stuff? You can certainly get by in most cases with a second / third tier card.
I’m in a similar boat. Haven’t upgraded in 5 years or so and I haven’t felt the need. It would be nice to have smoother framerates or whatever, but there’s nothing I want to play that won’t run well enough on my machine. Even if I do want to upgrade, I don’t feel the pull towards the high-end hardware. I may just get the Steambox when it comes out and call that good enough.
But not in 4K. That's 27 times as many pixels as VGA.
The steam deck by comparison only has 10/3 times as many pixels as VGA.
No you’re right, and that was one of the reasons I did it because I had changed to a 4k screen and unlike other things that actually does use the graphics card more. But I suspect the games Ive been playing would still be ok on my old card.