Just to echo the other children of this comment; I'm pretty lost as to the reasoning here.

I game at 1440p on a GTX 1080 from launch day in 2016. Cost is essentially no object for me, as gaming is my primary hobby and I can easily spend 60hrs/week playing video games, so the return would be more than justified in my mind.

But I haven't upgraded in 6 years because there has been no reason to. I'm running my favorite games at 144fps, and the newer super-high fidelity stuff I can run at 60fps, which is more than reasonable.

I will say that I was excited for the 40XX lineup, but at these prices I'm more inclined to hunt for a cheaper 2080 or 3080 solely for RTX functionality, but that's an enthusiast feature even for someone like me who spends a huge amount of time gaming.

I couldn't imagine giving up my access to old titles, console emulators, mods, itch.io experiments, and low-budget indie games on Steam to save a few hundred bucks in the short-term to buy a console.

YMMV if you're not paid well in a HCOL area, or if your location offers alternatives such as PC cafes.

You’re missing the part where you get pipe cred by posting timespy scores in Discord after installing your 4090 and dedicated ac unit.

I historically have bought 1-2 gen old cards and it has worked well for me too.

The big filter right now is 4k 120hz. If you’re aiming for that you need a recent card with hdmi 2.1, which is like 3k nvidia 6k amd series. I upgraded displays recently and it finally forced me, begrudgingly, onto a more current gen card. Really wanted to wait for 4k/7k lines to ditch my old 1080Tis.

Almost 10 hours per day. I'm curious : Is it typical for gamers to spend this much time gaming?

No. I am almost certainly an outlier, even among my peer group. No kids, taking a break from work, very few responsibilities. When I have a full time job my playtime drops, but 1-3 hours on weeknights plus large binges on weekends can keep the number surprisingly high, though.

This is mostly a matter of multitasking (which I know HN is fairly divded on).

I play games when I watch TV, and I also use games to socialize with my friends.

If an average person added up ~80% of their socialization time and all of their TV/movie/audiobook/podcast time, I suspect that it'd look pretty close to the amount of gaming I do when I have a full time job (probably fluctuates between 10-40 hours per week).

Weekends could easily be > 1/3 of that time (say 24h over 2 days),leaving a reasonable ~5 hours per week day. I don't know about typical, but I've had such a schedule at points in my life when playing games I really enjoyed.

Yes, for some games, but not on a consistent basis.

I still enjoy games, but with adult life I'm playing either after diner (if I'm not too tired) or on the weekends, and gaming competes with other entertainment (series, movies, going out with friends/dates with SO, etc). So as I've grown it takes less time overall.

I am, however, making a schedule for Homeworld 3 and KSP2 when they launch (:

> Me and most of my PC gaming friends gave up on this hobby in the past two-three years due to the insane GPU prices.

Why give up? Modern games are perfectly playable at 720p/no AA, reaching 60+ FPS also on pre-GTX 2000 cards.

I've moved to 1080p just because I bought my latest card before the price hike, but I still don't mind playing at 720p/no AA.

As presented, the choices then are:

- buy a $800 GPU, keep PC gaming and all the fun maintenance associated with that

- buy a cool new toy like a Xbox Series X/PS5/Steam Deck

- don't do anything, game at 720P with no AA (this sounds sort of like when I had lunchables for dinner yesterday)

Your alternative isn't wrong but they weren't looking to optimize for staying on a PC, but rather, for gaming, and were already thinking in terms of "how much of my disposable income do I want to spend on my hobby?" rather than "should I spend my disposable income on my hobby?"

I had a PS5. I sold it after playing a few exclusives because there was just nothing else to play. Games are more expensive on consoles than PC, no mods, have to pay to play online, and so on.

Plus, the very fact that it's a general purpose computer I can use for work, programming, and cool GPU stuff like Stable Diffusion are what made me get a PC over a console. In other words, I'm gonna need a computer anyway, why not get one that can play games over getting a computer or laptop and also a games console that doesn't do everything as well as a gaming PC?

I'm sure in the long term one would actually spend less on a PC than a console, given all these constraints.

Couch experience is overall much nicer. Dual classing one pc as a tv and desk thing is just plain annoying.

PC -> TV experiences are also not great in general.

Also many will not buy a desktop computer, their compute device is a phone at most.

Dual classing a pc as a tv and desk PC can be pretty nice once you get it set up. Something like Nvidia Shield, Moonlight Gamestream software (if you have an Nvidia card), and Playnight launcher can work great if you can hook it all together with ethernet or MOCA over COAX.

Having run an over powered desktop to enable my gaming hobby, I have been toying with putting a "thin client" on my desk and my beefy rig in the living room.

Computer performance has felt ~stagnant for the past decade. Given the number of platforms that build to be mobile friendly, there is increasingly less need to be constantly running a power hungry rig as my main configuration when I am spending most of my time browser the internet. If I want to "desktop game" I could stream from the living room to my desk in the event it is not a controller friendly experience.

> PC -> TV experiences are also not great in general.

Why not? I recently bought an inexpensive gamepad, hooked up TV via HDMI and added a wireless keyboard+touchpad to the mix (I can't get used to Steam console mode). Overall experience is pretty good, effectively indistinguishable from PS4 we had in the office.

It drops into desktop, you have to drag out the keyboard / mouse, it's connected as another monitor on hdmi, so if someone else turns on the tv, that starts interacting with your computer as a second screen. Not to mention the extra annoyances when the tv is in another room.

Streaming boxes like the nvidia shield or similar have their own issues, along with dropping to desktop and so on.

While a dedicated TV console has none of those issues.

> It drops into desktop, you have to drag out the keyboard / mouse ...

For the years I had a living room PC hooked up to the main TV, I used a small gamepad-sized wireless keyboard and touchpad similar to this:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00Z81U3YY

The one I had worked pretty well, but it wasn't this model.

I just do both really. There are some games that are just better sitting on the sofa that can be started fast and no fuss. Then there are some games that are maybe more of a slow Sunday afternoon at a desk vibe.

First point is disingenuous, it’s not like you only have that one option. There’s plenty options at lower price points which are still decent. And there’s the second-hand market for the budget-conscious. You can get a decent pc for around 1k, and much lower with second-hand market options.

For the maintenance, it’s not like you’re buying a car. Unless you’re enthusiastic about your pc, you can get a pre-built, plug it in and use it, same as console.

Not to mention that games are cheaper and there’s more cheap indie titles available, so if one is optimising for max gaming enjoyment for the least money, pc looks like a better option. But if the plan is to play through the best titles here and there, then console is a good option as well.

There is far more maintenance or rather troubleshooting with a PC. The Steam Deck too TBH (even on "Verified" games you run into the occasional problem with more frequency than a Switch). You're just far more likely to run into some weird problem or issue with a random title especially that 10 year old game you bought for $1.

On console you match the label to the machine and it works.

- play any of the myriad brilliant non-AAA games that don't require bleeding edge hardware for full experience.

> - don't do anything, game at 720P with no AA (this sounds sort of like when I had lunchables for dinner yesterday)

This sounds sort of like audiophiles, who don't listen to music unless the audio system doesn't have expensive cables.

This is my story. I've been a PC-first gamer since I was a kid. Diablo was my first "big" game. The pricing of PC components and GPUs in particular have forced me to take a step back and move to console first with a Steam Deck supplementing.

For the price of one mid level 40 series card I can buy two consoles (Xbox Series X + Digital PS5). I know that the games themselves end up costing more, but I don't really care about the majority of new games coming out and the ones I do are often on game pass.

"I know that the games themselves end up costing more"

Just got PS5 and the PS Extra membership whose library has almost every game I wanted. Maxed out my SSD storage on day 1. And I think the XBox subscription is even better. I mean PC is still cheaper but the difference is not that big anymore.

3060 is enough to compete with PS5/XSX. Buy used one that will getting cheap.

I know, I have a 2080 at the moment. But I don't like where the PC industry is headed so I am not going to support it going forward unless something changes.

You don't have to buy 40 series. Actually, you even don't have to buy 30 series. Even more actually, for gaming only you may buy AMD card, more or less th same that used by Xbox and PS5.

Even at 300 dollars, a 350w 3080 still looks pretty bad. I'd much rather watch prices of the 6800xt, at least until AMD makes their RDNA3 announcement. It also runs (well) on linux too :).

I occasionally play games, including some recent AAA releases. Everything plays fine at 1k/medium-high settings or 4k/medium-low settings on my GTX 1060. No AA, but I don't care that much. The age of needing a new graphics card to play the new games is basically over. IIRC the GTX 1060 is still the most popular GPU on steam. I just "upgraded" to a Radeon Pro VII (for RoCM), with basically equivalent graphics performance, and everything still plays very well.

>the price of a modern GPU alone buys you a whole stand-alone gaming console today.

This has been true for as long as I’ve seen. Mid-range GPUs have historically tended to cost about as much as whole consoles. Pascal, one of the most well-received lines in terms of pricing, sold the GTX 1070 for $400 MSRP, the same price as buying a whole PS4. These new prices being the equivalent of buying two whole machines is what’s truly intense.