There was a time when gaming PCs had to be upgraded regularly, but that hasn't been the case for years, now. My gaming rig was built about three years ago, and it should be able to go another one to two years before it will need an upgrade. And even then, the only upgrade it should need is a new video card (the GTX 460 that I have is sufficient, but it will eventually be a performance bottleneck).

I wonder how much consoles are to blame for that. Big studios that have the power to drive PC upgrades produce mainly for decade-old hardware, which is just peanuts by the standards of today's PCs.

The PS3 is nearly 7 years old and runs GTA V. Modern PCs could run GTA V just fine. In fact, it'd probably run better on the PC because they could just install the entire game to the hard drive (load times are a bit lengthy on the PS3 because of disc seek times).