News - PC gaming hardware market worth $21.5 billion

[zsde]

There was time when Console games were at least double or triple of PC games. Now the gaming industry has started pushing PC game prices to the same levels. The pain threshold just diminished in terms of what people are prepared to fork out for PC games to have them. Not that much difference anymore, unfortunately. The PC gamers are just cross subsidising the Console games who in turn probably subsidise the Console hardware manufacturers.

[OilSheikh]

You mean, all of us at Hexus spends $21.5 billion ?

[JGJones]

Might this be good news for SteamOS? Game availability for it continue to grow and quite a number of big names are now developing linux ports of their game engine such as the Unreal 4 being the latest and gamers obviously continue to love their PC rather than consoles.

[JGJones]

and they said PCs are dying, dumb asses!

Discrete graphics card sales are down year on year.

IGPs are eating away at discrete sales each year and more and more people own laptops and hybrid tablets instead of desktops.

All this is saying is the remaining PC owners,are probably spending more on their PCs now.

The increase in graphics card prices and the slowing down of generational improvements alone,probably means more and more people are spending more on graphics cards over a fixed period now.

NVIDIA earlier in the year have said that they've had quite a large growth in sales for their GPU (on desktop and notebooks) - around 50% increase in shipments (overall a 14% year to year growth in revenue) - they put this down to increased demand in high-end gaming.

I do think desktop sales have more or less flat-lined - this is probably due to a large % of households now having a PC in the house and much longer average life of a PC (a Core 2 Duo CPU is still decent enough to perform just about all the tasks needed in the house. I've got a Core Duo (32bit only) laptop that's still running just fine and I don't find it slow. Granted I don't use it for gaming mind you

Due to that, it doesn't get replaced as frequently as it might have done 10 years earlier!

[Percy1983]

As others have said general use is being eaten by tablets or is still on older desktops, so of course desktops are in decline as there isn't a need for one in every house any more.

I am one of those who wants good video editing specs so may as well chuck and extra few quid in and add a beastly GPU.

I have no immediate plan to upgrade but probably will with the next range of GPUs, and may make the jump to an AMD CPU too.

[failquail]

I thought that the prevailing wisdom was that AMD's CPU's were not as good for gaming as their Intel-based brethren at the high-end (top i5 and all i7). I'm sure there's been comments in the last month here about a replacement for the FX's being long overdue.

True, but factor in the price and AMD are quite competitive.

I'll never buy intel if i can help it (their dirty tricks against AMD over the years just pulled too many minus points for me to willingly buy from them...)
But even a fairly cheap FX-8120 with a decent cooler is still holding very strong against any modern game, even if intel is better AMD is still more than adequate...

And considering my PC (4.4GHZ AMD 8-core, 16GB RAM) and the consoles (~1.6GHZ AMD 8-core, 8GB RAM) I can't see myself getting below mainstream spec for games any time soon...
Most i'd need is a new GPU to replace my 6950 and i can match anything from this new gen...

[rayden54]

What's "PC gaming hardware" exactly? It's a lot easier to point at a console and say "gaming" than computer parts*. The article mentions CPUs, SSDs, and "fast memory." Even GPUs by themselves aren't necessarily for gaming use.

*Although the PS3 probably did get a boost from being one of the cheaper, most reliable Blu-ray players on the market way back when.