Naively previewing 2021, still in the warm twilight of the release of the impressive GeForce RTX 3080 and Radeon RX 6800 XT, this year looked like the year of affordable gaming PCs. A golden year for bargaining platforms, and one in the eye for the latest consoles. As it turns out, 2021 was the worst year for PC gaming. why? Because the heart of the hobby, the mainstream market and the budget, was executed succinctly.
Computer games mean different things to different people, and that alone plays a good role in the hobby, and why no other platform can match it. On the other hand, you have some early adopters, sometimes recognized as the elite, who have cash to burn; Those who will leave a large sum on a new component once it is launched simply so that they can claim to have the latest and greatest platform known to mankind.
This is awesome. The sheer power that mounts within this high-performance gaming rig will always be unmatched by anything our console cousins could dream of. The scalability of PC games means that the big titles will look their best on our platforms when pushed to their full potential.
But it’s the scalability that adds up to what makes PC gaming really special for me. Because on the other hand you have budget builders, dedicated gamers are working hard to squeeze the most performance out of the more expensive parts into those same games.
When you have a large portfolio it is easy to play 4K games at smooth frame rates, but when you are working on a tight budget you have to put in hours searching for parts, compromising some and finally optimizing the hell out of your games and system. It’s challenging, but very rewarding, especially when you often end up with a gaming PC that delivers frame rates to make your Xbox One blush.
That’s how it was in the past, and as a general rule, I’d say going into the second year of the new console generation, you can expect to put together a gaming PC for the same money, and with equal or better performance, compared to the current generation gamebox. Prices drop, and new parts are released from the regular budget to make the task of creating a PC easier.
Not with this generation, nor with the Series X or the PS5. If you want 4K gaming at $500, this is still where the smart money goes.
In this, the darkest possible timeline, there is no financial necessity to “waste” production capacity on cheaper products.
Since the demand for components and computers in general started to increase in 2020, this trend has continued this year, and it looks like it will be the new normal throughout 2022 – possibly until 2023 as well. Combined with limited manufacturing capacity, disruption in the supply chain, and the relentless rise of cryptocurrency –repeatedly-, This means that major components, such as graphics cards, are not available immediately upon release, and thus become as scarce as donkey eggs.
That then becomes a breeding ground for bots and retailers who resell wildly inflated price tags on our favorite components, which has made trying to upgrade or build a new PC over the past couple of years a nightmare.
This is all general information, and you’re probably going through that pain as a PC gamer by now. But the least-cited side effect of chip shortages, extremely high demand, and a brutal ongoing epidemic, is its effect on the choices manufacturers have made about what they produce, and what their product lines actually look like.
When everything you do sells out immediately upon shipment, and you only have limited manufacturing capacity and a limited chip supply, there is little incentive to create less expensive, traditionally high-volume products. If you’re selling up to $1,000 GPUs like your $400 options, why would any lower GPU cut down the potential performance stack?
Normally, we’d have seen cards under $200 for budget gamers so far, those who take the latest architecture, with just a few pennies and tucks here and there, providing great bang for your buck. But mathematics is no longer valuable. The conventional understanding is that you make $200 off of GPUs, with the goal of selling a full load of them because you’ll be selling fewer higher-priced options. But on this, the darkest possible timeline, there is no financial necessity to “waste” production capacity on cheaper products while you can make the same number of more expensive chips while still selling the same number, but with a much higher return.
The fact that it’s an economical concept doesn’t make it any less sad or crazy. Capitalism is a cruel mistress.
And if you want some raw numbers to back that up: A year or so after the GeForce RTX 2080 was released, Nvidia released five $300 GPUs, each a step higher than their related predecessors. You can even get those six if you factor in the price drop to $299 for the RTX 2060 at the start of 2020.
On the AMD side, due in part to the low flagship price, it released seven of its under-$300 GPUs a year after its Radeon RX 5700 XT, if you count the various OEM versions of its first-generation RDNA cards, it’s.
And where does the number stand a year or so after the release of the GeForce RTX 3080 and Radeon RX 6800 XT? At zero fat is a lot. Nada. Zilch. There are no GPUs under $300 in this generation.
There is no alternative either. The boom-and-bust cycle of cryptocurrency mining actually made this happen any The GPU is picked up by the adventurous Ethereum digger, meaning that the last resort for budget gamers, ebay, is a wasteland when it comes to last-generation graphics cards that are also affordable.
This makes it impossible to build an economical gaming device worth it. Is there any hope on the horizon? Yeah. Although let me just let the “potential” calm hang in the air…
There is potential for a budget gaming renaissance in 2022
There may be new Nvidia and AMD GPUs launched next year with lower price tags and physical availability, and Intel will finally join the race with its own line of discrete GPUs as well. This will give us three opportunities at affordable prices and competitive graphics cards, and with SSD prices low, DDR4 priced well right now, and Intel budget CPUs being a great value, there’s a good chance of a budget gaming renaissance in 2022.
With CES circulating in January, where AMD usually likes to talk about new mobile chips and APUs, there are rumors of a Rembrandt APU design sporting RDNA 2 GPU cores. This can provide low-cost setups that don’t need a separate graphics card to be able to deliver 1080p gaming performance, providing another affordable avenue for the hobby.
We’ve also got a Steam Deck in the tube for its February release, with a console-level price point, and the ability to play both on PC and consoles from a SteamOS-based system.
While these plans can eliminate the woes of budget PC gaming, there is still a very real specter of a supply shortfall. Steam Deck has already been delayed from its December launch to February, with Valve citing “global supply chain issues” as the cause. The initial inventory has already been purchased as well, so if you haven’t already bought a ticket to Deck’s launch day, you’re not going to top up your Steamy handheld anytime soon.
And whether we’re talking about the GPU or the APU, AMD is still completely dependent on TSMC for its manufacture (as is Valve thanks to the use of AMD APUs in the same deck) which means that it is fighting with nearly every other company on the planet for chip manufacturing capacity from Taiwanese foundry. That means limited supply, which means knowing how to manage those cheaper components along with high-end GPUs and CPUs, plus all the chips AMD needs to power both Sony and Microsoft for their PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles.
Despite its extensive manufacturing capabilities, Intel is also using TSMC’s contract manufacturing services for its upcoming line of Xe-based Alchemist graphics cards.
This is a juggling multi-manufacturer job that might end up with the blue and red teams offering theoretically great budget graphics cards and APUs, but without the size for any of them that matter.
Then there’s Nvidia, which owes no credit to TSMC, but to Samsung’s manufacturing efforts. So far, this has meant you’ll be more likely to be able to track a new GeForce GPU out into the wild than AMD’s, and the same could be true for budget cards as well. Although supply will remain scarce, the battle to find one in the MSRPs will continue throughout 2022.
So there’s little hope of a return to the budget gaming PC market with potentially affordable key components in the future. This is vital because it is not only related to the wildly excited world of monster platforms, but also includes PC games. It’s about giving everyone with a PC the opportunity to participate in the hobby, whether they want to play Warzone or Wildermyth, whether they can spend $1,000 on a graphics card every 12 months or have to agonize over whether they can part with $50 on a new gaming headset. .
I definitely had a lot more fun of meticulous arithmetic and building a budget device that would push its weight class, than of enjoying a few high-powered parts together and calling them daily. And I desperately need to go back to the days when that would be possible again.