Don’t forget this market insanity started around COVID, and has basically been succeeded by consequent crises with few dips.
The typical release cadence of PC components is around 4-6 years, which requires new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
Adding in the GPU basically results in a new build, and that’s being generous assuming no upgrades/changes to other parts like PSU and storage.
My take is that a lot of these people wishing to upgrade are those who have simply been holding out since 2020 or earlier. This seems to vaguely match up with the Steam Hardware results, with a fair number of people still using RTX 3000 series or RX 6000 series, of which even the top end cards are starting to become par/outperformed by their modern mid level counterparts.
The typical release cadence of PC components is around 4-6 years, which requires new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
Not with AMD though. Usually the motherboard can be reused if you buy new generation of CPU and RAM (good luck if you have Intel, then you are screwed and need to change everything). But besides that, even after a few years upgrading graphics card and RAM is all you need to stay “competitive” to play top games. Maybe new SSD too. I don’t know how usual it is to upgrade parts along the way, not all at once. Especially in times like these just upgrading certain parts at a time is the only option for most.
Don’t forget this market insanity started around COVID, and has basically been succeeded by consequent crises with few dips.
The typical release cadence of PC components is around 4-6 years, which requires new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
Adding in the GPU basically results in a new build, and that’s being generous assuming no upgrades/changes to other parts like PSU and storage.
My take is that a lot of these people wishing to upgrade are those who have simply been holding out since 2020 or earlier. This seems to vaguely match up with the Steam Hardware results, with a fair number of people still using RTX 3000 series or RX 6000 series, of which even the top end cards are starting to become par/outperformed by their modern mid level counterparts.
Not with AMD though. Usually the motherboard can be reused if you buy new generation of CPU and RAM (good luck if you have Intel, then you are screwed and need to change everything). But besides that, even after a few years upgrading graphics card and RAM is all you need to stay “competitive” to play top games. Maybe new SSD too. I don’t know how usual it is to upgrade parts along the way, not all at once. Especially in times like these just upgrading certain parts at a time is the only option for most.