Analyse This: Next Generation PC gaming... [UPDATED 04-Sep-2020]

Nvidia's much-anticipated event has literally just wrapped up and there's actually not too much to parse in terms of reveals. The big one - no increase in release price - is, for me, the primary shocker. I think it's great... but at the same time, we're still talking RTX 20 series levels of pricing... but I find it hard to complain about getting the performance we really deserved with the 20 series for the price increase. Let's not forget, graphics hardware releases are slowing considerably and what was once a 50% performance increase over 2 years has now become a 70-80% performance increase over 4 years, at an increased price point.

But lets put that behind us and just jump in and have a poke around the reveal...

Analyse This: The Next Gen Consoles (Part 11)...

 

We've been mostly sweltering in hot weather these last few weeks and, as such, the appropriately named Hotchips has come and gone and the promised Xbox Series X architecture presentation has given us a peek into the inner workings of the console. However, that's not the only source of new information for us to analyse. We've got a short promo for "the new Xbox experience" and speculation on the Series S' configuration and GPU performance to go through too!

This post might be a little dense. But let's see what we can assemble from this morass of information...

The limiting factors for the next generation of hardware...

Recently, I've become a bit numb with all the leaks and predictions, stats, and manoeuvrings of the companies in the industry, trying to one-up each other, provide counter-intelligence and increase mindshare. We're in the middle of a storm that I cannot remember being so intense since the end of the 90s or very early 2000s... and even then not in every gaming sector and not in various hardware "genres".

However, what has been slowly coalescing in my mind are what *I* think are the limitations we're going to run into over the next couple of years.

Next Gen game PC hardware requirements... (Part 2 - looking toward the future)

Last time, I went over a list of hand-picked games that were released over the last ten years, compiling the recommended system requirements and averaging the performance required of an average gaming PC (for playing more demanding games) per year and also compared the requirements of those theoretical PCs to the then-current most technically capable console hardware*.

*That was the final graph in the summary. Don't worry, I'm going to go over it again.

This time, as promised, I want to try to make predictions about where the "average" PC will need to be in terms of performance per year for the next five years.

Next Gen game PC hardware requirements... (Part 1 - looking at the past)

We are on the cusp of a new generation of consoles and alongside that we also have major hardware releases that tout generational* improvements in performance from AMD and NVidia. Other outlets have had a crack at trying to predict where the PC gaming space is going to go and I've pontificated before about the required hardware for a relatively future-proof gaming PC but I wanted to take a deeper, more data-driven look at the console/PC relationship so let's take a look into the past and see if that might inform us on future trends...

*Human generation, not technological generation