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