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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Most PC gamers aren't using high-end machines and don't upgrade very often. The Steam Hardware Survey shows that the majority (74%) of PC gamers have a 1080p monitor and a plurality (37%) have a video card with 2GB of VRAM and 8GB of system RAM (47%). The GTX 1060 only recently overtook the GTX 750 Ti as the single most popular video card.

Pricing of high-end hardware is largely irrelevant to the success of PC gaming as a platform. The majority of users have always opted for value-oriented hardware.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

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I can't get a mid level graphics card either. These cards in the article are $200 and $250 cards from AMD. They are going for over $400.

I am the person that buys $200 graphic cards and high end is $500+ like a 1080ti or some sort of Titan. I always thought that $200 was the sweet spot with the best price to performance ratio. I can't buy a $200 card now.

I was lucky and got a new AMD 480 last year for $220. It sadly has an issue and needs to go in for warranty (3 years). It can only handle the simplest of graphics or it hangs and freezes the computer. No big deal, I wanted to make my kids a Minecraft and coding computer and I can't buy a decent $150 card either.

RAM is also sky high and I do video editing from time to time an want at least 16 GB in my rig. That would cost $100 18 months ago and now thats $225+ also due to the miners.

The effects on prices are quite bad, but the pendulum always comes back in the other direction two. Every GPU shortage leads to the second hand market getting flooded a few years later with used mining GPUs.

So in effect we get short term problems, but if you time your purchases correctly you can get deals too.

The problem that a few years later those GPUs aren’t worth much and with more and more coins coming out miners have always something to fallback on for their older hardware.

It doesn’t look like the GPU flood of 2015 would happen again.

Would you want to buy a piece of hardware that had been run at 100% of it's capacity for years, without any warranty?

I might. If it still works after mining for years then that tells me it'll last for a while.

Well, not everyone is aware of this, and 2nd hand mining card price points on various market platforms probably will push down the prices of everything else to varying extents. (both new, as well as 2nd hand gamer cards).

When the crash comes or when someone comes up with an ASIC for Ethereum, all these cards will flood the secondary market and the spare capacity slack will cause a price crash. You'll be able to get the highest end card in the world for half the current price.

Unless there will be no crash and/or Ethereum will be replaced by another cryptocurrency that's profitable to mine with GPU's.

> RAM is also sky high and I do video editing from time to time an want at least 16 GB in my rig. That would cost $100 18 months ago and now thats $225+ also due to the miners.

That is crazily out of whack. Back in 2011 I bought 8Gb (2x4Gb, 1333Mhz) for in my 2009 15” MBP and it cost me €25 secondhand. Worked like a champ too, even transferred it to the computer of my little brother when I upgraded to a new MacBook.

It's not that long ago I used to think of RAM as _almost_ disposable - you could max out your capacity pretty cheaply, and it wasn't really worth reselling a lot of the time. Over the past few years it seems to just been getting increasingly expensive though.

This impacts everything from mid-range upwards. A friend of mine, not so well versed in gaming hardware, recently asked me for advice on buying a new GPU, to replace some 3 generation old card he's using.

I recommended him something like a 1060, assuming they'd be reasonably affordable by now, just to discover that they've actually increased in price, especially considering he's on a tight budget.

In 20 years of PC gaming I can't remember a situation comparable to whats going on right now and frankly, it's quite depressing.

With this going on neither Nvidia nor AMD have much reason at all to innovate and keep increasing their performance, as most of their performant cards sell like crazy anyway, which is a horrible situation for consumers.

Keep in mind that the hardware survey may be skewed by Steam being used on machines aren't primarily for gaming, so I'd be somewhat cautious about drawing firm conclusions (e.g. I have Steam on an old Surface Pro 3 that is basically just for chat/non-real time games).

I'd also wonder if the small percentage of people on top-end gear drive the market forward (e.g. purchasing significantly more games even if the users are smaller in number).

keep in mind that the numbers have been skewed in the last few months because of an influx of pubg players from china, who probably don't have as much money to spend than western gamers.

see: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/directx/

windows 7 having a huge uptick from aug-oct, and high end graphics cards' market shares dropping in the same time.

Simplified Chinese having 63.90% share by language suggests that as well.

Are those stats normalized for game purchases?

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