Lately I've been feeling like computers have become fast enough. During the 1990s, the pace of improvement was staggering, and the impact of every hardware improvement was really felt. But these days, I've come to expect a 10-year life from my hardware. My previous PC, now 12 year old, worked admirably for 10 years. It ran The Witcher 2 just fine. It did everything just fine, except for the latest games; after some update, EU4 stopped running well (I kept playing for years on the last version before that performance-breaking update), and I knew I needed a new PC for The Witcher 3. But frankly, the graphics of The Witcher 2 were already stunning.

Currently that old PC has become unstable and occasionally crashes or reboots. No idea why. I'd love to get it working again, but it feels a bit pointless for such an old PC. But it feels wasteful to just chuck it out; there are tons of things it can still do. Maybe if I just upgrade the CPU?

So do we really need games to continue to demand more and more from the hardware, or should games be made to do more with less? There are excellent games that run fine on lesser hardware.

Arguably the best game of the past decades in Minecraft, and it runs fine on my son's crappy school laptop without GPU (though not at very high framerate, and not when he wants to stream). (I'd really like that laptop to last him for ages, but it turns out he needs Blender for school, and rendering Blender movies requires more GPU.)