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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

General computing has not required a dedicated GPU for nearly 20 years, I would argue that the continued perseverance of Windows hinges on a handful of productivity software and, for ordinary people, crucially, games. So judging a market so completely, based on "general" computing is too shallow.

> The best phone APUs nowadays are more powerful than my not so old MacBook Air M1.

Which is, itself, an APU.

The question is, is it better than a 2020 era dGPU and CPU combo (at any thermal/power envelope).

The answer is complicated unfortunately, but a 3090 (a 5 year old card) has 4x the memory bandwidth of an M4 Pro and also about 4x the FP32 performance.

So on the high end, descrete graphics cards are still going to be king for gaming. (I know that a 3090 isn't common, but 5080s are more powerful than 3090s).

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> for ordinary people, crucially, games

PC gaming is a niche which is incredibly small. Ordinary people don’t use games on their PC provided they have one in the first place. Most PCs nowadays are laptops and they are mostly bought by companies sometimes by people and mostly to do work.

If you look at the respective market size, gaming is mostly done on smartphones and dedicated consoles and they all use APUs.

Is there less people gaming on PC, than let’s say 20 years ago, or just the market became larger, and new people started to play with something else?

Its changing. Bellular News : Gamers Are Dying out(*) https://youtu.be/_80DVbedWiI

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ign-launches-gaming-trends-pla...

> The prominence of mobile among younger players probably won't be a huge surprise to anyone reading this – 93% of Gen Alpha prefer playing on mobile, according to IGN's segmentation study. But preference for mobile is actually growing for Millennials, too, with 32% calling it their preferred device.

> ...

> Daily concurrent user numbers have grown in Roblox from 3.8 million in June 2022 to more than 25 million in June 2025. Over the same period, Fortnite has grown from 1.2 million to 1.77 million concurrents – with occasional blips, like when 15.3 million players logged on for the Marvel Galactus event.

Steam charts: https://store.steampowered.com/charts show 36,647,144 online now (as I write this)

These are still percentages. I asked for absolute values. If 100 million people played on PC in 2005, and now 100 million plays on PC, but 2 billion on mobile, then percentages changes, but you still have the same amount of people playing PC. Btw, “playing” is a very convoluted expression, because almost everybody played snake on their phone even 20 years ago. This is why the only indicator which matters is absolute values.

Do you have any links with regards to these market segments? I know that nowadays many people are mobile-only, but I struggle to estimate percentages. I guess it's going to be very different in developed vs developing economies, based on personal observations, but again I would like to see stats. I was able to find things like personal computer sales figures but nothing was said e.g. about desktops vs laptops and whether the laptop is for work or personal use and in the latter case, general vs gaming focused use.

I think the challenge is that uses for a PC, or even if you restrict it to "PC gaming" is such a wide net it's hard to make anything but the most vague/general readings from that audience. When the monthly steam hardware survey results come out there's always a crowd of enthusiasts putting their spin on what should or shouldn't be there, when that includes people playing simple low requirement games all the way through to reality simulators. For non-gaming uses, I think the most significant step was Vista, where they moved over to GPU acceleration for drawing windows (but with a software 'basic' fallback), video decode acceleration and to a lesser extent encode for any device with a camera, although I'd say mobile devices likely exercise encode capability more than desktops do generally.

>gaming is mostly done on smartphones

I kinda feel that most games on smartphones are so fundamentally different to like the sweaty PC-gamer type games that they really should be considered a different market.

Should it?

Take a look at the statistics for Minecraft and Fortnite, both games I would consider typical PC games, both massively successful. Mobile is always between 45% and 50%. PC has between 25% and 30% roughly on par with console.

PC gaming is mostly an Asian thing nowadays entirely propped up by esports. The market sure is big enough for GPU still making sense as a product (my incredibly small comment is admittedly a bit too extreme) but probably not for someone to go try to dislodge the current duopoly unless they have a product "for free" as an offshoot of something else.

I don't think Minecraft or Fortnite are very typical PC games at all. They have a very different userbase and demographic that they appeal to.

You are discounting two of the most played PC games by far. I think there is only Roblox which is somehow comparable.

I'm therefore curious. What do you think PC gaming is?

I'd say PC gaming is huge, but the subset that cares for teasing out both fps and maximum details like it's 1999, that's tiny, an expensive niche hobby like classic cars (not quite as expensive tough). For almost the entire PC gaming market, GPU performance just isn't a pressing issue anymore. Some games might get a little prettier when you pick the more expensive option when choosing a new system, but that's it, not much of a driving factor in buying motivation.

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