The Cycle of PC Gaming

Year One -- You spend months researching, saving, and finally building a state of the art, balls to the wall gaming PC. For the next 365 days, all third party releases will be played with max settings and the highest resolution your fancy new monitor can handle. Any game released more than half a year before you build your PC will now run at 90 FPS + and almost run too fast for your eyes to handle, but you'll never admit it -- this is way too awesome. You spend hours on forums and modding websites turning Skyrim from a mediocre fantasy world into a sprawling landscape that rivals reality. Year one is pure bliss.

Year Two -- This is the tweaking year. Frequent dusting, a loaded up hard drive, general wear and tear, and a few less than secure downloads for Far Cry 3 mods have caused your PC to lose a step or two. Some of the bigger releases no longer run at absolute max settings, meaning the first install of a new game will result in more tweaking of graphical settings than actual game playing. A few of the long winded games may end up being purchased for consoles, as the couch and 60" LED are looking awfully comfy compared to your rigid desk chair. But still, your PC impresses.

Year Three -- Newer games are running in high settings, while you compromise on whether or not you'd rather have 1080P resolution or full anti-aliasing. More and more games that aren't essential to a mouse and keyboard find their way onto your shelf via home console. Your PC's being used more for internet surfing and work.

Year Four -- Your once state of the art PC is now a shell of its former self. Only the kinds of games you refuse to play on console like Bethesda releases find their way onto your PC shelf. You're now almost exclusively a console gamer because thinking about getting a new release to run without being able to run anything but medium settings is a travesty and is not the reason you got into PC gaming. Now, you much prefer buying a new game and having a machine where it simply works right out of the box. This is the darkest year.

Year Five -- You start to reminisce about the glory days of a brand new PC; tweaking graphical settings, modding the living crap out of your games. This is probably the year a Bethesda game like Elder Scrolls or Fallout releases, and when you realize your PC is going to relegate this new game to that of a ps2 release, you begin to save, research, and eventually talk yourself into upgrading or even building a brand new gaming computer. This year is a later, rinse, repeat of year one. And everything is glorious.

Very true but I upgrade as soon as I see my games starting to struggle.

I don't mind lowering some settings that don't make such a graphical impact to increase performance... but when I'm lowering too many settings I know it's time to upgrade.

Once you play on High-Max settings, you can never go back to Medium-Low.

^^^ Side note -- Jesus Christ at your PC specs. 32GB of RAM, are you composing soundtracks for Christopher Nolan movies?!

LOL I wish, I would be on good money, hahahaha.

Nah, I built this PC about 4 months ago. When they were going to send out the parts, the shop called me and said they were out of 16GB RAM stock (which I had ordered originally). For the stock to come in I had to wait another week, and I already had planned myself to take time off that weekend to build the PC, so they did me a good deal with the 32GB and so I went with that to get the parts in time.

It's funny to play a game and then look at your Task Manager and it saying 28GB free RAM, hahahahaha. It does help with Photoshop and Illustrator though cause I sometimes work with high resolution photos and vector images.

For me.... from my 2009 PC:

Year 1: Average mid-range PC runs games well enough at 1440x900 on a 19" monitor and/or 32" 720p HDTV

Year 2: No change

Year 3: Switched to 24" 1080p HDTV as my primary monitor. Some games run fine at the higher res, other games run slower. Upgrades video card ($219). All is well.

Year 4: Needed improved Handbrake performance. Upgrades motherboard and CPU ($271). Video card is still sufficient for at least Med-High or better in all games at 1080p. If 1080p seems at all sluggish, switch main monitor to the older 19" 1440x900.

I could've upgraded my video card at this point. But, I chose to buy a gaming laptop instead to complement my desktop PC.

Year 5: This year. Planning for a video card upgrade this summer. No hurry.

I don't know. I'm still running an overclocked i7-2600k and two generations later there's still no reason to upgrade. I ran a pair of 580GTXs for years. I finally upgraded to a 780 ti because SLI was making my system unstable.

It's fast, it's nice. I'm certainly not complaining, but... CES 2014 came and went and the next big graphics cycle from Nvidia? Not announced. Instead they're trying to cram Kepler into your phone. AMD? There latest and greatest has just barely caught up to Nvidia's latest and greatest...

And the next big game that's going to bring this system to its knees......... is nowhere to be found.

PCs are floundering because everyone got infatuated with their phones. Consoles are big because they can still manage to produce what PC's can't... hype.

Everyone's hyperfocused on mobile.... And, while phones and tablets are fun and portability is nice... I'd rather have my entertainment on a big screen than a little one...

I really find hard to follow your logic here. The fact is that in "Year One" the gap (in performance and graphics) that a PC have from consoles will remain the same in "Year Five".

For example, a high-end PC from 2006 with a 8800GTX(etc), was performing in games much better than consoles, the SAME was true in 2013 (7 years after) when the 7th console generation ended. I mean take a recent random multiplat and you will see that a 8800(or equivalent) still play games with much better performance and graphics than consoles(ps3, 360) like it did back in 2006.

@MK-Professor: An 8800 is not running current releases at high to max settings. Most games now require at least a 260.

Can't really find myself in that logic. It's year three now of my current PC and I'm still maxing out 99% of the games coming out.

I can find myself in that logic even less. So you are saying I would pay more for a game, to get the console version, when I could get the PC version and just play it on my TV as well ? The PC version not only costs, less, but it also looks way better on my mid-end PC 3-4 years down the line.

low- medium settings on current PC multiplats look better than ps3&360 multiplats. The gap is always the same.

In 2006 a 8800 play games at ultra(with higher rez and fps), and consoles at high.

in 2013 a 8800 play games at low-medium(with higher rez and fps), and consoles at low settings and a lot of times lower that low.

The gap remain the same.(btw low-medium settings on a 2013 game can look better than a 2006 game at ultra settings)

That definitely makes sense. I never thought about it that way. In fact, I think this gen will be quite different (meaning PC vs console performance will be even wider), considering the fact that the consoles aren't really using much special proprietary hardware. Also, the fact the PC GPU's are capable of GPU compute as well. Old PC's will probably be able to run games on High setting for much longer nowadays. Unless devs really go out of the way to really differentiate Ultra vs High vs Med settings; pushing the PC hardware.

I could be wrong with my analysis, I'm no expert. But it's an interesting thing to think about.

My PC is 5 years old. A few months ago I replaced the graphics card and once again it's maxing most games. Even before I was running 90% of games at high settings at 1080p. The whole regular upgrades thing is exaggerated IMO.

I would shave out years 3-5 ... just repeat 1 and 2 :P

I got a feeling I won't wait 5 years until I upgrade my GPU. I want to finish my backlog first, and also there should be a GPU at least twice as powerful as the one I currently got. If the GTX 880 is twice as strong as a GTX 680(which I doubt).. Then I will wait until I have finished my backlog of older games which the 680 runs fine before I think about purchasing it.

I'm still on my rig I got in 2009, and I feel it's finally time for me to upgrade. I can't run Crysis 3 at all and a few other games due to the OS or not meeting the minimum specs. I don't know if I'm going to attempt to build a rig this time around or do what I did before and by one from Best Buy along with a gpu and power supply for them to swap out the stock parts with. I know whay you all are gonna say. Build my own. I may try, if i have patience enough to do the research to figure out all the parts I need for it.

GTX 880 might actually come close to being true.

Third party 780 Ti's are offering the same performance as a GTX 690 and offering 60-70% more frames than a single 680.

If the GTX 880 is a respectable boost over the 780 Ti (like 20-25%) then that's cutting it very close to being twice as strong as a 680

Yeah, but I think nVidia will end up doing the same as they did with Kepler. Milk it and not release a full sized ( as 780, Titan and 780 Ti is) Maxwell core GPU until the 9XX card.

For my old PC

Year 1:You build all sorts of sweet components on your birthday. Before the morning is up I had installed several games. and started playing.
Year 2: Still maxing every game I play.
Year 3: Still every game on max settings, but installing all the best graphics mods for some games may be a problem. This year I met a new friend, unfortunately, he is a console only gamer. Invite him over several times to make him amazed at all the games. Try to persuade him, but he is too busy spending money on other stuff despite wanting a PC.
Year 4: High settings on every game, this is still a good state to play the recent games. However friend still hasn't gotten a PC, so I device a plan, research for a week what new components I want for my PC, then buy them, the components arrive a few days later and I build up the PC, then I sell him my old computer for a fair price. Now we both play together online, and he is very happy, so am I.

I'll start year 3 this summer, but I think I'll upgrade before I go back to consoles.

I did buy GTA V (I have weak willpower for that franchise) and while I thoroughly enjoyed it - I never went back and played it to mess around like I used to after completing the story. Maybe it's because my couch is really not comfortable, maybe it's because my TV is small, maybe it's because going super fast in cars at <30 FPS really hurt my eyes. I don't think I could go back to consoles if I wanted to - year 1 or year 5.

I've never really kept the same hardware for more than 3 years. I bought an Intel 980x back in the beginning of 2010 along with an EVGA GTX 480. I replaced the video card in 2012 with a 690. Still have same cpu, hdd, (added more ram from the initial 8GB to 24GB).

I'm really more impressed at the Intel chip still going strong to this day

Yeah the first gen i5/i7's where so far ahead of the time its not even funny (that's part of the reason why they haven't gotten much faster clock for clock since there's no reason for it to do so).

An overclock i7 920 from 2008 Is literally 3 times as fast and the xboxone/ps4's CPU which is crazy (first gen i7/i5 is so far ahead of its time).

Your 980x is so freaking fast even by today's standards

I wouldn't be shocked if they did but even then, I remember the gtx 680 being a decent amount faster than the 580

Hm yeah that's not me lol I just upgrade my PC to keep up once it starts not running games no high/max with high FPS.

Yet it was not really the its true successor. 680 wasn't a full sized Kepler card. The 780 was the first one.