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Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

2015 is eight years ago. In PC terms, that's forever.

I got my 4k 60Hz monitor in 2017 for $400 or so. You can get them for $250 these days, so I agree that is pretty mid-range by now - or even the lower part of it. That leaves $750 for the computer.

According to the logicalincrements linked above, that gets you a RX 6600 - which they rate for 40 FPS @ 4k in The Witcher 3 - a game which came it out 2015.

So no, you cannot get a decent 4k monitor and a PC able to drive it for less than 1k. That's the entire problem: there is no midrange anymore.

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Steam Survey says you're wrong. Unless something changed recently most people are 1080p and with midranges (GTX*60 & *70). I was running a 970 and 1080p until 2021. I play mainstream stuff, FotM, and competitive.

The way the market is structured just doesn't offer a whole lot of reward. Forknife, LoL, CSGO, CoD, etc... Are all built to accommodate toasters. The big titles are are built for consoles and poorly optimized, there isn't a whole lot to be had aside from higher framrates - and many times these are locked.

I upgraded for compute power.

As for resolution I'm not convinced it's worth the upgrade. Maybe in a few years.

Is that most people in the US, or most people?

But am generally in agreement, I did a big upgrade a while ago and while it's great for a few things, the extra hardware and resolution don't mean much while playing Stellaris.

8 years is no longer forever in PC terms. It used to be you could only go a couple years before your computer could no longer run anything but that's no longer the case.

For an example, I usually build a PC once the older one is horribly outdated. So that was 1999, 2002, 2006, 2011, and ... Well that one has turned into the PC of Theseus. I upgraded to an SSD and $300 video card in 2018, and in 2022 I bought a new cpu/mobo/ram. Still plays games at 1440p at acceptable frame rates.

If I wanted to game at 4k 240Hz, yeah I'd probably have to spend $3500 (and it still wouldn't run that great) which just tells me that 4k gaming isn't ready for prime time

> in 2022 I bought a new cpu/mobo/ram

That's basically a new computer in your previous case.

Generally I agree. However, I saw negligible performance improvement from getting a ten year newer mobo/cpu/ram, so the previous trend didn't apply. I only upgraded because there were some system stability issues (probably ram caused, but buying new ddr3 ram in an attempt to fix it seemed a waste). From a performance point of view, the new GPU and SSD in 2018 were the new computer experience.

> 2015 is eight years ago. In PC terms, that's forever.

I think the point is that this isn't true anymore.

In the 80s or 90s eight years was huge in terms of computer hardware advances. In the last eight years though? Meh. Aside from one of my laptops, all of my computers are older than 2015 and they are all perfectly fine for current use. Hardware doesn't advance very quickly anymore, which is great, but bad for sales.

1440p should be midrange but the gpu makers refuse to make that a reality. How is it that decent framerate 1080p was entry level SEVEN years ago, and cards that double the speed of the rx480 are still going for 300-500 dollars?

>2015 is eight years ago. In PC terms, that's forever.

In the '90s, eight years was forever, but less so now.

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