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Conina on 19 June 2022
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Conina said:
patronmacabre said:

You missed the crux of my argument. I wasn't talking about backwards compatibility, I was complaining about the annoyance of software rot. Computers age after five years (three to four years for laptops) and don't run as fast as they once did. Anyone who has never experienced this has never used the same computer for that long a span of time. The only way to really fix it is to straight up reformat your hard drive and reinstall Windows. 

The reason for computer rot is that there is planned obsolescence in the software and hardware of PCs that is non-existant in consoles because of the nature of generational changes. A console doesn't need to degrade, because games will eventually just stop coming out for that system. 

It is also seemingly apparent that hardware manufacturers, Nvidia in particular, are speeding up the rates of hardware obsolescence with their graphics cards, as there are reports that the Geforce 700 series do not play games as well as they properly should.

I don't mean to get into an argument, but it seems more and more apparent that that so many new PC gamers have no idea what they're getting into. A GTX 980 isn't going to futureproof your computer against the next generation even if it should, because PCs have built-in planned obselence. 

Okay, i waited almost another five years. The software rot didn't happen.

My last clean install of Windows was in October 2013 (so even before launch of the PS4 and XBO), when I bought my still current CPU (i5 4670K for less than €200), mainboard and RAM. I upgraded to Windows 10 in 2015, but that wasn't a clean install, all settings and installations were brought over to the newer OS.

Since then I installed thousands of PC games and it didn't matter either. The system didn't get slower, benchmarks still give the expected results.

The hardware obsolence also didn't happen. The GTX 980 ist still well above the minimum specs of any existing PC game. Slower performance due to newer graphic drivers has also been disproven over and over again from various tech sites comparing results of different drivers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/6u4cpw/is_nvidia_ruining_your_performance_linus_tech_tips/

Driver optimization efforts are of course focused to the newest GPU generation, but old hardware doesn't get slower with new drivers. It stays the same or even gets a bit better.

I waited another 2.5 years. I gifted my old PC to my brother and he is happy with it. The software rot still didn't happen. The system didn't get slower, benchmarks still give the expected results.

The hardware obsolence also still didn't happen. The 7.5 year old GTX 980 and GTX 970 and the 8.5 year old R9 290X and R9 290 GPUs are still running (almost?) every new game with 30+ fps, often even with 40+ fps:

And that's even without the boost of AMD FSR 1.0 + 2.0 / RSR or Nvidia Image Scaling.

So PCs can also run a "console generation" of 6 - 8 years without problems or big compromises.