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Conina said:

Chazore said:

"Why Nobody Is Buying Graphics Cards Anymore"

I don't think that's true for PC gaming. The growth of the RTX40-series on Steam ain't slower/worse than Ampere or Turing and it is a lot faster than Maxwell and Kepler. Only Pascal gained its percentages faster and peaked higher:

And these are just percentage shares. The user base on Steam has grown a lot over the last decade.

Both concurrent users and concurrent "in-game" stats more than doubled in the last 6 years... so in absolute numbers the RTX40-series perhaps even sold better than the GTX10-series (based on the Steam hardware survey):

I think you're looking at the wrong side of chart. As in, you're watching how fast the sales curve goes up every generation and don't notice any big differences.

That's true, but that's also not what's important right now. Rather, look at the tail ends: See how after Pascal peaked, the lead over Maxwell got smaller?

See, that's how it traditionally went: By the time The current generation dropped, the drop of the previous one had slowed down already to just those who kept their hardware for longer, which were pretty few. But let's look at Turing compared to Pascal now:

As you can see, Turing stays longer at it's Zenith, and then drops - but does so slower than Pascal instead of faster. This trend is getting even stronger with Ampere: It's stagnating much longer than any previous generation and simply refuses to drop down despite it's successor being out for almost 2 years now.

All this implies that people take longer and longer to upgrade their hardware. Part of the reason is certainly that there's less and less need to actually do so, especially on the games that are played the most like Counterstrike or eSport titles, all of which run fine on an APU. So if an APU suffices for the most popular games, what's the point of upgrading your 5-year old mid-range GPU (like a GTX 1660 or RX 580 for instance) if it's still powerful enough for the games?

You point at the growing number of players on Steam as an argument that people are still buying GPUs - but those are mostly new players with new computers and laptops, when the argument is that nobody is upgrading their GPUs anymore.

Speaking of laptops, those are an increasing force on the steam hardware charts. Those of course are also not upgrading their GPUs for obvious reasons.