Valve New Hardware Launching Early 2026 - Steam Machine, Steam Frame, Steam Controller

[Bofferbrauer2]

Zippy6 said:

Kyuu said:

Yeah, but I think typically the majority of active PC gamers will upgrade to hardware better than an old console by its 4th year. The transition has been slower this generation on both PC and consoles (where tens of millions of PS4 players refuse to upgrade).

I'm a PC gamer myself (dropped PS4 after Sekiro) with a build much weaker than a PS5, but still decent-ish for most games that I care about.

Looked at steam hardware survey for October 2018 Vs 2025 to compare.

I'd say that in 2018 roughly 43% of steam users had a better GPU than the PS4, and in 2025 about 37% have one better than the PS5. So definitely a decline in how fast the average Steam user catches up to console spec, though not a massive one.

Probably down to A. The apocalyptic GPU prices we had for a year during COVID, and B. The consoles this generation were much more competitive to current pc tech.

The PS4 was most similar to a Radeon 7850. A $250 GPU that was released over 1.5 years before the PS4.

Whereas PS5 got RDNA2 just before  the first PC card launched, and it's closest pc equivalent launched almost a year later at $380.

I would add C. Hardware also holds up for longer than in the past. If you got a high end PC in 2018, chances are you can still play most games reasonably well on that one. A high end PC from 2011 would have seriously struggled to even run some games from 2018, and other games would be more like slideshows.

For comparison, the GTX 480 gets soundly beaten by a 1050, while the 1080Ti sits between the 5050 and 5060 plus comes with more VRAM