this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
201 points (96.3% liked)

Technology

69726 readers
3523 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

"These price increases have multiple intertwining causes, some direct and some less so: inflation, pandemic-era supply crunches, the unpredictable trade policies of the Trump administration, and a gradual shift among console makers away from selling hardware at a loss or breaking even in the hopes that game sales will subsidize the hardware. And you never want to rule out good old shareholder-prioritizing corporate greed.

But one major factor, both in the price increases and in the reduction in drastic “slim”-style redesigns, is technical: the death of Moore’s Law and a noticeable slowdown in the rate at which processors and graphics chips can improve."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago (5 children)

You don't need a graphics card. You can get mini PCs with decent gaming performance for cheap these days.

[–] chunes@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago

Can confirm. I wouldn't recommend it unless you mostly play indie games, though.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The ones with capable GPUs cost as much as a PS5 Pro.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

There are CPUs with quite capable iGPU, fitting in a mini-PC. All in all maybe $500.

And yeah, sure, the article mentioned that consoles are subsidized by game prices.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

I have a Ryzen 7 5700G in my DeskMini X300, but that one is a genrration (?) ago. Still, can play almost all games in 3440x1440 at medium settings.

In case you have seen my "string and tape" case mod to fit the cooler, that was done to support Turbo for video recoding. Noctua NH-L9a-AM4 fits nicely.

[–] treyf711@lemm.ee 1 points 14 hours ago

Knowing the usefulness that we’ve gotten at our house out of having them, I would probably say if I didn’t have the PS5 I would get a steam deck at this point. A refurbished one from valve when they’re on sale would be my pick. Plus, it works on my 20 year catalog of games.

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Interesting point. Then you understand why Apple is making moves to try to be a real player in gaming.

All three of us see how gaming performance is plateauing across various hardware types to the point that a modern game can run on a wide range of hardware. With settings changes to scale across the hardware, of course.

Or are you going to be a bummer and claim it’s only mini pcs that get this benefit. Not consoles, not VR headsets, not macs, not Linux laptops.

There really is a situation going on where there is a large body of hardware in a similar place on the performance curve in a way that wasn’t always true in the past. Historically, major performance gains were made every few years. And various platforms were on very different and less interoperable hardware architectures, etc.

The Steam Deck’s success proves my point, and your point alone.

The thing is, people don’t wanna hear it. They wanna focus on the very high end. Or super high refresh rates. Or they wanna complain about library sizes.

[–] FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 0 points 19 hours ago

By decent you meant significantly worse than console gaming performance though.

Consoles are still the king for values in gaming, even with their increasing prices.

[–] YouAreLiterallyAnNPC@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

That sounds kind of like a console, no?

Edit: I mean, if the intent is gaming and only gaming, it feels like there's a lot of overlap. Only the PC would have less support for more freedom.