this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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"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."

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 22 hours ago (5 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours 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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 21 hours ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours 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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 15 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours 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.