Are gamers falling behind in gaming hardware?

[Combined]

I seem to think that gamers are not catching up to the new technology thats being presented. Thanks to this servey by valve and for a member name ud!t for reminding me about the current servey by valve, it shows the percentage of what current gamers are using as far as gpus, cpus, and Ram. http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html
And from what i have studed majority of pc users don't even have beyond 512mb of ram and are still playing on dated gpus. From what i am seeing there are a large percentage of people this servey that can only play bf2 at low settings or not at all :hmm: . What do u think about this.........?

edit: oh yeah it seems that 500,000+ users were included in this servey

I think it's only normal, with all consumer products, a select minority will always purchase the latest hardware, while the majority will tend to upgrade every two or three years, and a minority will upgrade once every four or more years. Sure I'd love to buy two 7800 and a new motherboard & cpu, but I have other, more important expenses. It's just games, and not really worth the money and time in the first place.

[tripleplay369]

Even though a LOT of people play HL2/CS Source, everyone and their grandma plays CS.

[Ion]

I just can't afford to keep up...

and screw Counter Strike I was bored within 15 minutes.

[ChopperKill]

When upgrading your PC it's about choosing the right time to buy. If you wait too long your old parts will be worth nothing in resale and if you buy too soon it's money wasted as the prices would drop. All PC parts have a sweet spot or when you get your most bang for buck.

If you buy new bits and sell you old ones at the right time you can keep up for about £150-£250 every 12-18 months. I've been doing that for the last 4 years. I haven't got an uber PC as I've just had to go from a 9800 PRO to a 6800 GT and from 1GB to 1.5GB RAM. It cost me £130 to do that having spent nothing on my PC for 16 months. I can play at all high settings and it should last about a year.

[Wynterheart]

i would say that a lot of people are behind on hardware for pcs. i see it in these forums all the time. the video card is probably the most expensive piece of hardware for a pc. current, good video cards run about $300 or more. thats a hefty chunk of change to lay down. considering that you can get a large hard drive for about $100, a decent motherboard is about $100-150, 1 gb of DDR 3200 RAM for about $80, good sound card for about $80-90 (or possibly less now). dvd burners can be bought for about $50. the only other hefty piece of hardware is a lcd monitor and maybe cpu. i just got a amd 64 3400+ 2.4 ghz cpu a few months ago for around $200 i believe. a 19" lcd monitor is around $300 or so.

for games, the video card is going to be the most important item.

i don't understand why the video cards cost so much compared to everything else. i guess its because without them, people can't play the games, so they are able to jack the price up because people need to buy them.

also take into consideration a lot of gamers are younger kids.

[tehpwnerofnoobs]

If I had the 1700 bucks I'd build:

Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
AMD AthlonXP X2 4200
Duel BFG Geforce FX6800GTs in SLI mode
2 Gigs of DDR 3200 RAM
WD 160GB hdd
Any combo drive

Already have a 17'' LCD and speakers to suit me, but everything else is old.

[aRedEyeJedi]

built my rig W/0 LCD for 1600, man
You can spend like 1000-1600 and build a sweet rig man
I dont see why peps think u need a 3000-5000 rig to play games.
I run all the titles maxed out on this rig at 1680x1050
Cant wait to add SLI, and a 4400+

Sniper " you can run but you will only die tired"

[Eddy01741]

I built my new rig for 934 bucks including tax and shipping, i bough all parts from newegg.com, I run BF2 on max settings with 6xAA at 1280x960 resolution. I saved at least 300 bucks. Build your own system is the only way to go if you have saving money on your mind.

[Dloan]

Game works fine on medium settings at 1280x960 using a 3GHz P4, 9800pro and 1gig mem. Of course, I would like to play at high settings, but given that I'll need to replace just about everything in my next upgrade, that's perfectly acceptible.

[Ubermensch]

i dont think hardware is getting too expensive IF you're getting what you're paying for. even then, there are custom PC builders that offer GREAT prices on fully built systems that you can customize yourself.

www.cyberpowersystem.com <--- a GREAT place to get a full pc built for an incredible price, i have personally bought three computers from them. and i recommend them to anyone.

www.ibuypower.com <--- another great place to get high-end PCs, at an awesome price.

[noobeffect]

You must have never played cs before cause most of them are extremely dedicated gamers and this servey was done off mostly cs and cs:s users or pretty much anyone who has half life or half life 2

Extremely dedicated gamers, yes. Extremely rich gamers? NO. Just about 90% of the low end computers that can play CS 1.6 CAN handle the Source engine.

I built my new rig for 934 bucks including tax and shipping, i bough all parts from newegg.com, I run BF2 on max settings with 6xAA at 1280x960 resolution. I saved at least 300 bucks. Build your own system is the only way to go if you have saving money on your mind.

The Ultimate Gaming Machine (as seen on AOTS) was built from scratch and cost over $12,000 (no typo).

[Annihilator]

but think about it this way how many people also have half life 2 who are currently members of this forum. probably almost all of us at least i know i have it. Which means this servey is alot more expansive than u think because u have to have steam in order to play half life 2 also.

Yea i have it too.

[Nitemare]

i dont think hardware is getting too expensive IF you're getting what you're paying for. even then, there are custom PC builders that offer GREAT prices on fully built systems that you can customize yourself.

www.cyberpowersystem.com <--- a GREAT place to get a full pc built for an incredible price, i have personally bought three computers from them. and i recommend them to anyone.

www.ibuypower.com <--- another great place to get high-end PCs, at an awesome price.

Those sites suck, www.ecollegepc.com

I built the rig in my sig from that place for 1100 dollars (w.o monitor, speakers, sound card)

[Wynterheart]

Those sites suck, www.ecollegepc.com

I built the rig in my sig from that place for 1100 dollars (w.o monitor, speakers, sound card)

that doesn't sound like something i would brag about....

[ud!t]

according to that steampowered survey, which looks at over half a million computers, the most common card people have is the radeon 9800. Not exactly the kind of thing most people here have is it? and like I said, only 0.35 % have that 7800 GTX.

Just about every card is more common than the 7800. All the 6800's, and X800's are more common right now. But what about the FX5200? the the Radeon 9600? the Geforce 4? All horrible cards right? Well heres a suprise: these are the most common cards people have right now.

And ram? most people have 512 to 999mb! what's that very close second? 256 to 511mb !! god how bad is that?

And don't even get me started on how bad the CPU's are...

the way I see it, FX5200 is low end, 9800 pro is mid end, 6800GT is high end and 7800GTX is top end. Most people have mid end stuff, makes sense right? It also makes sense that most ordinary people dont shell out a grand to get dual 7800's right? good.

The truth is, while you run bf2 maxed out, most people don't care as much about it and run medium with their 9800. Ever noticed that those dual SLI 7800's with 4 gigs of ram and your top end cpu or two ALWAYS get you in first? it's because no-one bothers wasting that much money on rediculously expensive/good hardware. You have a better computer than every 500 or so people, and you know it because of this survey and the fact that you are always first in to load the map.

I suggest donating to a worthy charity, rather than shelling out every time a new top end card somes out.