It’s no secret that the mining bubble left without new GPUs to be able to buy PC video game fans, who differ from console fans by always striving for the highest picture definition and being up to date. . But the situation also affects the industry itself, we explain the reasons.
Consequences of the shortage of gaming equipment
Today, it is impossible to buy a graphics card if you want to build a new gaming PC or expand the capabilities of the one you already have. Which means that the PC gaming enthusiast market has been completely slowed down in its traditional lead. The problem with the shortage is that it leads to huge price increases, making it prohibitive for most of the market to have a gaming PC.
Make no mistake about it, while the RTX 3080 and RX 6900 XT are graphics cards we all wish we had on our PCs, the reality is very different and not everyone can afford hardware at prices. If to this we add that said shortage has driven prices up into the stratosphere, then we find that the PC gaming market has entered more than clear technological stagnation.
Technological stagnation is also bad at a time when a new generation of consoles is coming out which is technically aging over time, but in the launch period of a new generation they are offering enough power in their processors to watch the PC. Each new console user becomes a user who leaves the PC temporarily and vice versa.
But it turns out that we are having stock issues on consoles and even so due to the mining bubble we are not seeing growth in the purchase of gaming hardware among users. It was a great time for many people to upgrade their old graphics cards and move on.
Ray tracing is the future
There is no doubt that we are facing a period of transition to Ray Tracing, especially as rasterization has reached a point where its limits do not allow for further resizing of graphics as rasterization does not represent the transport of light, especially indirect bounces.
Pero el trazado de rayos requires that the gente tenga el hardware necesario para dar el salto, lo que en PC supone that the gente tenga tarjetas gráficas con las capacidades necesarias como es el caso de las AMD RX 6000 y las NVIDIA RTX 2000 y RTX 3000 . The problem? Its stock is completely gone and people cannot afford to use ray tracing in their favorite games.
For the use of a technology to be standardized on PC, it is not enough to support the code of the games, but there must be a sufficient user base with said hardware. In the case of Ray Tracing, the problem is not only on PC but also on consoles, which are also affected by the shortage.
Planning has been affected
The shortage of gaming hardware, both on PC and on consoles, has affected the development of new video games. The lack of stock of the next generation consoles has meant that a good chunk of the games that were originally intended for the new consoles will also be released for the older generation.
In the PC market, where a large portion of games are console-to-PC conversions, this also affects, because despite NVIDIA’s investment in getting games that take advantage of the latest technology, the number of games that take advantage of them will decrease. . And not because of the inability of the latest generation hardware on PC, but because it is not available to a sufficient number of users who will be playing games with these GPUs.
Today’s games take many years to complete, and financial and personnel planning is important to do in the beginning. Being late creates delays and problems that add to the already high production costs of games, which is counterproductive. To this must be added the problems linked to the pandemic, where the production of the various studies is much lower than what they had initially planned.
