Why Upgrading a Gaming PC Right Now is Almost Pointless

[loki1944]

Upgrading CPU has become increasingly pointless since the original i7 in 2008; once Ivy Bridge came out the decelaration of benefit accelerated increasingly. At this point most any CPU 2012 onward; especially with 4c8t+ is plenty for pc gaming at 60+FPS with a modern GPU. With a GTX 1080Ti can still average 55+ FPS @1440p with a 2017 1080ti across 30+ modern games at high to Ultra settings including Far Cry New Dawn, GoW 5, GR Breakpoing, CSGO, Overwatch 2, Apex Legends,R6S, TOR . And that is on what will be a 15 year old cpu this November.

The gaming experience on my i7 10700KF from 2020 with all cores at 5.138Ghz+XMP 3200Mhz RAM is hardly staggering versus my 2017 i7 7800X@4.6, 2016 i7 6850K, i7 5820K, or even my i7 4770K in terms of tangibly non fps counter watching noticeable difference at high/ultra 1440p.

 

[VcoreLeone]

Just get any 8/6 starting from 9900/3700x and throw every penny into gpu horsepower. FSR2/DLSS2/Xess/TSR provide excellent ways of using 1-2 resolutions higher than your native and then recouping some of that performance with upscaling while producing a much better image than your native 1080/1440p display. 1270p + good upscaling runs within -10% or less from native 1440p, while it just crushes native in terms of image quality. I don't think I played a 1440p native game in year's time on my 1440p display, always used some form of vsr+fsr2 or dldsr+dlss2.

 

[dalpilot]

Yeah, I for one am still rocking a GTX 1070

I stopped gaming but I'm still rocking my 4 GB RX 570. Until I need to do some HW encoding videos (AV1 anybody?). Just did my last AM4 upgrade - R5 3600 (6C/12T) to R7 5700G (8 core/16 thread). The G was less expensive (by enough) over the non APU equivalent.