December 2025 PCG Article Discussion

[neogunhero]

According to one analyst, Intel's 14A process node is the 'real deal'

But let's wait to see what 18A is like first, yes?

www.pcgamer.com

Just a few months ago, things were looking very bad for Intel, but lately that seems to be turning around. They've even convinced Apple to let them produce some of their chips again, albeit not Intel chips. This all seems like good news for hardware enthusiasts as the last thing we need is an even larger monopoly on the market.

 

[Johnway]

Crucial memory will soon be a memory itself as Micron abandons consumers in favor of AI data centers

The RAM crisis is just getting started.

www.pcgamer.com

its going to get worse isn't it? There's rumours AMD are increasing the prices of both graphics cards and cpus by 10% as the monster AI boom just gobbles absolutely everything. I'm thinking whether i should take the plunge and grab my 9800x3d, geforce 5070 card and hoard it like a dragon.

on the flip side, i guess i can get around to playing my back log and failing that buy cheaper games as long as my current pc doesn't go back.

but i'm not optimistic that tings will get better by 2027 tbh.

 

[Pifanjr]

Crucial memory will soon be a memory itself as Micron abandons consumers in favor of AI data centers

The RAM crisis is just getting started.

www.pcgamer.com

its going to get worse isn't it? There's rumours AMD are increasing the prices of both graphics cards and cpus by 10% as the monster AI boom just gobbles absolutely everything. I'm thinking whether i should take the plunge and grab my 9800x3d, geforce 5070 card and hoard it like a dragon.

on the flip side, i guess i can get around to playing my back log and failing that buy cheaper games as long as my current pc doesn't go back.

but i'm not optimistic that tings will get better by 2027 tbh.

I assume that at some point supply will catch up to demand and things will get cheaper again, but that might take a while. I'm just hoping my old PC doesn't give up entirely before then.

 

[neogunhero]

its going to get worse isn't it? There's rumours AMD are increasing the prices of both graphics cards and cpus by 10% as the monster AI boom just gobbles absolutely everything. I'm thinking whether i should take the plunge and grab my 9800x3d, geforce 5070 card and hoard it like a dragon.

I assume that at some point supply will catch up to demand and things will get cheaper again, but that might take a while. I'm just hoping my old PC doesn't give up entirely before then.

John, just like Pifanjr said, at some point it will get better. How long that will take is another question though. The GPU market was very inflated for a few years due to crypto mining but that have since died down. This situation is different though as memory is in everything from RAM, SSDs and GPUs and the demand is mainly coming from larger customers, not your average consumer.

If you have the cash I'd say take the plunge now. The CPU will last you years and years so that's what I'd personally get first.

I got lucky by upgrading my RAM and SSD earlier this year before all the price hikes. I think this situation will affect all aspects of PC hardware, so it may be best to take the plunge before things get really out of hand. It'll get worse before it gets better I believe.

 

[Johnway]

John, just like Pifanjr said, at some point it will get better. How long that will take is another question though. The GPU market was very inflated for a few years due to crypto mining but that have since died down. This situation is different though as memory is in everything from RAM, SSDs and GPUs and the demand is mainly coming from larger customers, not your average consumer.

If you have the cash I'd say take the plunge now. The CPU will last you years and years so that's what I'd personally get first.

I got lucky by upgrading my RAM and SSD earlier this year before all the price hikes. I think this situation will affect all aspects of PC hardware, so it may be best to take the plunge before things get really out of hand. It'll get worse before it gets better I believe.

Whats killing me is that i want 64gb of ram and honestly at this point i'm in this strange lull where i could buy a new pc and probably benefit from it but at the same time, but current pc is perfectly fine with all the games i'm playing. its a battle of willpower atm and i'm tightening my belt as much as possible and focusing on smaller wins. my PC isn't developing any phyiscal faults and like Pifanjr i'm hoping my rig will hold out. i still have a few more years before we reach the decade milestone so who knows? maybe come 2027 things might change.

i think what's tempting me to go now is that i still have that 1500psu sitting on my bedroom floor and its just tempting me to use it. i thought i could wait a bit longer for a better deal but its been getting worse and the cost of a full build just doesn't justify splurging in this current climate.

 

[neogunhero]

Whats killing me is that i want 64gb of ram and honestly at this point i'm in this strange lull where i could buy a new pc and probably benefit from it but at the same time, but current pc is perfectly fine with all the games i'm playing. its a battle of willpower atm and i'm tightening my belt as much as possible and focusing on smaller wins. my PC isn't developing any phyiscal faults and like Pifanjr i'm hoping my rig will hold out. i still have a few more years before we reach the decade milestone so who knows? maybe come 2027 things might change.

The battle of willpower is one I know all too well lol. My GPU was getting old and wasn't playing the games I wanted to play so I had to splurge on that a month ago. I constantly looked at GPUs for months before finally giving in, but there was a great deal so it was hard to pass up. Besides that the rest of the PC is totally fine, I've got more than enough storage space, RAM is about the fastest you can get for DDR4 without OC'ing so that's good, and CPU is still running strong, only a very small handful of games have requirements above my 5700X.

The battle I'm fighting right now is a new monitor. I really don't need one, but my current one is old, so anything would be an upgrade for me. It's not necessary, but I really want one. I'll have to wait until after Christmas for that, I've barely shopped for anyone and have a long list of gifts I need to get.

 

[BeardyHat]

Whats killing me is that i want 64gb of ram and honestly at this point i'm in this strange lull where i could buy a new pc and probably benefit from it but at the same time, but current pc is perfectly fine with all the games i'm playing. its a battle of willpower atm and i'm tightening my belt as much as possible and focusing on smaller wins. my PC isn't developing any phyiscal faults and like Pifanjr i'm hoping my rig will hold out. i still have a few more years before we reach the decade milestone so who knows? maybe come 2027 things might change.

i think what's tempting me to go now is that i still have that 1500psu sitting on my bedroom floor and its just tempting me to use it. i thought i could wait a bit longer for a better deal but its been getting worse and the cost of a full build just doesn't justify splurging in this current climate.

By the same token, don't succumb to FOMO.

Earlier this week, with all the news, I was feeling the same. Maybe I should drop the cash and upgrade from my 6700XT to a 9060XT? It's a bit of a stretch, but I could afford it. Ditto maybe dropping some cash on a 5800X3D to keep my AM4 system chugging for a little while longer.

But I looked at benchmarks. Both are a definite increase in performance over what I have now, probably on the order of 30% or more. But at the resolution I play at, 1080p, even with my current hardware new AAA games are achieving 60+ fps easily medium or high settings. Then again, by the same token, what games am I currently playing?

Darkest Dungeon 2

Secret of Monkey Island via ScummVM

Maybe Civ 6? Maybe more Transport Fever 2?

Am I playing Stalker 2? Expedition 33? Hogwarts Legacy? Last of Us 2? No, none of those and do I have any desire or motivation to play them? Not even remotely. The game that caught my eye today was Old School Rally...

Save 20% on Old School Rally on Steam

A nostalgic racing game that combines the charm of classic retro style visuals with the thrill of international rally competitions.

store.steampowered.com

That definitely doesn't require an upgrade. and what else am I going to play in the future? I don't particularly care about what's happening in the AAA space and I don't have any desire or need to buy GTA 6 when it comes out, so is there really any need for me to drop the cash on an upgrade?

No. Not really.

This is the stuff I went over in my head this past week. I still feel minor FOMO, like what if there's something I want to play, but even if there is, I have a massive library of other games I've never touched that will run on a potato. I think I'll be ok and I can save myself the money.

 

[Colif]

lots of deals being made but very little actually being produced. Lets expand the bubble.

AI has a lot of hot air in it, promises a lot... not seeing anything besides imaginative search engines on steroids.

I don't know what to expect in 2027 but then I don't know what will happen tomorrow, so why worry about it now. Sort of glad I got my PC before the memory/SSD drought. I wait and see what AMD GPU are like in 2 years.

Whats killing me is that i want 64gb of ram

Do you need it though? I wanted 64gb on current PC but after changing when some programs load with windows I found I rarely need 32gb now. I need to do the same thing on my old PC but so many things become difficult with only 1 working foot. Its not set up for starters. Should be by now so mum has a working PC that doesn't tell her to upgrade all the time.

 

[neogunhero]

But I looked at benchmarks. Both are a definite increase in performance over what I have now, probably on the order of 30% or more. But at the resolution I play at, 1080p, even with my current hardware new AAA games are achieving 60+ fps easily medium or high settings.

The performance increases need to make sense when buying upgrades. Going from my old Ryzen 1600X to my 5700X was a huge increase for me. On paper, the average increase is about ~30% better, but that depends on the game. I remember not being able to hit 60FPS Medium settings with the 1600X and RTX 2060 in Far Cry 6, but after upgrading to the 5700X, I was able to play at full Ultra without RT at around 90FPS.

Am I playing Stalker 2? Expedition 33? Hogwarts Legacy? Last of Us 2? No, none of those and do I have any desire or motivation to play them? Not even remotely.

I upgraded my GPU to play Oblivion Remastered and future games, but besides that most of what I play on a day-to-day basis can be played just as good with my old RTX 2060. Currently playing Captain Wayne which is built off the DOOM 1 engine and will move back to finish Skin Deep which is built off the DOOM 3 engine (great year for indie games built off old engines), meaning that these games can run on potato laptops. I'm glad I got the GPU, of all the games I've benchmarked it with there has been a significant performance increase, but really the majority of the games I play aren't that demanding. Arc Raiders would have ran just fine on the old GPU.

All of this to say, FOMO sucks, willpower and discipline can be hard to hold onto, but patience is worth it as it always pays off in the end. My patience of sticking with the RTX 2060 for nearly 7 years came in the form of having this massive performance increase with a relatively lower mid-range card (in terms of what came out this year). That's much more significant to me personally than if I were to buy a new GPU every year or two and only saw minor increases over time.

Do you need it though? I wanted 64gb on current PC but after changing when some programs load with windows I found I rarely need 32gb now.

32GB is becoming the new sweet spot for gaming these days especially if you play AAA/more demanding games. Slowly we're starting to see more games break past the 16GB requirement. So far the only game I've noticed this with is Oblivion Remastered, the .exe alone uses about 15GB, and with everything else my total memory usage while playing that game is a steady 24GB. Stalker 2 also recommends 32GB, but realistically both that game and Oblivion are just poorly optimized.

 

[BeardyHat]

All of this to say, FOMO sucks, willpower and discipline can be hard to hold onto, but patience is worth it as it always pays off in the end. My patience of sticking with the RTX 2060 for nearly 7 years came in the form of having this massive performance increase with a relatively lower mid-range card (in terms of what came out this year). That's much more significant to me personally than if I were to buy a new GPU every year or two and only saw minor increases over time.

My other thing I that I just don't game on my more powerful desktop all that often, so I can usually talk myself off the cliff when it comes to that. The only real thing that would be good about a new GPU is faster AI processing, but if I'm honest, my 6700XT does a fine job and I don't particularly want to support Nvidia right now anyway.

But I lasted with my 970GTX from May 2015 (according to Newegg) all the way until August 2023. I did upgrade from an i3-6100 I bought in 2016 to a Ryzen 2600X in December 2019 though, just because Kingdom Come: Deliverance wasn't giving me the performance I wanted. Then again to the Ryzen 5600 in August 2023, because for whatever reason I let myself get a little hyped for Starfield.

I could definitely stand to upgrade, but I think I ought to save my money for something else down the road. I'll probably want another new laptop in a year or so, since that's what I typically play my games on, but we'll see where I'm at.

 

[Pifanjr]

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/events-conferences/every-game-trailer-and-announcement-in-the-2025-pc-gaming-show-most-wanted/

I haven't looked at any of the videos yet, nor am I going to watch them all, but there were a couple of games that stood out to me already.

Star Wars Zero Company - I love XCOM and Star Wars, so a game that combines both definitely peaks my interest.

Light No Fire - I've seen a lot of games procedurally generate terrain but it always feels kind of bland. This is true for No Man's Sky as well, but with all of the experience they've gained from that I'm curious whether this game might actually have interesting terrain.

Streets of Fortuna - Another game reliant on procedural generation, but this time for NPC interactions rather than terrain. Another area that no game has been able to really pull off very well yet, so I'm curious how this game will do.