Better to Skip a Year for PC Upgrades?

For decades, it’s been the same ritual: PC gamers religiously expect new shiny hardware to show up, year after year, with more RAM, more storage, better specs, beefier GPUs, and so on. And for a very long time, the market has almost always obliged. While there were years where the progress was certainly slowing down, on average you could count on being able to buy something better for the same price the next year. Our latest survey shows that 2026 may be reversing that trend.

Faced with AI-driven markets that have sent GPUs, RAM, and storage prices soaring, most aren’t just hesitant to buy—they’re actively pushing back.

Let’s break the numbers: Just 1.8% say they’ll “buy at current prices anyway”; 16% plan to “buy used as much as possible”; 40% want to “delay most planned purchases”; and a whopping 41.8% admit, “I had no intention to renew hardware this year.” These aren’t the actions of early adopters—they’re the moves of a community that’s decided it’s not worth it at the moment.

The Value Proposition Change

We are now again in a new inflatory phase, and this time the difference is that it does not only impact GPUs, but almost everything really important, like RAM and NVME storage. If you are in the market to buy a machine for the first time, this sucks, because everything is much more expensive than 6 months ago, and there’s no telling when prices will come back to a reasonable level. But most of us already have an existing gear. So while we might have been in the habit of upgrading parts on a regular basis, is it as relevant as ever?

In the 90s and early 2000s, it felt almost mandatory to upgrade every 12 to 18 months. The performance upgrade was almost night and day every time. Many games were pushing the envelope and making use of what the newest hardware could deliver. It’s certainly a different era now. Of course, if you want to run games at max details and super high resolution, having the very best GPU is a very good idea, but there’s a huge space where games can be downgraded graphically a little, run better, and still look great. This has been the advantage of PC gaming for a long time.

But there’s also something new on the software side. The advent of new technologies like DLSS, FSR, and more recently Framegen have also changed the performance equation a bit. Maybe your hardware can’t run the game at full native resolution, but you can live with a smaller rendering resolution and use an upscaler on top. Maybe you can’t get to 60 FPS reliably, but with Framegen activated suddenly this becomes possible.

Finally, the games themselves are not pushing the enveloppe as much as they used to. Even AAA games. It’s almost shameful but 10 years old game don’t look that much worse than newer games in 2026. We had Witcher 3: Blood and Wine back in 2016 and while it’s the best looking game ever, it has aged very well.

Games have become more demanding because the engines are trying to do more things (Unreal Engine 5 is certainly a massive resource hog), but that’s not obvious that the visual outcomes are far better. We have entered in the marginal progress zone. That’s not good - at some point we were expecting some games to become photo-realistic, but it seems like this is not where most games are headed. People also play a lot more indie games these days, and they tend to be less demanding too.

Add all of these elements together, and a 5 years old gaming rig is still actually surprisingly capable in 2026. Expect maybe for shit games like Borderland 4 - where developers have become a parody of themselves.

The Rise of the Used Gaming Economy

If 41% have no upgrade plans, and 16% are leaning into used gear, what does that say about the future of PC hardware? It means that the value of “new” is not as obvious versus what is available on the used market for cheaper. This is also something that has clearly shifted in recent years.

In the 2010s, I can’t recall a single GPU generation that was “not an upgrade” versus the previous one. Yet this is somehow what has happened for Nvidia GPUs since the 2020s. The flagship card is always better (and usually much better). For example, the RTX4090 was a massive upgrade vs the RTX3090, and the same is true for the RTX5090 over the 4090.

But for the mid-tier and lower tier GPUs, the improvement from one generation to the next is far from obvious. We are talking about single digits framerate upgrades, which is hardly noticeable in most scenarios. Add to that that the MSRP pricing is nowhere to be found. This is worse as you go for the high end, like the situation of the RTX 5090:

The RTX 5090 is almost in a category of its own. It’s 32 percent more expensive in February than it was in November, despite already launching above MSRP. Supply for this model is extremely limited, and buyers are now paying about $800 more on average than they were just three months ago. In total, RTX 5090 pricing sits roughly 65 percent above the global MSRP.

so your new card may cost a lot more than you previous one, because of the market demand exacerbated by external factors.

So the used market is thriving, perhaps like no time before. A lot of components have a longer shelf life than their replacement rate, so swapping one older GPU for a slightly more recent one is a good deal in most cases. Even mainstream sites like HowtoGeek are recommending used hardware as the best option right now.

Instead, it makes far more sense to focus on last-gen parts that have already depreciated heavily. You won’t get absolute top-tier performance, but you can still game comfortably at 1080p and 1440p on older hardware—before upgrading to an RX 9070 XT last month, I was more than happy gaming on a used RX 6800 XT.

Software support is also rarely a major issue (except on Nvidia where drivers stop getting updates after 10 years, I guess). Sites like PCPartPicker highlight “used but verified” components as top recommendations for budget builds, too. They know where this is going.

There is also a new market for GPU modding. Some chinese modders sell new versions of 2080 TI GPUs with expanded VRAM from 11GB to 22GB. This is usually not for gaming purposes but for cheaper access to local AI capabilities. This kind of thing was either unheard or rare a few years ago, but they have now clear economic value there is a clear commercial market for it.

Demand and Supply Situation

Here’s the bigger picture: The AI boom isn’t just making hardware expensive, it’s changing WHO gets to buy it. GPU manufacturers like NVIDIA and AMD are diverting production to data centers (where AI companies pay premium prices, making higher margins possible) over consumer markets. We have seen Nvidia reducing their production of RTX50 series GPUs significantly to focus their parts on AI-grade GPUs. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, declared in 2025:

We see $3 trillion to $4 trillion in AI infrastructure spend by the end of the decade. A new industrial revolution has started. The AI race is on.

That means scarcity for gamers: even if you want to buy a new GPU, it might be sold out, backordered, or priced beyond what’s reasonable.

This isn’t the first time hardware prices have spiked (remember crypto? COVID-19? Or the 2017 GPU shortage?). But what’s different now is the justification for high prices: AI isn’t a temporary crisis. It’s a structural shift in the tech industry. It’s hard to imagine a world where AI stops being a valid investment (despite all the criticism, its usefulness is undeniable, and if anything, increasing), so we are locked in this situation until:

• demand magically drops for some reason
• supply magically increases beyond demand

So how long is this situation going to go on? Difficult to say or predict the future, as always, but several publications have made some estimates and it looks like we could be in this situation for another year, or maybe two. According to AVnet:

Relief is not imminent. Research indicates elevated pricing and tight allocation could persist through 2027 as new capacity lags demand. Suppliers are investing more heavily in DRAM than NAND, prioritizing volatile memory to support AI and other data-intensive workloads.

GPU prices from AMD and Nvidia could follow suit, too, and increase during 2026.

That does not look too good for us PC gamers at least in the short term.

It’s not just PC parts

Since most components in hardware are shared across multiple platforms these days, the PC gamers are not the only ones to be impacted. There’s already rumors about Sony pushing back the release of its upcoming Playstation 6 to 2028 or 2029 because of ongoing price crisis. Nintendo is likely going to raise pricing for the Switch 2 as well in 2026, despite an already expensive unit price at launch.

Valve has also announced that their new hardware will be delayed to later in 2026 because of the supply shortages and increased prices, and this affects the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame.

When we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now. But the memory and storage shortages you’ve likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame).

Many people were exciting about the Steam Machine, but a pricing at more than 1000 USD would be fairly risky. Not sure how much this is feasible for Valve in 2026.

Implications for PC Gaming

Maybe it’s some wishful thinking, but I hope developers or middleware producers will spend some time optimizing their games and engines to run better on existing, legacy hardware instead of relying on ever increasing performance from the next-generation GPU being around the corner.

Another option is that newer (big budget) games will be properly tested and adapted to work well even on older hardware, even if the Ultra and Max settings work best on the latest and shiniest hardware. If they don’t, it’s likely that gamers will play less demanding games (indies) and there is certainly no lack of choice there.

I would also expect the cloud gaming services to gain some renewed popularity in the meantime. If it’s too expensive to run your games locally, you might as well rent some GPU on the cloud to run your games, like with Amazon Luna or GeForce Now.

And for gamers, maybe it’s one of the best times you will ever get to look at your backlog and play some older games you have not yet started. There’s a lot of gems well worth playing out there.