We had our annual pilgrimage to Spain again... the same campsite, same pitch, same trailer full of gear that permanently lives there now... same two weeks of heat, same tapas and same mild Wi-Fi anxiety. And my family spent it doing what they normally do, which is lie in direct sunlight, and occasionally cool off in the pool.
Meanwhile, I hid under the trees with a stack of PC Gamer back issues going soft in the humidity, working through a few months of magazines I've been too busy to read at home. This is my preferred approach to holidays... catch up on what I missed and make plans for my return to the mancave. Frame rates don't give me a rash.
Somewhere in the two weeks away, I read a PC Gamer article by Morgan Park titled "Embrace the great Tech Pause". I read it twice, because it had touched on something I have thought for a long time.
The best hardware I never bought
I have a gamer's confession to make... I have never gamed at the cutting edge. G-Sync, RTX, DLSS... they were just gimmicks to me at launch.
My entire PC gaming life has been mid-level. Always an i5. RAM just a nudge above the baseline. Mid-range GPUs bought a generation behind. I have never owned a halo product, or pre-ordered a flagship. And in that mid-level hardware mediocrity, I have consumed and absorbed... four decades of glorious videogames.
The big, mainstream hits and the unsung heroes too. Quake, Half-Life, Deus Ex all sit strongly alongside Outlaws and Battlezone in my fond memories. And I still have a Steam library fast approaching 1500 titles, the vast majority of which I have barely touched. Whatever I was supposedly missing by not owning the best kit of that particular year, I clearly wasn't missing it much, because I still can't get through what I already own.
And it isn't just me. My family are all running 3060s and doing absolutely fine. Same games, same enjoyment, no complaints. That's your control group right there... the top-end chase was always a con and the proof is sitting in my relatives' living rooms.
The 4070 Ti Super in my desktop right now is a rare treat. It's the nicest bit of kit I've put in a case and I have no regrets about buying it, mostly because I bought it before things got properly stupid. But if it died tomorrow? A 5060 would be absolutely fine. I'd be a bit sad and then I'd never think about it again, because the games would still run and I'd still be behind on my backlog.
The only thing stopping me is that I'd quite like to never give NVIDIA another penny.
Little piggy eyes over the fence
Let's talk about how we got here, because it wasn't an accident and this isn't the free market doing its magic.
A few years back NVIDIA got a taste of crypto-shaped earnings. Miners were buying everything in a crypto-rush and prices became detached from reality. Pandemic and supply chain problems made it worse. Then crypto stopped being a licence to print money, and Elon Musk made it uncool for good measure (anything he touches is cringe), so the demand died down.
But GPU prices didn't come back down. Jensen Huang and his boardroom cronies looked at those numbers and decided this was the new baseline, and they would artificially ration the supply and ensure they'd all be able to buy a billion dollar yacht...
And here's the rub, because it hasn't stopped with graphics cards.
For the past five years the RAM and SSD manufacturers have been peering over the fence at NVIDIA's earnings with little piggy green eyes, squinting, working out whether they could get away with exactly the same trick.
They're not short. They chose this
The current memory shortage situation gets reported like weather. Shortage, supply chain, unprecedented demand... rent money for a modest SSD please.
But this isn't weather... it's a conscious decision to take more money from the consumer.
Three companies make the world's DRAM. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. That's not a market, it's a cartel-shaped silhouette. And what those three have done is reallocate fab capacity away from the commodity memory that goes in your PC and towards high bandwidth memory for AI workloads, because that's where the fat margins are.
That's the whole reason... not a fire at a major plant. Not a raw materials crunch. It's a choice about which customers get the silicon wafers, and it wasn't us loyal consumers.
The analyst consensus I've seen doesn't have prices normalising for another two years at the earliest. I've actually been hoping that China will come in and fuck shit up, just like they're doing to the European car market. Unfortunately, any hope that Chinese manufacturing might break the logjam runs into the fact that CXMT's output, even ramping up through this year, is overwhelmingly being absorbed domestically in China. It isn't coming to rescue your build.
Thing is... we've been here before. The 2004 memory shortage looked very similar on the surface... a supply crunch during a transition phase pushed prices through the roof. What came out afterwards was a price-fixing investigation that ended with guilty pleas and fines from several of the biggest names in memory.
So when this same set of companies tells us that this exact set of circumstances is nobody's fault... we do have some history to draw on.
And that's because everybody in the supply chain lies. Every single link in it. The market is stable. Demand is strong. Consumers are still spending. Pricing reflects underlying conditions. All of it delivered with a straight face on an earnings call, and all of it repeated back by outlets who need the review samples to keep arriving.
Long live PC gaming
Now for the genuinely hopeful bit, because I'm not actually trying to be miserable on my holiday.
The best thing happening in PC gaming right now is people getting more out of less. There's a whole ecosystem of channels dedicated to it, retro-focused and otherwise. ETA Prime, RandomGaminginHD and others... are great at dialling in settings to get Cyberpunk 2077, Crimson Desert and other high end games running smoothly on hardware that is nowhere near a flagship.
This kind of control over your own kit is the reason this gaming platform is worth defending. I don't think we've had this much meaningful leverage over our own machines since the autoexec.bat and config.sys days, when getting a game to boot was a puzzle in its own right...
You will never get that on a storefront box and Game Pass isn't going to hand it to you. The PlayStation Store certainly isn't. That freedom to squeeze, tinker, downgrade, sidegrade and simply refuse... it only exists here.
Long live PC gaming.
So: take the pause
When family have asked me about upgrades recently, my advice has been simple. Wait. Just wait. The ones who couldn't wait went AMD, not out of brand loyalty but out of sheer exhaustion at being taken for a ride for the crime of having a hobby.
So here's the easy ask - let's have a #techpause.
Don't upgrade your PC if you don't have to. You almost certainly don't have to. Your machine is fine. Your backlog is enormous and most of it will run on what you've already got.
If you genuinely need parts, buy used. Somebody else already paid the tariff on that hardware, so no need to pay it twice.
And be loud about it. This matters more than the wallet, honestly. Blog it, vlog it, post it, tell people in the comments what you actually paid and what you actually decided not to buy. The manufactured story is that demand is strong and everything's normal and we're all queuing up happily. Every honest public account of somebody sitting this generation out puts a small dent in their story.
Wallets and visibility. That's the entire toolkit. It's not much, but it's what we've got, and the alternative is politely accepting that a hobby I've had since I was a kid is now a luxury good.
I'll be over here, slowly making my way through 1400 unplayed games, and upgrading nothing.
What's the oldest part still running in your rig? Come discuss on Bluesky.
