Why low powered PC hardware matters

It feels like such a long time ago that we could count on exponential improvements in computing power. The leaps between one generation of consoles in the early days was massive, just as it was between graphics cards in the PC space.

However, it is becoming clear that those days are long gone. The computer hardware industry has been ransacked by Grand Theft Autocomplete (AI), collusion by DRAM manufacturers and other geopolitical issues. We’re now in the odd position where computer parts actually appreciate over time.

We are then left with a choice –pay well over the odds for hardware, or make do with what we’ve got.

Brute force

The trouble with rapidly advancing hardware performance is it allowed developers to skip the part of the development process which ensures their product will actually perform at an acceptable level on the customer’s machine. It was assumed that it may run badly now, but new hardware will fix it later by sheer force.

This idea seems at odds with the reality of what customers have been using. The current Steam Hardware survey for June 2026 shows that the most common PC configuration includes a 6-core CPU, 16GB RAM, a Nvidia Geforce RTX 4060 laptop GPU with 8GB VRAM, and a primary display resolution of 1920x1080.

I’m currently running a 12 core CPU, 32GB RAM and an AMD RX9070XT GPU with 16GB VRAM. This is relatively high-end hardware and it should wipe the floor with modern titles, but it very often does not, at least not without relying on upscaling.

The problem is that the market seems to have standardised on Unreal Engine 5, which in its default configuration is a stuttering, bloated mess. It also has a way of making every game ‘feel’ the same. With care, it can be really good. It has been used to great effect in Denshattack! but Denshattack! is an indie title and indies have long been showing the corporates how it is done.

It is the indies who have been making interesting titles which push boundaries in ways that the corporates have not dared to since the PS3 and Xbox 360 era. Moreover, they tend to make games that work on hardware that actually exists.

Can it run Crysis?

In the late 2000s a little game called Crysis was released. It was a very pretty game that made use of the then new Direct3D10 (otherwise known as DirectX10), but even Nvidia’s flagship 8800GTX and 8800GTS struggled to run it properly. It started a running joke that any new hardware releasing, the question of whether it could run Crysis would inevitably be asked.

Back then we knew that the successor to the 8800 would fare much better, but in today’s market the question would not be so clear cut. The cost of DRAM has increased around 600% in the past couple of years, affecting both the main memory and VRAM. Whilst CPUs haven’t seen the same increases, the total cost of a build is now in silly territory.

The cost of hardware is reaching the point where many people will decide to bow out of gaming entirely, or just play on their phones. Developers need to realise the market for the cutting edge is bleeding out. Devices like the Steam Machine, Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch 2 is where the players are at.

These days a mid-range graphics card will set you back between £500 and £1000, with the high end north of £1500. It wasn’t long ago you could build a whole PC for that.

As much as I liked to live life on the cutting edge in my younger years (Hell, I even owned a PhysX card), I’m excited by the prospect of developers targeting devices at the level of handheld PCs and the new Steam Machine, which coincidentally runs a 6 core CPU, 16GB RAM and a mid-range GPU. It will force them to make games that are mechanically interesting and not just release yet another extraction shooter dressed in an Unreal Engine asset suit.

It needs to be fun, it needs to be interesting and it needs to run on the hardware people already own. The gaming industry has fallen into the same trap as the Hollywood movie industry –thinking it needed to be louder, more far-fetched, but at the expense of an actual plot worth caring about.

As that old meme went, “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding”.

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