[kibwen]

You don't need a beefy rig to play games. The majority of developers are already struggling to produce art assets that can put a strain on top-tier hardware. The PS5 launch was dominated by two games: Demon's Souls, a jaw-droppingly beautiful game that made great use of the hardware, and Bugsnax, whose graphics looked like it could have been a Gamecube game (don't take this as a denigration). The hyped PC game of the past two weeks has been Valheim (having the fifth most-simultaneous players of any Steam game ever), whose graphics compare favorably to Tribes 2, a game from 2001. A select number of AAA studios have the resources to invest in pushing the graphical envelope; everyone else can get by just fine on five year-old hardware.

[hnick]

Valheim is very poorly optimised right now, graphics aside. I am not sure how well it works on older hardware but on my RTX2060 and corresponding CPU I get frame drops all the time and global locks when it decides to save the world state in combat or I walk towards somewhere new. I'd imagine it's worse on an older computer, it'll run but it might not be as enjoyable at sub-30-FPS.

Hardware creep inevitabily leads to optimisation decisions about how much effort to spend getting things to run well.

I do agree that PC hardware tends to last around 5 years now though unless you run the latest AAA games, and there is a wealth of older games. Just the stuff I missed since 2000 would be enough to keep me busy for at least a decade.

[belval]

i5-4XXX + R7 260X (a very bad and old card) works well at 1080p low settings. 3800X + 1080Ti gets you 58 fps at 4k.

YMMV but be sure to put the window in fullscreen, that helps with the frame drops.

[Sebb767]

I play sufficiently modern games virtualized (VFIO) on an i5-2500. If FullHD is fine for you, old hardware is still extremely good.

[Buttons840]

And, of course, the Demon Souls game you touted as the graphically impressive one, originally played well on a PS3.

[pja]

The new version makes full use of the GPU on the PS5, visually it's far more impressive. Not having played either I have no idea whether the gameplay differs between the two!