[paulmd]

> Recall that most games are designed for the XBox Series X (released 2020) and PS5 (released 2020) and still target that caliber of GPU performance.

This cycle is extremely unusual though, the length of the cross-gen period has been dramatically extended by both covid shortages and also disruptions to the game development pipeline from covid and the Russian war among other things.

Once developers are no longer forced to validate for literal base-tier ps4 hardware from 2012 (8 jaguar netbook cores and an underclocked 7850, oh my), gtx 970 tier hardware is going to immediately drop off a cliff. And frankly even pascal is not going to age well. There were lots of improvements and features in pascal that got downplayed by reviewers from 2018-2022 and now they are really starting to come into play (and would have done so earlier had it not been for the pandemic).

You can hardly say we’ve even seen next-gen games at this point, tbh. Even CP2077 is a cross-gen title - which in many ways functionally means “last-gen”.