Is 2025 the Year of Peak PC Gaming?
Big desktops! Big GPUs! Big Handhelds?
Having recently returned from CES 2025 and diving headfirst into the buzz surrounding upcoming Nvidia 50-series and AMD 9000-series GPUs, it feels like we’re headed into a year of peak PC gaming.
The sheer number of Reddit posts from people planning to camp out overnight on January 30 for a shot at a 5090 or 5080 GPU from Nvidia tells me desktops are hotter than ever, especially when the top-end cards are going for more than $2,000.
After covering computer and console gaming hardware for a million years, I'm fascinated by the desktop PC's reemergence as the ideal home gaming setup, especially when it's driven by something as niche as internal components.
But that's part of the fun and functionality of desktop PCs. In addition to building them (see my MSI-based family desktop project from 2024 here), you can continually upgrade and reinvent them. The Desktop of Theseus feels like a very real concept, especially when so many parts get replaced in your current desktop that there's nothing left but the case.
That's a good thing. Whether you add a $2,000 Nvidia RTX 5090 or a $250 Intel B580, a desktop PC feels like the one thing left in our lives that's truly modular and doesn't need to be tossed and replaced on a semi-regular basis.
Compare that to sealed box systems like the PS5 and Xbox Series X. Both are great devices and deliver a lot of value for $500. But they were not quite cutting edge in 2020, and are even further behind now. At least it's easier to upgrade the storage on these compared to previous generations of living room consoles, but to get a meaningful performance upgrade, you have to trade up to something like a PS5 Pro. To be fair, the $700 PS5 Pro is still cheaper than most new PC graphics cards...
That's not the only thing to be excited about this year. Desktop PCs are great, but as an apartment-dweller and frequent traveler, I'm more of a laptop guy at heart (I'm typing this on a Razer Blade 16 right now), and I can't overstate how important it is that the new Nvidia GPUs are also coming to laptops in March, just weeks after the desktop versions.
It doesn't matter what the actual relative performance is; no one wants to spend big bucks on a gaming laptop with last-gen GPU when desktops are outfitted with the latest and greatest. Instead of waiting nearly a year, we'll have desktop and laptop parity (at least in part-naming) very soon.
Not to mention -- a laptop, with its constraints on heat and power supply, is where the new Nvidia AI-powered frame and pixel generation features are likely to be put to best use.
But let's go one step further than that. Desktops and laptops are both getting big hardware upgrades this year, but the most exciting area (at least for gamers), might be the explosive growth of handheld PCs. It started a few years ago with Valve's Steam Deck, which is still the overall best user experience for many gamers.
Handheld PC systems like the Lenovo Legion Go, MSI Claw, and Asus Ally arrived with the full Windows OS, making them compatible with more games from more vendors, e.g., the Epic Game Store, Xbox Game Pass, GOG, and others. None of these handhelds are perfect yet, but there's something really interesting happening there, as confirmed by the many new models on display at CES earlier this month.
That includes new editions of the Legion Go and Claw, the former with both SteamOS and Windows versions, and what might be my favorite so far, the Acer Nitro Blaze, in 7-inch, 8-inch and 11-inch screen configurations. Is an 11-inch handheld gaming PC overkill? I say no. After playing with one, it's already on my most-wanted tech of the year list.
The other new gaming platform coming in 2025, the Nintendo Switch 2, is a little lost in the shuffle. Even with very little revealed about the internal hardware or even the display, I suppose it's as close as you can get to a guaranteed hit. But eight years after the original Switch, an LCD screen (vs an OLED one) and anything less than a hot new CPU/GPU might feel like a letdown with so many other handheld devices pushing the boundaries. Not that I'm about to count Nintendo out, especially if there's a killer launch app, like Wii Sports was for the Wii or Breath of the Wild for the OG Switch.
If we already have so much new hardware to talk about and it's still only January, I suspect this will be a conversation we come back to again and again in 2025.
Let’s Visit Buc-ee’s!
As a native NYC guy, I love visiting iconic places I never knew about as a kid, and that still don't exist here. Buc-ee's has been a long-time obsession of mine, so I got a chance to visit one of the flagship locations in Texas, and I even brought my DJI Neo drone along.