2021 was a strange year for PC games. Hardware shortages going hand-in-hand with a ton of new tech has been frustrating. We just hope it all pays off in PC gaming in 2022.
In all the years we’ve been playing the best PC games,2022 has by far been the weirdest year. Not only are things like ray tracing and AI-accelerated supersampling industry-wide buzzwords, but huge hardware shortages have made the hobby more expensive than it’s ever been. And because the world of PC gaming is in such a strange place, we thought it’d be a good time to take a look into the future and try to guess what PC gaming will look like in the coming year. And it looks like 2022 is going to be a pretty exciting year – new graphics cards and a whole lineup of games that won’t be hampered by the last-generation consoles, the PS4 and Xbox One. Frustration could come hand in hand with that excitement, though, especially if you’ve been mashing your F5 key in hopes of getting a new graphics card, only for new ones to come out before you can buy an RTX 3080 at a reasonable price. Who knows – indie games could become even more popular on PC. One of the hardest things to deal with in 2021 was the huge shortage in silicon. While this affected the entire world, it was a huge blow to PC gamers that were looking to upgrade – especially following the launch of some of the best graphics cards we’ve seen in years. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 launched in September 2020 and was a huge upgrade over the previous generation’s RTX 2080 Super, but even now, more than a year after it first hit the shelves, it’s incredibly difficult to find. It would be one thing if it was just out of stock, but we’ve been seeing people buying up the cards and reselling them at a huge markup to the point where you can expect to pay double what Nvidia initially charged. And now that we’re expecting to see Nvidia unveil the RTX 4080 in late 2022, we just hope that it becomes at least a little easier to get your hands on a new graphics card. It’s easy to imagine that there are going to be a lot of frustrated folks if they’ve had to wait on the sidelines for two generations because there hasn’t been enough supply to upgrade their gaming rigs, especially as PC games jump up in system requirements, as the Xbox One and PS4 finally get left behind.
