What with all the doom and gloom of late over memory and SSD prices, not to mention the longer-term escalation of the cost of a GPU, you might think gaming PC sales are pretty stuffed. But according to Jon Peddie Research, gaming PC sales are “surging.” The catch for mere mortal gamers is that all the action is at the high end of the market.
JPR has a new report that claims, “while game software sales drift through a lukewarm cycle, spending on gaming PCs—both system-integrated rigs and DIY builds—along with upgrades and peripherals, continues to surge.”
Notably, “the high-end portion of this market is well over twice the size of entry-level and midrange combined.” JPR says this trend of gaming PC sales moving up market has been, “occurring for the past decade” and indeed the “vast majority” of high-end PCs are bought for gaming.
What hope, then, for affordable gaming on the PC in the future? Perhaps surprisingly, JPR thinks Arm chips are coming to our rescue.
“In the past few years, there has been a new force in the market that has started to raise some eyebrows. Not even on the radar in 2023, Arm-based notebooks and desktops within the entry-level gaming category have experienced explosive growth,” JPR reckons.
It then goes on to predict 49% annual growth each year over the 2024 to 2028 period for gaming desktops based on Arm CPUs and 31% growth for Arm-based gaming laptops over the same period.
JPR says gaming PC sales are booming despite the memory crisis. (Image credit: Future)
The upshot, JPR estimates, is the total Arm-based gaming PC market growing from just over $400 million in 2024 to around $1,500 million in 2028. If that sounds impressive, various estimates of the overall value of the gaming PC hardware market put it at between $40 billion to $60 billion in recent years.
Given JPR itself is expecting the gaming market to grow substantially in the next few years from those current levels, that $1.5 billion’s worth of Arm-based gaming PCs in 2028 will therefore only represent a few percentage points of the market.
Indeed, you could argue the very premise of an Arm-based gaming PC right now is questionable, especially desktop systems. Frankly, we’re unaware of any viable gaming desktop PC available today that’s based on an Arm CPU.
There are numerous PC laptops currently available offering Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips. But it’s a real stretch to describe any of them as “gaming” laptops.
Of course, the big, er, game changer here is expected to be Nvidia’s upcoming N1X Arm chip for the PC. Nvidia CEO says its based on the GB10 Superchip found in the Nvidia DGX Spark box. And GB10 has a GPU that’s basically identical to an RTX 5070 desktop GPU. That’s proper gaming grunt.
Nvidia’s GB10 Arm-based superchip seems an unlikely hero for those hoping for future budget-friendly gaming PCs… (Image credit: Nvidia)
As ever, however, software compatibility is at least as significant a challenge as raw performance for any Arm-based gaming PC. Thus far and based on the performance of Qualcomm-based Arm PCs, Microsoft’s Prism translation layer for running x86 PC games on Arm CPUs is a bit hit and miss.
So, if Arm gaming is to take off, Prism or some other emulation layer is going to have to really deliver.
Anywho, the overall picture for real-world PC gamers looks mixed. It’s good that the PC as a gaming platform is growing. That’s especially true given I can recall a time about 10 years ago when the assumption was that it was on borrowed time. But of late it’s felt like an increasingly undemocratic platform. And this new report from JPR does little to dispel that sense, sadly.
