Of the 3 billion gamers in the world, 1.3 billion are estimated to be PC gamers according to newzoo. Steam hardware survey shows about two and a half percent of gamers have a 2080 Super or above. 32 billion or so? Hmmm. Let's say newzoo is wrong and it is only 500 million PC gamer in the world. That's 12.5 million. Cut that in half again and we are still above 5 million.
Three Billion Players by 2023: Engagement and Revenues Continue to Thrive Across the Global Games Market | Newzoo
Steam Hardware & Software Survey (steampowered.com)
You're making a lot of guesses and guesstimates, cutting numbers by half out the blue out of arbitrary reasons. The reason you do so is because you don't even believe the accuracy of the numbers you're quoting, nor have an ability to parse through the data to give conclusive evidence that disproves my claim. There are no facts to be found there (receipts). So lets establish a few things.
With consoles, and console numbers we know for a fact that each console owner who owns a console owns it to play video games (those who use it as a media center and don't play games on a PS5 are an statistical irrelevance). With PS5, the 5m or so owners of the platform do so for gaming. I'll explain later why this is important.
If you're going to compare and claim numbers out the blue you first have to set the parameter of the comparison clear in order to know which specific hardware numbers we must look after to compare.
Here is what you would be trying to disprove:
"....
not to mention the fact that the overwhelming majority of PC gamers don't have, nor own a rig more capable than what the PS5 can do in gaming - so it's what it's."
What you'll be trying to prove is that more than 5m PC gamers own a PC gaming rig that is MORE capable than a PS5, not just
simply matching it in performance.
The PS5 has been observed to perform as good as a 2080/2080 super, sometimes like a 2070 etc. It oscillates around that sort of performance (for now since the kinks in the hardware have upside).
So which sort of PC hardware performs better than 2080/2080 super unequivocally? 3070, 3080, 3090, 6800, 6900 etc.
What you will then need is to find the total number of those cards out there on the market. You can't make up numbers here. You will then need to parse through that sales data somehow and figure out how many of those cards are mining crypto, sitting on servers, offices, software developers offices etc vs. how many of those are in the hands of PC enthusiasts and used for gaming.
Only then can you try to create a good educated guess on the sort of numbers that exist as an install base to THEN compare it to the PS5's numbers which we know clearly to be unequivocal facts.
Not only do you have to do that for graphics cards as part of the components base that make up a gaming PC, but also for a CPU's with better performance than a 8-core Zen 2 CPU's, the SSD (which is incomparable atm no matter the config on PC - edge PS5 etc.. etc..).
Since that exercise proves to be almost impossible (and it would be easier if we had leaks on Nvidia/AMD sales for specific cards/cpu's - to at least help us get started to then get to usage types) we can only attempt to use Steam hardware surveys to have a sort of idea, not fact, but an idea of what the numbers
may possibly be.
And since I've done this already, although not up to date for Feb 2021..... here is what I got. I'm not going to redo all of that math but it's safe to say the percentages haven't changed much due to the scarcity aspect, and paper launch nature of the hardware in question, as well as the slow nature of adoption on PC.
What I can say is that I believe it's reasonable to conclude that the overwhelming majority of PC gamers do not own PC gaming rigs that are unequivocally more capable than a PS5. There is no actual credible evidence that has been presented to date to prove otherwise and the market conditions and the data that is indeed available do not support that conclusion. You'll be hard pressed to prove that more than 5m combined sales of 3070, 3080, 3090, 6800, 6900 etc have occurred in the 3-4 month period of sales, and that all of those are dedicated to gaming, and that the gaming rigs in which those cards are found all have the necessary components required to outperform a PS5 in gaming.
And it goes without saying that the Steam Hardware survey is a very limited, opt-in only survey of
some users on Steam. It does not provide the whole picture, not even the slightest. And even then the data is weak to prove the counterpoint.
https://www.neogaf.com/threads/perf...der-heavy-load.1580207/page-10#post-261487323
Steam Hardware Survey (July-November 2020) - Here!
GPU: PS5 in gaming performance (and other benchmarks as in the thread topic) has been seen to potentially go as far high as matching performance of that of an RTX 2080 or 2080 Super (obviously performance bound to go higher the more developers learn to/make use of the PS5 hardware). Using that as an early ceiling:
Roughly ONLY
2% of PC Gamers as of November 2020 own a graphics card that comfortably exceeds PS5's early observed ceiling performance. That make up comes from RTX 3000 series cards (paper launch) at
0.32%, non-existant Radeon 6800 series and
0.82% for the RTX 2080ti.
That is to say the PS5 matches or is superior in gaming performance to 98% of PC cards out there - say with a margin of error of at most 2% pts. Lets say that number improves by years end of
2021? Looking at the slow rate of adoption of previous cards shows that PC gamers upgrade at a
snail-like pace (more so given the high costs today - not everyone can shell out $1000). So to be generous that will only improve to about a potential max of
4-5% "exceeding" the PS5 by years end of 2021
. Not to mention of the millions of PS5's that will be out there aka the sales disparity that will exist between consoles and these cards.
CPU:
89.29% of PC gamers don’t own an 8 core CPU as of November 2020. That is to say
ONLY 9.81% of PC gamers have an equivalent CPU that
appears to match PS5's CPU.
And ONLY 0.90% exceed it. Only
23.32% of the Intel CPU’s are clocked at roughly matching or exceeding PS5's GPU clock speed - give or take. And obviously performance varies – that is to say, for gaming related output the PS5 CPU will outperform a great deal of those CPU’s that “match it” within than
9.81%, on average
, shrinking that number lower.
RAM:
43.24 % of PC gamers do not have more RAM on their Gaming PC's than what’s found on PS5. Not to mention the nature of bottlenecked performance on PC architecture (but that's another topic).
Display Resolution:
Only
10.28% have displays that can output 1440p (8%) or 4K (2.25%) resolutions. That is not performance however. Not to be confused.
Hard Drive:
I think it's funny Steam doesn't poll this (or maybe they did but no longer do
- homework for the inclined). Looking at the data above to get an overall picture, how many PC gamers own an SSD that can even match or exceed PS5's data throughput without getting bottlenocked? Or just by sheer brute force strength outdo the PS5... or whatever fairytale PCMRs tell themselves to cope....when Direct Storage is not even out yet?
Or are we gonna bring the "more RAM" argument to the mix? Checked on that RAM data of those numbers exceeding 16 GBs yet?
I'm gonna provide the data point for the lack of data anyway as it's not needed here.
0.1% including accounting for margin of error.
So we come to the obvious conclusion of the saga. The PS5 matches or outperforms roughly 97-98% of PC gaming rigs out there today. And for 2021 - roughly 95-96%. And that will spill over into 2022.