The longtime PC gaming hardware prognosticators at Jon Peddie Research have released a new note predicting that the industry will have a tough time in the short to medium term before growth picks up in 2025.

But there is a flip side to that: JPR sees both the high-end and low-end segments seeing a decent uptick in 2025, while mid-range gaming hardware will be flat.

JPR's numbers (open in new tab) also show how huge the hardware frenzy was in 2021. According to their figures, the entire PC gaming hardware market will have huge sales of $68.5 billion in 2021, falling to $42 billion in 2022.

JPR predicts $37 billion this year, $41 billion in 2024, and $47 billion in 2025. Digging into these numbers reveals just how big an impact the demand for high-end hardware had in 2021.

According to JPR, of the $68.5 trillion figure for 2021, $46 billion came from high-end hardware. This will drop sharply to just under $23 billion in 2022, less than half.

Meanwhile, entry-level and mid-range hardware also fell, but by relatively small amounts, and JPR's forecasts for 2023, 2024, and 2025 show that both high-end and entry-level hardware, while not matching the size of 2021, a bumper year While they appear to be increasingly healthy, we see relatively little growth in the mid-range.

As to why, JPR sees Intel's entry into the graphics market with its Arc GPUs, including the Intel Arc A770 (opens in new tab) at the low end, along with AMD's older GPUs, helping to boost this segment.

Meanwhile, at the high end of the PC market, JPR states that "it is a renaissance in PC gaming display development, with gamers being drawn to the ultra-wide screens now available in high-end oriented products with 5K and 8K resolutions."

This increase in screen resolution will force gamers to upgrade their systems to obtain smoother frame rates.

This is quite a claim, and one that I do not fully share. Will gamers really buy 5K and 8K monitors in such large numbers that they will impact the market on such a large scale?

There are very few such monitors available today, and even looking at the roadmaps (open in new tab) of upcoming LCD and OLED panels published by industry giants such as LG, Samsung, and BOE, there are few upcoming panels that fit into these categories.

Nevertheless, one thing we do agree with is JPR's extensive assessment of where the focus of PC gaming hardware is these days.

Nvidia and especially AMD have been quite slow to roll out more affordable desktop variants of their latest RTX 50 series (open in new tab) and RX 7000 GPUs (open in new tab), especially as graphics cards have dramatically upmarket in recent years There is no doubt that there has been a dramatic upmarket shift in recent years, especially in graphics cards.

What is a bit troubling is that it is not entirely clear how JPR defines the three segments: is the RTX 4070 Ti (open in new tab) high-end?" What if the RTX 4070 is indeed the rumored $599 (open in new tab)?

Similarly, GPUs are a bit of an outlier now that prices for most other major PC hardware elements are back to what can be called normal levels (open in new tab); SSDs are now very cheap, DDR5 memory is much more affordable than before, 34" ultra wide monitors can be had for $250, and AMD AM5 motherboards can be had for under $100.

Thus, the extent to which JPR's conclusions apply to the whole, not just graphics cards, is an open question. We are not entirely convinced. However, the JPR's projected numbers do not actually indicate a major shift toward the high end, but rather that the mid-range will flatten out, with a bit more growth on either side of it.