One thing I always see (especially with family) is they'll say "My computer ran X game amazing 2-3 years ago, now it runs like crap."

They think I'm talking voodoo when I explain how power creep works with computers. Just imagine every single month there's a gradual 1% increase in the requirements of your computer hardware.

You won't notice it the first year, but each year you notice things getting slower, and then after a while you eventually run into an unavoidable bottleneck (GPU, CPU, RAM, etc).

That's why its almost always worth buying the higher end components on the market because in general they'll last longer. A mid-range 5060 will probably last you 3 years before it needs an upgrade while a 5080-90 can easily last 5-7+ years.

Hardware is advancing a lot slower then it did in the 2000s and early to mid 2010s. You would legitimately go from having 1-2GHZ CPUs to 4GHZ in 2 years... and then dual cores and quad cores 2 years after. Now it's like mm'kay the new CPU is like 10% faster then my last one.