well, your computer either seems pretty good, or my computer is pretty average lol. You have twice more ram than me...

I personally would only upgrade my pc if it starts getting impossible to use it, like when my pc had 4gb of ram and opening unity could easily take literal hours. If your computer already have a hardware good enough for everything you need to do, then i don't think you should be upgrading all the time - too expensive, and it's also risky for you to break the other pieces of hardware from your computer

As far as I’m concerned, developers have been upping minimum requirements to force people to feed an economy that simply doesn’t require growth in the first place. The majority of software doesn’t justify at all the insane amount of RAMs it consumes, or features it demands. It is ridiculous that Notepad in 2025 takes even seconds to load on a modern computer.

Hopefully this nonsense will come to an end, as people are no longer able to upgrade, developers will finally start putting in effort in optimizing their software.

I say “hopefully”, but I don’t actually believe this will happen. So yes, I’m taking the “watch the world burn” route.

I think your approach makes a lot of sense. If your current setup already runs the games you enjoy without issues, there’s really no urgent reason to upgrade right now. A GTX 1050 Ti with 16 GB of RAM is still perfectly fine for esports titles and most indie games, and even older AAA games can run well with the right settings.

Upgrading just because of hype or fear of shortages usually isn’t the best move, especially when prices are inflated. Hardware markets tend to stabilize over time, and waiting often means getting better performance for a much more reasonable price.

I’m personally in the “wait and see” camp as well. Unless someone truly needs more power for work or specific new games, sticking with a solid and reliable system like yours seems like a smart and stress-free decision.

Wish you a great 2026 😘

I'd like to upgrade my video card to be able to run AI models (Like SD XL, music models or big LLM models) to experiment and find how i could include it into my workflow. (I have an 8Gb VRAM AMD). But yeah, prices of nvidia cards skyrocketed before ram. Luckily i don't have to change RAM yet.

Hopefully when the bubble burst the manufactures will return to provide hardware for the average user. (More offers lowers the price).

Also what mid said 'The majority of software doesn’t justify at all the insane amount of RAMs it consumes, or features it demands.' Is like an 'Unreal 5' situation. If things keep like this, people will start to (hopefully) search for better optimized software and games. Perhaps is a good opportunity for AA and indie devs. Since many of us use have and work in average consumer grade computers, we  can optimize (and pretty much we have to due to the limitations) our games, making them more playable in pretty much every computer.

And it's also like you said: 'Every shortage can be resupplied very fast, because companies fight for customers and the consumer market is still significant.' But if i'm not wrong, many of the RAM stock was already bough even before production (idk if true, but if it's). And the rest of the RAM manufacturing companies  aren't increasing production because they are also waiting for the bubble to burst. (If they expand now to increase the production and the bubble burst in a couple of years the losses may send them bankrupt).

I accept the situation and would rather push the situation off of a cliff. XD

Real talk: I would rather have this situation happen than never happen at all. The only folks who would suffer from the RAM shortages are the folks who NEED to have 4K resolution, that high rez refresh rate and a cutting edge that would make the closest goth reconsider their life-style and turn to either religion or music.

The other half that it could be good for us besides shitting bricks at the Ram prices we need to pay to build new rigs (PEOPLE ARE ASSEMBLING THEIR OWN RAM FROM SCRATCH NOW!! THE CHIPS THEMSELVES ARE MORE INEXPENSIVE THAN THE RAM ITSELF!!! GOOGLE IT!!!), It brings a new problem to developers and the big AAA developers need to swallow their pride on this one too; NOONE will be able to run whatever resource chugging game they publish this year. If noone can run their game, then their sales suffer and the company suffers... and they want to KEEP THEIR JOBS, they need to do what programmers have been doing since the 1940's; work within the limitations of their mediums and stretch it as far and thin as possible. (1940's, WW2, first complex computer used to decipher the Enigma coded messages from Germany. The first computer had to decode those messages and they had to work within the limitations to get shit decoded.)

That's what programmers had to do with the Atari, the NES, the SNES, they did even HARDER WORK WITH THE SEGA GENESIS, The PS1 and the N64... To this day, Resident Evil 2 for the N64 is a FU***NG MASTERPIECE OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING!!! No cut levels, were able to cram ALL OF THE CUTSCENES without losing any quality or shrinking the video and they were able to cram all of this onto a 64MB OF SPACE ON A CARTRIDGE FROM A GAME CD THAT TAKES U P 700MB!!

The big complaint here, is that the modern developers don't try to optimize their titles anymore, they don't bother bug fixing often or try to plug memory leaks. They expect us to have the appropriate hardware to RUN the game and the expectations are tone deaf to all of us...

The TL:DR of my whole post: I'm somewhat glad it's happening as it is leading to something that has been needed for a long time. Problem Solving, Engineering and working for solutions.

I’m not a hardcore gamer. One of the features I look for in games is quick loading on my systems.

Another is storage size. My focus in design is on keeping the file sizes small but looking like heavier graphics. Example: I made a promotional animation today that’s 3kb. The animation loads immediately on slow internet. It runs snoothly.

When the game developers make games my existing devices can’t handle, I don’t play them. Why bother? I could go to the public library and play there, but why?

It’s like when an extremely sloppy ebook publisher gives me a 2GB prose novel (much heavier than average), I delete the file(s). They couldn’t bother putting in the little bit of effort into reducing the file size of their cover or any formatting to a reasonable amount, then I don’t need to put in the effort to open their book. When asked for a review, I point out the reason.

Many of the big video games are badly designed. Reviewers who know better than me say that’s bad management under pressure from greedy funders allowing duplicates of excessively sized textures and junk code go out to the public as shared essential resources are under strain.

That’s like what’s happening in the AI computer bubble: bad management under pressure from greedy funders allowing junk code go out to the public as shared essential resources are under strain.

I figure it’s not old computers that are the problem. Lousy companies that maybe shouldn’t be in business without stronger regulation are (a big part of) the problem.

There are many small developers who don’t waste my time, storage space, or electricity. I’d like them to have better support.

I'm running 256mb graphics and 4 gig of ddr 2 I reckon you will be right mate.