>Games especially have a very long history of having a bottomless appetite for more and more powerful hardware every year as they push the limits of what's poss

>Games especially have a very long history of having a bottomless appetite for more and more powerful hardware every year as they push the limits of what's possible. Sure, though the CPU has less to do with that. For reference, most modern games still perform just fine on first-gen i7s and second-gen i5s; the most recent of those was released 6 years ago. GPUs are a replaceable part where CPUs are not. At least GPU technology is still advancing in big ways, though I think that's more a property of how they're built, what their functions are, and (especially for higher-end cards) what kind of power budget users are willing to accept. It's unusual for the newest mid-range card not to match the previous high-end card. Intel, on the other hand, has never released a CPU with TDP over 150W (AMD had a couple at 220W), even though most in the overclocking community know that 5GHz is regularly attainable on modern CPUs. But that that's been mostly true since 2013.