I think the challenge is that uses for a PC, or even if you restrict it to "PC gaming" is such a wide net it's hard to make anything but the most vague/general readings from that audience. When the monthly steam hardware survey results come out there's always a crowd of enthusiasts putting their spin on what should or shouldn't be there, when that includes people playing simple low requirement games all the way through to reality simulators. For non-gaming uses, I think the most significant step was Vista, where they moved over to GPU acceleration for drawing windows (but with a software 'basic' fallback), video decode acceleration and to a lesser extent encode for any device with a camera, although I'd say mobile devices likely exercise encode capability more than desktops do generally.