Write a better story or create better game play and all of a sudden, the hardware doesn’t mean as much. But that’s so much harder to do. So poor stories and difficult game play it is!
Why is the implication here that difficult gameplay can’t be good? Hard disagree
It can be. But many times that difficult game play is just lazy and shitty design.
Not doubting you, but curious to hear some examples
Most of the actually good games don’t need strong hardware.
A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.
An appreciable rise in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. Rapid growth of productive capital calls forth just as rapid a growth of wealth, of luxury, of social needs and social pleasures. Therefore, although the pleasures of the labourer have increased, the social gratification which they afford has fallen in comparison with the increased pleasures of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the stage of development of society in general. Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.
kmarx wagelabor and capital
Happy day of cakes!
We don’t do that here. Now go on, git
Oh, it is! Thanks.
Don’t worry, gpus don’t have much growth anymore anyway, next generation of cards will be incremental. The green company has not been able to truely innovate since the 1080ti so anything you get now will be relevant for a very very very long time. Hence why they’ve had to change to enterprise customers to keep line going up with empty over hyped promises in ai. It will come to an end when shareholders demand returns on investment. Pop.
I remember thinking that the 3090 is ridiculously expensive. Today, a 5080 bought for almost as much seems reasonable.
We are being conditioned.
Time to catch up on some older games you missed. More fun for less money.
And indies. Many indie devs do bother with optimization instead of telling people to buy more RAM.
Retroarch is love. Retroarch is life.
Not if you picked the right platform. AM4 serves me well since 2017, all the way from ryzen 1700 and 16gigs of ram to 5700X3D and 32Gigs now. Same motherboard - and I expect it to serve me for another 5 years
Things move forward. I’m with a 5900X, it was one of the best CPUs to buy 4-5 years ago (it’s still doing well for me), but recently, just out of curiosity I found out that a current laptop CPU beats it by a solid 15-20% in single thread performance.
I’m still angry at myself that I didn’t upgrade to AM5 before the current crisis - mainly because 32 gigs of RAM aren’t cutting it for me any more (and it didn’t make sense to pour money into the old platform).
Upgrading each year seems pointless, but once every 3-4 years is I think reasonable.
That’ll save money but I don’t think it nullifies parts being expensive. My GPU is now legacy (1050Ti) because I didn’t upgrade it when I did my 2019 AM4 build (sale prices were great). Ryzen seems like it’s more expensive now due to its success.
With how prices are I’ll probably keep using these parts until I stop using a computer.
Upgrade to Linux to extend the life another ten years.
Ok, I’m not a gamer, and I have a real honest question: we had fun with gamesetsin the 90’s. We had LAN games in the 2000’s, and over Internet quickly after. People were spending hours, days playing. Each new GPU was so much better, sharper pictures, “so realistic”, etc.
Are you genuinely having more fun now than with good games from 10years ago? Even 15years ago??
Because it looks like this whole requirements thing is pure marketing, and studios needing to keep selling: “Look, shinier graphics that will make the previous generation of games you loved and found incredibly sharp and detailed when theé came out look mild and of bad quality now!”
I’ve been enjoying the graphics in Satisfactory. Although I believe most of that enjoyment comes from their creativity and art choices rather than technical specs. Factorio is dark, dirty and depressing to represent the reality of mining and manufacturing, but for those same reasons I didn’t want to play it. However, Satisfactory’s bright and cheerful-looking landscapes, creatures and art drew me in to actually want to pick up the game. Then the juxtaposition of that natural beauty with cutting down trees and machines marring those landscapes spewing pollution was a highly effective choice to drive the same point home. I began to notice my GPU fan was spinning up and I dropped the framerate until it wasn’t. And I’ve made other greener choices in my life as well, just because I played a game.
EDIT: fix typo
Are you genuinely having more fun now than with good games from 10years ago? Even 15years ago??
I mean yes? Certainly I can put another 1000+ hours into a game from 10 years ago or 15 years ago, but people aren’t playing those games any longer, and those who do in a team setting are so far beyond anything a casual player can do it’s not even close to being remotely fun. LAN parties were amazing, but they existed because most of us didn’t have incredibly fast internet and we wanted to show off the PCs that we had cobbled together.
These days it’s easy to fire up Discord or whatever chat you want to use, play a new game with your friends that looks great, that plays well (enough), and then you can buy a new game. I’d rather play Doom Dark Ages over the original Doom. Or to go to the 10-15 years ago metric, I would much rather play Doom Dark Ages over Doom 3. But hey, when Doom 3 came out, this exact same conversation was happening, because Doom 3 wasn’t easy to run.
Are you genuinely having more fun now than with good games from 10years ago? Even 15years ago??
On the contrary, I’m still playing those games sometimes. At the moment it’s Need for Speed: Most Wanted from 2005.
And recently indie games are growing in popularity, those are often quite simple visually, or go for a retro style. Megabonk for example, or Mewgenics or Slay the Spire 2.
This has nothing to do with quality of enjoyment but access to it.
Requirements are not marketing. They are mechanical limitations specified by the developers. That’s the difference between “Minimum” and “Recommended”. We are talking about the minimum requirements here.
I’ve been a pretty avid gamer for most of my life, not really the guy who goes out to buy the absolute latest and greatest graphics card but let’s say I’ve been playing most games between medium and high settings most of the time.
For about a year or two now I’ve just stopped. I’ll play some og doom, Klondike, worms,…when I have 0 energy and some time to piss away. But honestly, even that has become less and less.
Probably age, but also, it’s a drag getting into gaming. Create 5 accounts, sacrifice your privacy and your soul. Learn these super weird controls that you’ll never need again, grind 3 weeks away or spend half a months pay,…
Mfr I just wanted 10 minutes of fragging.
Because it looks like this whole requirements thing is pure marketing, and studios needing to keep selling: “Look, shinier graphics that will make the previous generation of games you loved and found incredibly sharp and detailed when theé came out look mild and of bad quality now!”
This is exactly what’s happening. Its been going on for a long time, and is in some ways holding back the industry from progressing in other areas, such as new and innovative forms of actually interacting with game worlds and their narratives.
I’d personally say once 3D graphics were able to represent things without it looking abstract from too few polygons (say, around 2006 or so?), the medium could’ve slowed down the pace of graphical advancements significantly, and the industry would’ve benefited enormously.
Modern indie games that do not have AAA budgets for graphics instead have focused on unique and attractive art-styles, sometimes with retro aesthetics, and are generally able to create far more compelling experiences due to the lack of emphasis on graphics.
I think to myself, only half-ironically, “textures were a mistake” (pre-rendered cutscenes, too). Or at least the practice of unique textures on every model being the standard rather than the exception. It adds a lot of workload, and IMO is probably diminishing returns in many cases.
Sure, I get that it was a logical/necessary step when a texture/sprite saved on polygon budget. These days I think (visible!) vertex color is a very practical technique that didn’t really get used to its full potential. It even makes a lot of sense when making a model to think about color via geometry. There’s a lot of room for aesthetic choice with meshes, colors, materials/shaders, character/map design, and yes textures if they don’t become bloat.
This is also why I dislike the idea of many remasters/remakes. Losing arguably the smartest* and most scalable solutions and switching over to much heavier (data and rendering-wise) replacements. Sure they made it visually stunning, but now I don’t know if I can comfortably download/store/run a game that probably still has game-design warts from 20+ years ago (and new glitches added).
* For example, Spyro’s vertex color skyboxes being replaced in Reignited. The original were iconic, aesthetically pleasing, they had a gamefeel reason (portals, seamless fly-into portal+fly-into-level), free by modern standards (so a toggle should be viable) they’re just mesh globes! I could even see even some verts added to improve, or use of layers or more distant geometry to give it more depth.
Maybe that’s the silver lining. If AI companies are the main customers of GPUs, not us, then they won’t need to keep up-selling us every year with nonsense.
Back in the 90s, most people didn’t have PCs because they were PC gamers. They just played games on their normal PC, and game devs tried to make games that would run on anything. If the average person has old hardware, then game devs will be incentivized to build to that.
Rollercoaster Tycoon comes to mind. That beast of a game used to run with 16 MB of RAM and no 3D card.
Graphics, I think the most fun I had was PS one, SNES and NES era with a little in PS2 era and the last of it was the Batman arkham games. Not much has sparked true joy since.
The developers are noticing and indie is going retro. Free and paid games are adopting the simpler 3D models and 2D sprites, imposing artificial limitations to have to deal with, intentionally creating developmental challenges that will manifest as stylistic choices later.
It is working.
Back in the thick of it, it was easy to get sucked into the hype when game graphics tech was progressing so quickly…
These days I mainly emulate older games. Fun games are fun.
my favorite multiplayer experience was Conker’s Bad Fur Day on N64 with the Teddiz and the refugee Squirrelz. Blowing the heads off nazi teddy bears and watching foam shoot out their necks like blood was so fun.
This Steam Next Fest killed Unreal Engine for me.
Every single game with that splash screen ended up as a slide show, and not even prettier, I play 15 years old games that look better than most games I saw coming from UE5.
I used to recommend Unreal 4 for everyone, but they are already going for 6 without optimizing the 5.
No need to upgrade, just give a chance to other games, devs and engines that cares for their customers.
I got into Cassette Beasts a while ago and notice all Godot games run well on Steam Deck and my older hardware. Cry Engine looks beautiful and still run well on stuff.
Cassette beasts was so good and absolutely gorgeous
Kingdom Come Deliverance II was made on Cry Engine, day one it run pretty good on my setup (Ryzen 7 5700 X + RTX 2060 at the time, i got more or less 45 - 60 FPS on medium high settings, didn’t remember if i disabled upscaling).
Meanwhile The Outer Worlds 2 with way less realistic and impressive graphics was a messy pixelated slideshow once i finished the tutorial, i was running on everything on minimum.
Cry Engine and REngine are a memento from a time where videogame companies used to squish every bit for performance and make games look and feel fantastic even in weak hardware
I used to recommend Unreal 4 for everyone, but they are already going for 6 without optimizing the 5.
Real time global illumination (Lumen) and runtime LOD generation (Nanite) can’t be made much faster; it’s not really about optimization, it’s that these features are fundamentally slow. The problem is that Epic spent a shit-ton of R&D developing these, and they do save developers some time - at the expense of disk space and performance.
In UE5 my hobby project ran fine on my rig but I stopped and spent a year making a system that reduced the game’s footprint 3 fold.
If I was working for a company then they wouldn’t allow me to waste time doing that.
I blame Crysis for that.
Is there a way to filter steam games by engine?
By the end of this summer, it’ll be a full year on Linux for me. It’s giving my old hardware some more life, and I have no reason to go back.
Been on Linux since 2015 as my daily driver, and since 2023 for my gaming PC. Pretty much zero issues, and in some cases, much better performance and compatibility than Windows.
🍾 Cheers!
linux is good but it’s not magic either… it’ll help a 50-55 fps game run at 60 fps, but the game that crawls on windows won’t fare that much better on linux unfortunately
It depends. On linux i have 10+ year old laptop pc running indi games while playing youtube videos on a second window, all while keeping the temps below 70°. The same pc fans scream murder by simply open a browser in Win 10.
There’s of course a ton of variables at play here, and I’m gonna preface this by saying I’m by no means a graphics/performance snob and I’m mostly playing older games.
But anecdotally, there have been some cases where Linux has been a night and day difference for me.
My computer is basically 12+ years old, it’s basically the same computer my wife built before we started dating crammed into a new box with a couple upgrades along the way. It has a pre-ryzen AMD processor, and a 2060, so it’s definitely not technically meeting required specs for a lot of games but it’s holding it’s own and chugging along managing to run most of what I try to throw at it on (what I think are) acceptable settings.
I got Helldivers 2 to run on it exactly once on windows, every time after that it crashed on the loading screen when I tried to join a game no matter how I tried to get it running.
Since switching to Linux it’s been playable. Not necessarily the smoothest experience, but certainly good enough for my needs.
That’s probably the newest game I’ve tried to run, I’m cheap and tend to wait a couple years to get games on sale. All the older games I’ve tried to run so far have pretty much run the same as on windows as far as I can tell.
Yes, but it’s still not gonna help dramatically with the minimum requirements for games 😄
Linux gave extra life to so many computers. I still have a core 2 duo running Void.
Sadly, I can only open two tabs on Firefox. But it is great. For some games thought, I can only run stuff on hardware that came after 2012.
Only for terrible AAA games. Actual fun games I am fine.
Gamers who speedrun NES games briefly poke their head out of the cave, see that life is more than shadows on a cave wall, reject that reality and return to the task at hand.
Who do you think returned to the cave to lead us all as philosopher kings?
They got a sword for going into the cave. That’s more than I got out of any cave IRL.
yeah… just dont buy unreal engine 5 games and you are fine
I have never hated an engine before UE5. But god it is just a steaming pile of unoptimized, bloated dogshit.
The engine isn’t bad itself. The problem is it has some really cool tools that are expensive to run, but developers just turn them all on instead of optimizing. See: ARC Raiders for how it should be done. It’s UE5, but they aren’t using Nanite or Lumen. UE5 can run very well. Game developers thinking the only thing that matters is having the most photorealistic games is what’s causes the issue.
These features are enabled by default in UE5, devs aren’t going out of their way to enable them. Epic lies about them being beneficial to performance, which is only true if your assets are shit. Nanite is especially bad because Unreal Engine doesn’t have a different approach for automatic LODs; you either need to do it all yourself or use nanite.
Not to say that devs aren’t to blame - they should know better - but they are just following Epic’s recommendations and defaults.
UE 5.8 is supposed to include a “Lumen Lite” and some other improvements so that “games that rely on global illumination for artistic purposes can run on Nintendo Switch 2 at 60 fps”. That’ll probably provide a big boost on other platforms, but I dunno if anyone will patch their existing games to the new version.
I wish it was possible to disable lumen. I have a feeling that alone is whats robbing FPS, and that alone is why a lot of ue5 games have resolution scaling forced enabled and cant be turned off
I bet things would look better, too.
The developers can, or they can add a toggle. It isn’t fundamental to UE5. ARC Raiders and Squad are both on UE5 and don’t use Lumen.
The issue is supporting Lumen and another lighting solution requires them to make sure both work. For multiplayer games especially, having both isn’t an option, because then it gives an advantage to some people. Squad, for example, looked into it, but they ended up going with a different GI system that’s more performant so everyone can (and must) use it.
For single-player games, it’s possible to have Lumen and another option. It’s just extra cost to development. They’d rather go with the option that creates better trailers and not worry about people struggling to run it. They can run at an upscale 240p for all the executives care.
For multiplayer games especially, having both isn’t an option, because then it gives an advantage to some people.
Not if the option is configurable. This is akin to how Rocket League has all kinds of stylistic options, but most pros disable them all. I’m sure that will hold true for their UE6 migration, too.
No, I mean they can give you more information. Shadows can tell you where players are before you can see them, for example. You can also get information from reflections. Players who have hardware that can’t support these features are disadvantaged. Lumen is not equivalent to, for example, texture resolution.
I thought UE4 was bad… But then UE5 came along.
I’m getting like that for Unity games.
No idea what it is but just about every unity game makes my CPU run hot and starts pumping 40 degrees C air into the room.
What? Which ones? Escape from Tarkov is the most expensive Unity game to run that I know of, and it doesn’t have this issue.
The issues with UE5 aren’t the base engine. It’s Nanite and Lumen, and how easy they make them to just toggle on. Unity doesn’t have any features like this. You can get things like them on the store, but they aren’t baked in. They do have ECS, which is designed to have a ridiculous number of entities operating at once. I could see how that could cause this issue if unoptimized, but not many games are using it yet so it’s not what you’re talking about.
Raft, Software Inc, Tinberborn, Big Ambitions. None of those are heavy games, but all of them make cook my i7-9700K
Guess when I launched Raft and it hit high 50 degrees and when I exited the game.
High 50s isn’t actually an issue for any modern CPU I know of
Yeah high 50s is actually excellent for a CPU under load…
Problem is it then pumps 40 degrees temps into the room which sucks when the temp is already in the 30s.
That’s exactly what’s going to happen with any CPU with a TPD of 95W and 30+ degree ambient temps.
Your CPU is actually running extremely cool if your temps are only hitting the 50s in that scenario.
You need to fix the rooms airflow.
Yeah, that’s almost certainly not because of Unity. At most, it could be blamed on C#, if we’re blaming the technology. This is an issue with their simulation I would assume. For example, Timberborn is simulating liquids and a population of workers. The liquids are probably the biggest culprit, and there’s a reason you don’t see many games doing it.
All the games you listed are simulation games though. They are going to be the largest CPU hogs you can get, especially when you use the highest simulation speed possible. At that point, they’re usually literally maxing out your CPU and running it as fast as it can process. As another example of this, Paradox games can not reach their highest speeds on weaker systems or later into the games. They run as fast as the CPU can process, which means nearly 100% utilization. It’s not because they aren’t efficient. It’s because you’re telling it to go all out on processing.
The CPU isn’t anywhere near maxing out though.
I think it’s limited on the cores it runs on or something - mine chugs on big maps with lots of water without going over 30%, which would be 4 cores running at full.
Seriously, I barely play any new games, and pretty much no AAA that have come out the last few years. This year I’ve finished:
- Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Conviction, and Blacklist
- Super Mario World
- Grim Dawn (co-op)
- 999 (9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors)
- Across the Obelisk (multiple times, wife and I play this co-op)
- Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin
- Stella Glow
- Ball x Pit
- Rainbow Six Vegas 2
- ChainStaff
- 9 Years of Shadows
- Ace Combat X
- Live A Live remake
And currently I’m playing Megacopter: Blades of the Goddess solo, and Divinity: Original Sin 2 with my wife.
I’m having a blast tearing through the backlog this year, and I’ve barely bought any games compared to previous years. My Steam Deck alone has like 150+ games on it I’m looking to play through, and that doesn’t even account for all the retro games I’m looking to play via emulation.
is no man’s sky AAA? i’m having hella fun with that. I’m about to go play
ride on!
I always have a really powerful modern specs PC, but since I try to pick games that maximize fun and don’t try to squeeze 50hrs out of a 20hr game like AAA titles, I pretty much never challenge my system.
For some reason everything stresses when I sit on the steam window, though. Maybe a quirk of linux?
Don’t worry, maybe china will flood the market with cheap ram soon or something.
In 3-4 years.
Most likely not. They are using it for their own datacenters.
At the moment - for sure. When they scale production (could be more than 5 years) they may be able to exceed the dc demand. Chinese manufacturing of anything is running on much lower margins than others. They don’t play the limit-supply-to-increase-margins game. I think it’s a CCP policy, as it’s a harmful practice for the rest of the economy. So if they scale chip manufacturing to the point where it exceeds dc demand, they won’t stop scaling because their margins won’t fall. They’ll scale further to increase profits by making and selling into other markets - consumer, etc. including abroad. I think the limiting factors to this future are the mass producrion of high quality lithography machines in China as well as the availability of high performance CPU and GPU designs. They’re moving to solve all of those though, now faster than ever with the embargo on US tech.
Time to check our backlogs.
hey can i have a hit? i need a new ssd and psu sometime. well not need, want.
But I don’t want cheap RAM, I want GoodRAM™
Isn’t that what this is? Some trade war with China?
Kinda what happened to Japan?
I don’t know
software that uses excessive amounts of resources is usually poorly written and shouldn’t be used in the first place, so don’t worry, you’re not missing out on anything important :)
The whole games industry is poorly written according to the people I knew that worked there, but this doesn’t necessarily translate to needing the latest graphics card.
For decades, games were going towards foto realistic images. I’ve seen some interviews that now that we’re basically there, art directors are favouring other types of art that are less demanding on GPU.
