I run Linux on a 13 year old laptop. runs better than any windows bullshit.
I’ll be DEAD and BURIED before I play PC games that require a 1000W PSU-powered graphics card.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
🍾 Cheers!
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.
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.
Time to catch up on some older games you missed. More fun for less money.
Retroarch is love. Retroarch is life.
And indies. Many indie devs do bother with optimization instead of telling people to buy more RAM.
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.
Is there a way to filter steam games by engine?
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.
Gothic Remake having 2070 as minimum requirement hit different
Yeah, i fell that when i saw my old 2060 as minimun requirement for Alan Wake 2
Computer I built 15 years ago is just now showing up as minimum requirements on most of the games. It’s called future proofing. If you’re going to spend the money to build a computer build something that can last.
future proofing
I understand the sentiment, but this wording was always a marketing ploy for people to spend more than they need and it was never useful.
When I was young, we were having so many innovations that there was no need to overpay, in two years you could get something twice as powerful for half the price. Even less if you could get used.
Then it took a halt, by the time I needed more memory. It was cheap to get a DDR3 + mobo + CPU than filling the empty slots on my DDR2 motherboard.
I failed for “future proofing” a few times. Extra memory slots, multicores and 64bits that windows and programs struggled to see, PSU with 4x that power I needed, when I needed it most of the plugs already changed.
I lived through a bunch of hardware shenanigans, some were shrugged, some were caught and received a slap on the wrist.
Now, more than ever, people should buy what they can afford and properly dimension their hardware for their current needs, not some future fantasy. There are communities over here that can help them with that.
There are no big innovations either, mostly exaggerated hardware usage for no apparent reason to force buy new hardware that does not do much either.
My rule of thumb for games early last year was if you cannot build something better than Steam Deck for cheaper, get the Deck, but now it is all crazy.
yeah, i’ve tried building the fancy expensive system too. there’s always some bit of hardware architecture that needs an upgrade and now i’ve blown $1000 on some little useless piece after 2-3 years. getting something midgrade and upgrading in 7 years instead of 10-15 saves so much money
what pisses me off is i was just about to upgrade my SSD and my PSU right before the crazy hit. I can do without, i just don’t want to. Now i have to wait a decade for the market to cool down and it’ll be time for an entire new box by then
If you got a 1080p screen back then and haven’t moved to a higher res since, then maybe there’s some truth to that.
oh dude i’m still using the screens i had 20 and 10 years ago. one is 1366x788, the other 1680x1050. they work so why buy new ones? or steal them from the firms i occasionally consult with? oh that’s a good idea.
I was on 1680x1050 too (I had a 20"), then moved to 2560x1440 (27"), and now recently to 5120x2160 (40"). Every such upgrade has been meaningful for me, and still, it’s not something I do every year. The first 27" I bought is almost 10 years old at this point.
Depends on what you do, of course - but for me, even just scrolling through text feels better on a higher refresh rate and higher resolution.
I finally had to replace mine because my CPU was, I think, x64 v2, but at least two games needed the v3 instruction set.
Wow almost 20 years! Kudos.
Mine don’t even show up as minimum. I game on a Thinkpad.
Doesn’t keep me from playing those games. Granted, at low settings, 1280x720 resolution and 25 FPS, but the story is still the same.i can just take my glasses off and any resolutions above 720p don’t make a difference
yeah i basically don’t recognize a difference above 720p anyways.
Still can run stardew valley and factorio just fine. But yeah, the prices are crazy. Thankfully indie games are not that demanding.
As a kid I used to basically only play emulator games because I didn’t have money for a real gpu. As an adult I basically only play indie games cause AAA games are all soulless.
Yeah, I reached my limit years ago for games that spend a bazillion $ on graphics, but their gameplay is just running from cutscene to cutscene with barely engaging combat in between.
Indie games tend to be actually fun.
Fr. I was playing corekeeper with a friend and randomly found a really pretty oasis mini biome, it had no ‘use’ but it was a chill safe area I found by accident, you could tell the devs just wanted you to enjoy their game. It feels so nice to play something that isnt trying to milk you for money at every corner!
How can AAA games all be soulless if they’re all Soulslikes?
Because they all died, and then again on the corpse run.
“Good” news is that AI companies killed the gaming upgrade market, so studios will need to target the same hardware for while. We might even see the come back of the smart tricks to go beyond the hardware limits era.
the gaming upgrade market was kinda ridiculous anyway.
We dont need new, more powerful GPUs every 12/16 months
GPUs should, like, a new GPU every 5 years at a bare minium. New Cards being churned out every year is why gaming is shit, because theres no time for devs to learn, to optimize…instead they just target apis and get it out, and tell us use DLSS/FSR3 if performance is shit, even at 1080p there are still games they expect us to use stupid ass scaling to make playable.
APIs are… how you tell the GPU to do things. Nobody’s doing low level hardware access like it’s 1990 and you’re running MS-DOS.
Yes, summer child.
They also used to optimize for cards, too, to get the most performance for players. They don’t do that anymore, hence they only target the APIs and shit it out regardless of performance.
They’re prob going to try to push cloud hardware for everything. GeForce now, Windows 12? Online subscription!
Cloud? With what hardware? Everything is overpriced because of AI, no one is spared
Because they are mainly producing components for datacenters, which will be used for cloud computing. Only consumergrade hardware is overpriced.
Only consumergrade hardware is overpriced
Well no, the memory price increase is specifically here to price gouge AI datacenters. If you’re running a non-AI datacenter, and if you’re targeting consumers, like with remote desktop gaming, you have AI-like costs (literally, since servers GPUs are gaming GPUs), but without the enterprise customers. Oh and you also need the best bandwidth possible, because a few added MS might make the “remote” use unbearable, which is an added cost datacenters don’t have to deal with on the same terms.
That is prety irrelevant since consumers aren’t the customers for AI datacenter hardware, rich megacorporations with unlimited VC capital are.
Well yes, megacorps have unlimited budget for AI datacenters, that’s my point; consumer facing offerings don’t, such as cloud gaming, and they’re competing for the same price-gouged resource (“competing” is too generous tbh, consumer facing companies are getting curb stomped)
They seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that internet infrastructure in the US* is horrible and a lot of people outside of major urban areas have shitternet that makes streaming games laggy and unreliable. Unless they spend serious money upgrading infrastructure, it’s just going to be Stadia 2.0. Except even then people still really do not like gaming as a service so it’ll probably fail again anyway.
*I don’t know how good other countries’ internet is but I would include them if I did.
My internet is fine, good bandwith, good latency. But even then cloud gaming introduces delays i am a) not accostumed to and b) not tolerant of.
I do not want to have 100ms delay between my action and seeing the reaction. I do not want to be dependent on perfect connectivity to achieve even this delay, making every small issue which would only annoy me while browsing make my gaming hell. Even Bluetooth for my controller is too much delay for me when playing stuff like Dead Cells - it’s either a dedicated receiver or cable-bound. Everyone who actually wants to play something fast paced can’t be happy with cloud gaming. Well, the turn based strategy crowd might be tolerant of that, but i will never be until my body is too broken to play anything faster than solitaire.
They being the handful AAA publishers that we already know produce games for shareholders not gamers.
There is no probably about it. Jensen Huang has talked about nothing else (besides AI) for quite some time now.
I tried playing on Amazon Luna and it was a buggy laggy mess, even for a single player “offline” only game.
Yeah. Console optimization used to be a real thing they should bring to PCs. Tomb Raider 2013 and Battlefield 3/4 on the Xbox 360 managed visuals and performance that an equivalently-speced PC from 2005 wouldn’t have been anywhere close to handling.
