I haven’t built a gaming PC for over fifteen years; I defected to PlayStation in '08 when the constant upgrading got too expensive to really justify, but now I’m looking to come crawling back.
I am finding it easy enough to find build ideas for very capable (and expensive) machines but I am that out of touch with “what’s good” that I no longer have any idea of what would be “good enough” (to play most modern games at “high” settings and at 60fps).
Basically, I would like help in avoiding an attempt at going back to my old ways and building some kind of pie in the sky setup like this:
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D
CPU fan NZXT Kraken 360 RGB
MB Asus Prime X670E-Pro WiFi 6E
GPU Gigabyte Aero GeForce RTX 4090 24GB
RAM G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB Series 64GB DDR5-6000
SSD Samsung 990 Pro 2TB
PSU Corsair RM1000x Shift 1000 W
Perhaps the could serve as a starting point - what could you cut from the above build and what would you substitute?
Well, for a practical example, my Ryzen 5 5600x and Radeon 6600xt combo is juuust out of the running for games coming out right now, I’d say. The VRAM limitations at 8GB are becoming apparent and there’s been a few instances where the 5600x struggles in games that hit CPUs hard. But I’d say that’s because there’s been an oddly big jump in system requirements, recently.
Because devs don’t optimize for PC and get away with it by listing absurd minimum requirements.
I don’t remember any “optimised” game for PC, ever. GTA V was pretty optimised in terms of frame rendering at the time of release, but it’s slow on PC to this day.
Most games ran like crap and required updates, or just ran like crap until you upgraded your PC again. You used to need to upgrade your entire PC every year or two of you wanted to play PC games the highest settings.
Consoles have been getting better specs for years now and developers would be stupid to ignore them. PC part prices going up because of Nvidia and AI tomfoolery isn’t an optimisation problem. Now they need to add potato levels of quality because people have been using the same PC for ten years, and that’s a huge pain for any developer.
I’m perfectly happy gaming on my 7700k and GTX 1080. It was a beefy setup back in the day, and now it’s running medium-low on recent games.
The kicker is that the medium-low settings still look better than the ultra settings back in the day. My Steam Deck has the same amount of VRAM capacity as my desktop (and its CPU performance is no laughing matter either) and it shows how far technology has come.
Don’t get mad at developers for targeting the reasonable hardware of today. Get mad at Nvidia and AMD pricing you out of modern hardware. They could provide you affordable GPUs, but they chose not to so that they can make more profit on the slightly fewer cards they do sell.
That’s what took me out of PC gaming; that and a price increase (possibly crypto related, possibly financial crash related).
Crypto didn’t exist back then, PCs got great longevity somewhere around the early 2010s. Using the same CPU and GPU for five years suddenly became acceptable.
You only need to upgrade more often if you must have the highest settings on the highest framerates. The fact my 1080 even runs modern games at all seven years down the line wouldn’t have been possible for the majority of PC gaming history. You happily paid over $200 (today’s money) for an upgrade from Windows 95 to Windows 98 back in those days. Imagine paying Microsoft $200 to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 10 halfway through its service life.
An AMD K6 went for sale for an equivalent of over $1600 in today’s money, and wouldn’t even be able to run games on Windows XP four years later. Graphics cards were literally useless for new games after a few years (sharers were all done in hardware, no driver update was going to make your GPU run Quake on the GPU). Two years after spending the equivalent of $4000 in today’s money you got 20 FPS and you were happy for it.
Prices for gaming PCs have gone down for a decade, but compared to what they used to be, we’re still living in a pretty cheap era for gaming.
Using a reference point of February 2017, my gaming PC used to cost €1930 in today’s dollars. For about half that, you can get a 5600 + 6700xt + 32GB of fast RAM + an SSD. For a bit below my spending, you get a 7600 + 4070 12GB + twice the storage in PCIe that I had on a hard drive + an AIO. That’s ignoring the massive drop in monitor prices, of course, because the monitors from 2017 don’t hold a candle to what you can get these days.
That’s still half of the price of a Pentium machine capable of running Quake (Quake 1) at 32 FPS.
Sure, it’s not top or the line, but it’s more than capable of running games for the foreseeable future at amazing graphics settings. When you take inflation into account, prices sure have gone up, but not by as much as you may think. Nvidia is scum for artificially increasing the price and AMD sucks for going along with them for their bottom line, but before the COVID price jump, PC gaming have been getting cheaper year over year for equivalent products.
Things have changed a lot.
And you’re probably right about the crypto thing; if my defection had happened in ‘10 - ‘11 due to price increases that would have been more crypto and less financial crisis. Memory blurs a little.