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.

yeah.. just dont buy unreal engine 5 games and you are fine

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.

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?

In 3-4 years.

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

hey can i have a hit? i need a new ssd and psu sometime. well not need, want.

They're prob going to try to push cloud hardware for everything. GeForce now, Windows 12? Online subscription!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

How can AAA games all be soulless if they’re all Soulslikes?

And indies. Many indie devs do bother with optimization instead of telling people to buy more RAM.

!retrogaming@lemmy.world

Retroarch is love. Retroarch is life.

That seems to be the default for Unreal Engine 5.

It's gonna bite them in the ass shortly. $70 games that costs $200+ MM to make and despite selling millions of copies don't even break even. If the minimum graphical requirements break the floor of what the average PC gamer owns, sales will plummet and kill the AAAA and AAA product line.

yeah i basically don't recognize a difference above 720p anyways.

Yo guys have a GPU?

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

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.

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?

Cassette beasts was so good and absolutely gorgeous

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I'm so glad to have picked up a Steam Deck when I did. The cheapest one they sell right now is $789

My exact same mentality. Oh steam I always check if its deck verified before buying anything. My PC is still better spec but I like the flexibility.

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.

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.

I finally had to replace mine because my CPU was, I think, x64 v2, but at least two games needed the v3 instruction set.

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.

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.

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.

Why is the implication here that difficult gameplay can't be good? Hard disagree

We don't do that here. Now go on, git

Oh, it is! Thanks.

Steam just straight up doesn’t work that way. It’s an application launcher, it will happily try to run a game on integrate graphics even if you have a dedicated GPU if you haven’t configured your system properly. This is, in fact, a very common issue.

One of my favorite hobbies and genres of YouTube videos is testing out really old GPUs and CPUs on modern games to see what they do. I’ve had the game tell me it straight up won’t launch because an intel 845 doesn’t have the right graphics API for a modern game, but steam will still let the game try to launch.

Chiv probably doesn’t like your 10 year old integrated graphics because it’s 10 year old integrated graphics and you threw a hissy fit about steam instead of thinking maybe the game was the problem.

Steam doesn't impose launch restrictions like that?

Pick up a 980ti for like $50-80, play anything before like 2020 easily. There's no rules that you can't have an inexpensive rig but ancient integrated graphics are kinda terrible

So if the stop sign tells you to stop even though you didn't want to, this is asking to produce slop?