Are games becoming too demanding?

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5GT. D34N Mar 19 @ 2:37am

I mean, despite having the best hardware available it'll keep asking for more beyond what you can handle since technology continues to advance at a rapid pace while people's salaries remain stagnant meaning they can't afford a new PC or laptop with the latest specs regardless of their spending habits, lifestyle or financial management.

Last edited by 5GT. D34N; Mar 19 @ 2:37am

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Showing 1-15 of 26 comments

Zarineth Mar 19 @ 3:31am

That heavily depends on what you want to play. If you go for newest AAA, then you might hit a ceiling quickly with older hardware. Otherwise, there is a ton of new games, that can run on a potato.

sandokanski Mar 19 @ 3:35am

Perhaps some do. I don't. I have pretty old computer and I run Linux on it. I am satisfied with the games I can play on it.

Volfogg Mar 19 @ 3:47am

Can't really tell. the newest AAA games I'm playing are from 2021 (SRW30) and 2019 (SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays), more made with Switch and PS4 in mind, but run well enough on what was considered "average or above average" PC specs back then if my PC can be called that.
I never pushed it past 55 C or 60 FPS so I dunno its full capabilities. I'm more of a "retro" type at heart.

Last edited by Volfogg; Mar 19 @ 3:48am

SpeedFreak1972 Mar 19 @ 4:06am

problem is that modern games are often very badly optimized

Lithurge Mar 19 @ 4:23am

What you're noticing is more devs using and taking advantage of the newer engines, e.g. UE5. There was a clear point where i started having to go to low graphics settings on my 5 year old 2070.

Pushing past current hardware used to be a selling point - Crysis was sold on the back of that.

MonkehMaster Mar 19 @ 6:21am

demanding isn't the word I would use.

unoptimized and/or poorly coded, is about where the AAA (and self proclaimed AAAA) are at this point.

just avoid the slop and look at the indies, most of the indie games in my experience, tend to be better in quality, less in price, little to no greed features/dlc, zero ads bs (with the additional win from valve banning in-game ads, thank goodness) and aren't trying to force political nonsense.

per hardware and prices, yes thing have become wildly expensive in the last few years, I for one see zero reason to buy a new PC every year or so, just to keep up with tech, the gaming industry shouldn't be trying to push us that route either with less work done and a quantity over quality mindset and begging for insanely high base game prices (ignoring the other stuff begging for money).

I'm still running a 6950x and 1080 on an x99 platform (mobo) and it plays everything I throw at it, it's also running win 11 (despite win 7 being the best is to date imo) and soon to be steamos 3, so I have zero reason to "update" my working hardware to simply waste money.

Last edited by MonkehMaster; Mar 19 @ 6:24am

Mad Scientist Mar 19 @ 6:25am

Would say this really only applies to most AAA or voxel games; anything CPU, GPU or heavy on both parts. Loads of indie games run really well and are well-optimized. Some AAA games can also perform really well on medium settings compared to high/ultra on somewhat older parts, whereas other AAA games might still struggle.

There's also a point where it's more of "what part" is causing the slowdown, too many people these days seem to be running for example, an HDD as their OS Drive + 8GBs of RAM, and wonder why many games perform poorly, not realizing lack of memory means the disk is used for the OS, the apps, games AND Virtual Memory, so the tanked performance can often be resolved by having sufficient resources like RAM, and an SSD or NVME drive as the main drive, and even for larger games.

Really depends on the game and the hardware in use.

HuskyDynamics Mar 19 @ 9:17am

Thus is the nature of tech advancement. AAA studios try to make their newest games as big and flashy as possible to make full use of the newest hardware. There's a point at which everyone has to decide whether they want to try and keep up with it or whether they're happy with the limitations of their current system.

Chompman Mar 19 @ 10:14am

Salaries for most people should not remain stagnant as you can see the average pay go up every year and a lot of technology goes down in prices over time so while the newest tech may be expensive you should have no problem getting a bit older hardware for cheaper as time goes on.

Most games will not require the top of the line hardware unless you are going for the extreme settings of games such as 4k and every graphical feature at max.

This has been a thing since computers starting requiring dedicated gpu's and gaming is a luxury and not a requirement.

Last edited by Chompman; Mar 19 @ 10:15am