This month I have been: endlessly testing stuff. It's been a busy ol' time either testing the performance of new games, the performance of new motherboards, or the performance of new CPUs. I've done so many benchmarks that I'm genuinely dreaming about them in my sleep. Help.
Let me start by saying that I have been fascinated by GPUs since the late 1990s, especially when I bought 3dfx Voodoo 2 12 MB cards to go with my Nvidia Riva TNT. Together, they made Quake 2 (and Quake 3 Arena), into lightning fast, gorgeous looking games. From there, I bought, sold, and tinkered with just about every GPU released by ATI (eventually AMD), Nvidia, and Matrox. I was obsessed with them; I couldn't wait to get the next generation GPU and wring every ounce of speed from it.
Times have changed as I have changed, and these days, I only consider doing a GPU upgrade once every three to four years. I get a few here and there for testing purposes, but my main gaming rig will be running with its RTX 4080 Super until at least 2029. And thanks to all the different game performance articles I've been working on in recent times, it may last even longer than that.
Not because I think today's GPUs are just too expensive (which they are) and not because I think the developments in ray tracing, upscaling and frame generation aren't worth it (I believe they very much are). It's because I've noticed that an awful lot of games coming out lately actually look perfectly fine on relatively low quality settings.
Two such examples are Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Avowed. Both suffer from pretty heavy-handed pop-in of shadows and objects at low settings, but the textures, lighting, and overall geometry are still pretty good, even if you drop the quality right down. Both games are perfectly playable like this and it's possible to tweak them further to get a really nice balance between visuals and performance.
Not every game is like this, of course. Monster Hunter Wilds doesn't look all that great, and like KCD2 and Avowed, there's not a wealth of difference between the lowest and highest setting. However, it doesn't run especially well. In fact, you absolutely need to use upscaling to get any reasonable frame rate, especially on mid-range or lower hardware. Only on high-end gear do things really zip along, but it's not the kind of game to make me want to rush out and upgrade my entire PC.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 | Asus ROG Ally X (17 W mode) | 1080p, Medium preset, FSR Balanced
For the most part, though, today's games are surprisingly scalable across a range of PC configurations, far more so than they used to be 20 or 30 years ago. That's partly because the performance bottleneck in games is almost entirely on the GPU, which makes it easier to scale for, but mostly because we've reached a point of diminishing returns in graphics fidelity.
As much of a fan of ray tracing as I am, I'm still more than happy to play games with less accurate lighting, shadows, and reflections. The latter in KCD2 aren't all that impressive but that's fine, as everything else about the game overrides the wonky, wobbly nature of its reflections. Of course, if it had the option for even better reflections, I'd be even happier, but I don't mind because it'll run on a potato.
Case in point: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. This is a game that looks fabulous on any hardware that can run it, from the lowest settings, right up to the pixel-perfect path-traced maximum quality. However, the PC entry requirements to all of this loveliness are pretty steep: an RX 6600 or RTX 2060 Super. They're the minimum GPU specs and while they're a few years old now, KCD2 will run on a GTX 1060 and still look fine.
So although AMD and Nvidia would just love it if every PC gamer splashed out on a new RX 9070 or RTX 5070 Ti, I just want to remind everyone that graphics settings are there to be explored and played around with. Don't worry about not having multi-frame generation or cutting-edge ray tracing units—start with the lowest preset and work your way up from there. It won't take long to find a balance of looks and speed that you like, and best of all, it's completely free to do so.
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