I get the fascination of tinkering with the build, and optimising stuff, and so on. But eventually it's got to come down to actually playing the game, right? This article is a classic case in point: not once, in the entire article, does it talk about the actual game. It only talks about graphics performance. Who buys games just to run them at 60fps at 4K? Surely at some point you've got to actually, y'know, play the game and enjoy that game?
Alan Wake 2 merits specific consideration on this front because its system requirements seemed to suggest it wouldn't even be playable on a lot of popular configurations.
If this isn't you, consoles or mid-tier PCs are a great fit.
I would say I straddle the two - if I buy great hardware, I expect to capitalize on it. But I don't overclock shit or care exactly what speed my RAM is, nor do I need the fastest SSD or top tier everything.
The only reasons I can think of are fear of the controller and slow load times due to mechanical HDD on last-gen systems.
I don't spend time away from gameplay trying to get optimal setting. I'm just the type of neurotic that I will do that stuff even though I absolutely don't enjoy it.
I can jump directly into gaming without anxiety over how my hardware is falling behind. With my PS5 being in my living room, gaming is also time away from my desk, which I, much like doing anything on a Windows PC, associate with my IT jobby job.
A console is an appliance. It's like a toaster or dishwasher, except it lets me play games without any work.
With PS5, I also don't have to worry about weird glitches with audio through HDMI in my living room setup, since that's how I prefer to play. And PS5 now also renders Dolby Atmos, without any glitches.
These are of course all me-problems, but I thought I'd mention it here, since gaming is too much fun to be confined to the tuning-happy garage mindset of PC.
(As a parallel example, I love the idea of seeing films in 3D, 4K, HDR etc, but I rarely notice the difference within ten minutes of the film starting. There's a reason why digital cinema got along fine at 2K for so long: extra detail really, really, really doesn't matter.)
I remember when CoD 4 being 60fps on Xbox 360 was a big deal.
Virtually unplayable is in the eye of the beholder.
But I think there's most definitely room for articles that nerd out on some specific technical aspect of the work and I don't think they imply that the actual "fun factor" of the game is unimportant.
One the hugest misses of Nintendo to be honest. The art styles they develop are designed to scale down to their hardware, but they also scale way up and they never provide you an official way to take advantage, even on future hardware. The art team is being done a bit dirty in this respect.
Finished TOTK last week and had a lot of fun with it. I'm not blind and can clearly see jaggies, frame drops and resolution drops, but nowhere in the game did that really interfere with the core gameplay or make it impossible to enjoy it.
While newer systems have more detail, most of the time it's imperceptible since you don't have time to look at the scenery anyway and when it matters (e.g. when rendering faces) it still doesn't look realistic to me. Burning a kilowatt just to get a bit more detail or framerate for the same old gameplay just sounds insane to me.
They didn't neglect the style and art direction, but it absoutely required graphical horsepower. Maybe - though - you need top tier art direction to sell the sizzle of top shelf graphics.
I can run basically any game at 1080p with at least 60fps with my 1080ti, except this game.
What they did with the mesh shaders is basically the equivalent of releasing a raytracing-only game.
So now I have to wait until GPUs become affordable again, which might not happen for a couple of years still. Shame, as this was the game I was the most excited about this entire year.
And no, spending money to get the same (or worse) GPU which supports mesh shaders wouldn't be worth it.
And the situation is worse for AMD users, only 3 years since a compatible board came out.
(I appreciate that GPU prices have creeped up and up over time, though.)
In 2007, CPUs and GPUs were still getting twice as fast (perceptibly) each year. That hasn't been true for a while. Other than lacking a TPM, my i7-3770k machine and GTX 970 runs as fast in desktop use as my i9-9900k+2070 Super, and that machine (which dates to....2019, I think?) still plays new game releases at 1440p just fine.
Recall that most games are designed for the XBox Series X (released 2020) and PS5 (released 2020) and still target that caliber of GPU performance.
Because then you always have some capital within the hardware to upgrade again without breaking the bank
But if you upgrade mid life cycle or even worse: to a mid range card that’s already mid life cycle, then you’re always getting less life span and having to do full upgrades again
No, you can’t.
New or with 10 000+ hours of 100% load mining coins ?
Looks like they pivoted into a obscure news site. Will always have fond memories.
Mumble is still big in eve online afaik, due to some funky auth processes with EVE account.
Teamspeak forums are still pretty active too, and updates are still being released at a regular pace. I'm still keeping teamspeak as primary voice chat for my small gaming community and i hear from my users that TS3 voice quality is superior to discord. Plus if something happens with server, i can fix issues myself, since i host TS3 server on my hardware. Which is not the case with discord - if you have issues with discord server, your only choice is to wait.
I doubt this is related to the current domain, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xfire#Video_game_and_pop_cultu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xfire
I remember.
Spiderman 2 is awesome. It was one of the few preorders that have ever worked out for me. So I’m cautiously optimistic about recent mainstream games, and the preview for Alan Wake looks neat.
As for the story, it’s just Alan Wake 1 retold but louder and in your face about it.
Alan Wake 1 had a lengthy walking around/watching cutscenes first part, so this sounds good to me: I like walking simulators (e.g Gone Home, Firewatch). Not every game has to be about blowing things up to smithereens or solving over-rehashed puzzles.
The most recent example for me was Scorn: for me it was fantastic until I got to the area where you get a thinly veiled shotgun thing with mandatory combat + solve those rotating puzzles over and over whose essential logic has been seen a thousand times (in stark with the first big room environmental puzzle whose logic wasn't that complex but was immersive), at which point I dropped the game as it was just killing the mood for me.
Isn’t that exactly how Alan Wake 1 starts out?
Personally I'm hugely fond of it but I absolutely love the weirdness of Remedy's extended universe, and for me it's less about the gameplay but the story and atmosphere. So, my bias couldn't be more apparent but I think there's a lot more to it than what you're dismissing it for.
That said, the references to Control in this game definitely feel a bit hamfisted. You even encounter a familiar character from Control, and they seem to have a lot less depth than in the original game.
I think we have different definitions of "older" then. Does the game runs decently on something like rx580?
Ok, the game runs 2 fps even in low res on rx580: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbM433WwY8U
That said, it's kind of a shame that not many games let you actually pull back the graphical fidelity if you want to, despite the engines themselves often scaling back even to mobile devices. Maybe I'll upgrade in 3-5 years when Wirth's law will catch up way more. Then again, I can kind of understand companies wanting their games not to look "badly", no matter the graphics settings; it just means that indie games are for me, not AAA titles.
I would suggest learning how to tune them if you really want to pull some performance out.
The game will tell you that during startup.
As a midrange card from 3 years ago the RTX 2060 is getting long in the tooth, the 5 year old RTX 2070 is well above the minimum specs. Which seems perfectly reasonable for a new game. You don’t have to upgrade constantly, just put off some titles until you do.
Right, I'm okay with that. But "being a visual marvel even on PS5 era GPU" sounds not at all the same as "being a visual marvel even on older GPU" to me. I do consider RTX20xx modern GPU, even if they are not the highest range for sure.
I had to take the settings way way down to get to 60FPS and I don’t know as I get older, I prefer things to look nice and smudged vs high frame rates and crummy.
I’m just enjoying the heck out of walking around the forest and staring at necrotizing obese ray traced wieners. The details are astounding!
Also, if you’re looking to upgrade your GPU, it’s a great time. I bought this one off some kid for $400 and 3090s are selling for $650.
Maxing everything means enabling path tracing which is a massive performance hit. Basically to do that you need a 4090 or a cheaper 40xx card and use frame generation.
The “PS5/Series X equivalent” settings are a mixture of low/medium without any hardware ray tracing (I think it still does some software ray tracing similar to UE5 Lumen) using FSR2 with post processing effects done before the upscaling (low resolution). On PC if you use high post processing effects they happen after the upscaling and thus at much higher resolution (this is the “heaviest” option outside of the ray tracing stuff)
Remedy hasn’t made a game that targets “native” resolution since Max Payne 2. Basically starting with the first Alan Wake game they have used lower internal resolutions and used the budget for other graphical effects. (On PC you still always had the option to use native resolution)
The feature sets involving AI in the newest cards are really the key, I think, and why my last gen premium card is lagging behind. DLSS 2.0 on the 4080 and 4090 especially are just revolutionary in how they work. The last gen cards just can’t quite keep up. It’s like magic, making frames out of seemingly thin air.
In my opinion this is a good problem to have! I’d rather have games pushing the state of the art than sticking to what the PS5 and Xbox whatever it’s called these days can do.
Max settings also means enabled path tracing, which current-gen Nvidia's 4000 series have better hardware acceleration for. So you can't really compare performance to previous hardware which don't have that hardware acceleration. No amount of optimization is going to fix that, and it should probably be turned off if you're not on a 4000 series or newer card.
In that same way, AMD's path tracing hardware acceleration falls behind Nvidia's. A current-gen high-end AMD RX 7900 XTX does worse than Nvidia's last-gen not as high-end 3070 in Cyberpunk 2077's path tracing update. https://youtu.be/cSq2WoARtyM?t=503
Also, is the obstruction you speak of really an issue? Never had I thought "God damn, move over!" to the character I was controlling straight from above-behind in ye olde days.
Over the shoulder (offset behind the player) was popularized by resident evil 4. It makes sense because you want to both focus on what’s in front of you with a clear canvas for aiming while also keeping the character in view as part of the game.
Is this an Ad?
They have a PS5 review[1], and a 'this is how best to get console quality settings on a PC' comparison with a PS5 on performance settings.[2]
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JawxvOF__4Q 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrXoDon6fXs
Does it always rain in the game? How depressing.
I truly look forward to a year or so from now when the game finally makes it's way to Steam, fully patched and ready to go for Linux play. Until then, I'm content with playing the vast catalogue of non-exclusive games available.
https://investors.remedygames.com/app/uploads/2023/03/remedy...
They also have 2 more games with 505, max payne remakes with Rockstar and one game with Tencent.
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The idiocy of people. A game must be in a shipping ready state when it launches. End of story. If you wait for a game and buy it on T=0 day you do that because you want to experience the whole thing at that very moment, and don't want to wait for possible updates that would elevate it to a level where it would run much better on your hardware.
I agree but reality doesn't care about our opinions, it is how it is
1. https://ubm-twvideo01.s3.amazonaws.com/o1/vault/gdceurope201...
From what I was unless you're comparing RTX ON vs OFF side by side it's not noticeable enough to make a difference.
https://www.gamedevpensieve.com/graphics/3d/3d_frame-breakdo...
http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2020/12/29/graphics-stud...
http://simonschreibt.de/game-art-tricks/
Not super current, but still a nice overview :)
Remedy know what they are doing
Though if you flip on frame generation at 4K max settings, you can do 60+ FPS
On my RTX 2070 Super, I played the first hour so far on render resolution of 1080p (with DSLR upscale to 4K), medium settings, no ray-tracing at roughly 30-40FPS.
