Only for terrible AAA games. Actual fun games I am fine.
yeah… just dont buy unreal engine 5 games and you are fine
I have never hated an engine before UE5. But god it is just a steaming pile of unoptimized, bloated dogshit.
I’m getting like that for Unity games.
No idea what it is but just about every unity game makes my CPU run hot and starts pumping 40 degrees C air into the room.
I’m like that with Unity since all unity games spy on you.
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.
is no man’s sky AAA? i’m having hella fun with that. I’m about to go play
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?
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.
Been on Linux since 2015 as my daily driver, and since 2023 for my gaming PC. Pretty much zero issues, and in some cases, much better performance and compatibility than Windows.
🍾 Cheers!
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
It depends. On linux i have 10+ year old laptop pc running indi games while playing youtube videos on a second window, all while keeping the temps below 70°. The same pc fans scream murder by simply open a browser in Win 10.
There’s of course a ton of variables at play here, and I’m gonna preface this by saying I’m by no means a graphics/performance snob and I’m mostly playing older games.
But anecdotally, there have been some cases where Linux has been a night and day difference for me.
My computer is basically 12+ years old, it’s basically the same computer my wife built before we started dating crammed into a new box with a couple upgrades along the way. It has a pre-ryzen AMD processor, and a 2060, so it’s definitely not technically meeting required specs for a lot of games but it’s holding it’s own and chugging along managing to run most of what I try to throw at it on (what I think are) acceptable settings.
I got Helldivers 2 to run on it exactly once on windows, every time after that it crashed on the loading screen when I tried to join a game no matter how I tried to get it running.
Since switching to Linux it’s been playable. Not necessarily the smoothest experience, but certainly good enough for my needs.
That’s probably the newest game I’ve tried to run, I’m cheap and tend to wait a couple years to get games on sale. All the older games I’ve tried to run so far have pretty much run the same as on windows as far as I can tell.
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.
Time to catch up on some older games you missed. More fun for less money.
And indies. Many indie devs do bother with optimization instead of telling people to buy more RAM.
Retroarch is love. Retroarch is life.
As a kid I used to basically only play emulator games because I didn’t have money for a real gpu. As an adult I basically only play indie games cause AAA games are all soulless trash.
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.
Fr. I was playing corekeeper with a friend and randomly found a really pretty oasis mini biome, it had no ‘use’ but it was a chill safe area I found by accident, you could tell the devs just wanted you to enjoy their game. It feels so nice to play something that isnt trying to milk you for money at every corner!
How can AAA games all be soulless if they’re all Soulslikes?
Because they all died, and then again on the corpse run.
Soulslites, on the other hand…
Any company making games where they’re pushing graphics into top graphics card territory for no good gameplay reason can go straight to hell in 2026.
That seems to be the default for Unreal Engine 5.
Yeah FrameGen / DLSS is practically a requirement for UE5 games.
That’s my feelings after seeing Expedition 33 on UE5.
The game was absolutely phenomenal, but there is ABSOLUTELY no reason that that game should’ve forced me to upgrade my graphics card just to throw extraneous particle effect bullshit over every location that can’t even be turned off. It’s beyond ridiculous.
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.
I’m curious what it’ll look like when games get to AAAAA and AAAAAA. What’s the floor for S tier games? Where do we go from there!?
***still ignores backlog
Ok, I’m not a gamer, and I have a real honest question: we had fun with gamesetsin the 90’s. We had LAN games in the 2000’s, and over Internet quickly after. People were spending hours, days playing. Each new GPU was so much better, sharper pictures, “so realistic”, etc.
Are you genuinely having more fun now than with good games from 10years ago? Even 15years ago??
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Huh? Retro GPUs are like the 8800, right? The 1080ti is still pretty new, right?!
This Steam Next Fest killed Unreal Engine for me.
Every single game with that splash screen ended up as a slide show, and not even prettier, I play 15 years old games that look better than most games I saw coming from UE5.
I used to recommend Unreal 4 for everyone, but they are already going for 6 without optimizing the 5.
No need to upgrade, just give a chance to other games, devs and engines that cares for their customers.
I got into Cassette Beasts a while ago and notice all Godot games run well on Steam Deck and my older hardware. Cry Engine looks beautiful and still run well on stuff.
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
Cassette beasts was so good and absolutely gorgeous
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?
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.
Most of the actually good games don’t need strong hardware.
Nobel Committee- This post right here.
A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.
An appreciable rise in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. Rapid growth of productive capital calls forth just as rapid a growth of wealth, of luxury, of social needs and social pleasures. Therefore, although the pleasures of the labourer have increased, the social gratification which they afford has fallen in comparison with the increased pleasures of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the stage of development of society in general. Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.
kmarx wagelabor and capital
Upgrade to Linux to extend the life another ten years.
I remember thinking that the 3090 is ridiculously expensive. Today, a 5080 bought for almost as much seems reasonable.
We are being conditioned.
All part of the plan, so you subscribe to game streaming.
7900s, 4090s, and 5090s will become “forbidden technology” like you see in post apocalyptic fantasy where tech is magic. But also “idoocracy cyberpunk,” as human production is diverted to launching GPUs in space which engineers… awkwardly task with busywork.
You think I’m being hyperbolic. I am not.
Don’t worry, gpus don’t have much growth anymore anyway, next generation of cards will be incremental. The green company has not been able to truely innovate since the 1080ti so anything you get now will be relevant for a very very very long time. Hence why they’ve had to change to enterprise customers to keep line going up with empty over hyped promises in ai. It will come to an end when shareholders demand returns on investment. Pop.
