A bit of insight for those worried about gaming on older hardware. You might not need to upgrade!

[BarnacleStinson]

Just fyi this thread is more for newcomers to the forums, the computer community, and PC gaming. Veterans, feel free to read but you might find yourselves going "Well duh, of course that's how it works".

 

I was goofing around online the past hour or two and reading about the latest GPU's, Vega info, et cetera and I stumbled upon a comparison of the 3GB and 6GB variants of the 1060. I was curious, watched the video. The man in the video brought up an interesting point:

 

A majority of people playing games today, at this very moment, have Maxwell or Kepler GPU's or older. And these same people running these cards are either on Ivy Bridge/Sandy Bridge or for AMD, Bulldozer/Piledriver, MAYBE Haswell at the latest. This means their computers are anywhere from 3 to 6 years old, and their graphics cards are 2 or more. If I grabbed a 680 or a 780 today and booted up Witcher 3 at 1080p, it'd still run at medium to high detail. Why? Because if it didn't it wouldn't sell. Lemme explain.

 

Battlefield 1 is coming out this month. The company selling it is going to want roughly 50 million copies sold to make up for the cost of producing it. But according to the Steam hardware survey, most people fit into the demographic described above. Well, that's a bit of a problem. If the game ends up having been designed for Maxwell and Pascal and people are on 700 and 600 series GPUs they can't play this game! And thus, that 50 million copies goal becomes very hard to reach. The solution?

 

They design the games to run on hardware up to 5 years old.

 

Take AwesomeSauce Kyle's video on Sandy Bridge for example (he now goes by BitWit). In his video he demonstrated that Sandy Bridge is still a more than adequate CPU platform and that building a system with an i5-2xxx or i7-2xxx and an LGA1155 board is a great idea on a budget. The reason it still works so well does indeed have to do with the fact that Intel designs their chips to last, and computer hardware slowed down around the time Sandy came out, but it also has to do with the fact that game designers make their games so-called "backwards compatible" with older hardware so that the people who can't afford a whole new system every 2 or 3 years still have the ability to play newer games.

Now don't get me wrong, you're not going to be maxing out games at ultra detail with 1440p resoultion. But if you stick with 1080p, or simply upgrade your GPU to a 980, 980ti, 1060 6GB, 1070, or 1080, then 1440p isn't that hard to achieve. And instead of spending tons of money on a new computer, you either A) Didn't need to upgrade at all or B) Only upgraded the GPU for half to one-third of the cost of a whole new gaming system.

 

The whole point of this thread is to let newcomers know that if they have a 5 year old system, chances are you only need a GPU upgrade, not a whole new system (unless you have an i3, Pentium, or Celeron CPU, in which case you also need a CPU upgrade) and also to bury the myth that if you don't upgrade EVERY TWO OR THREE YEARS you won't be able to keep up with games and will quickly be left behind. When you build your new PC, don't overspend because you're trying to "beat the three year limit" or whatever people call it these days. Don't buy a Titan because you think it'll last you longer and save money in the long run. And before you re-build, make sure you REALLY need to, before you unnecessarily waste money. Hope this helps at least a few people. Stay awesome guys

[Cereal5]

Just to through out a point, the 680 was top of the line (excluding the 690) and the 780 compares very well to a 1060 3GB. I would say most people have a GTX x70 or x60, which are more border line. Just like people are buying the 1060 and 480 now.

 

overall, I definitely agree though

[Mira Yurizaki]

The problem some people seem to have isn't that the game simply runs, it's that the game doesn't run at maximum detail at 1080p at 60 FPS or whatever magical requirement they have. And some people take some serious issue if you dare say you should turn down the settings. It's like they never lived with a mediocre machine in their life. I remember playing games on a GeForce FX 5600. It was already chugging on games anywhere near high at 1024x768 on release.

 

The bar I think at times is also set too high. I did some fun experiments with gimping my system performance to see what happened. Like running Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare when my i5-4670K was running with two cores at 1.6GHz. It warned me it might suck at running it, but nope, it ran just fine. I also ran Doom and had its affinity set to one core and it ran at 50FPS or so. But I suppose setting the bar too high is better than setting the bar too low. Trying to run Oblivion on minimum requirements may as well be "it technically runs"

[Dark_Fuzzy]

Great post but considering this is aimed at newcomers i would expand a bit on " unless you have an i3, Pentium, or Celeron CPU, in which case you also need a CPU upgrade ".

Some i3s can still run pretty much everything just fine, even some pentiums can still keep up but i don't know if any could run bf1.

 

[Guest]

Running a square monitor @ 1280x1024 also helps. Yes, I have bad eyes, but even with glasses, I can't really count pixels @ 40 cm from the screen.

[BarnacleStinson]

1 minute ago, Dark_Fuzzy said:

Great post but considering this is aimed at newcomers i would expand a bit on " unless you have an i3, Pentium, or Celeron CPU, in which case you also need a CPU upgrade ".

Some i3s can still run pretty much everything just fine, even some pentiums can still keep up but i don't know if any could run bf1.

 

The G3258 redefined the term budget gaming CPU, but I'm not sure I'd game on anything less than an i5. My personal preference, and granted I do also usually turn the in game music off and run a third party music streamer in the back ground as well as keeping Facebook and such open in my web browser. These might not work so well on a dual core if you're running doom at the same time.

 

7 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

The problem some people seem to have isn't that the game simply runs, it's that the game doesn't run at maximum detail at 1080p at 60 FPS or whatever magical requirement they have. And some people take some serious issue if you dare say you should turn down the settings. It's like they never lived with a mediocre machine in their life. I remember playing games on a GeForce FX 5600. It was already chugging on games anywhere near high at 1024x768 on release.

 

The bar I think at times is also set too high. I did some fun experiments with gimping my system performance to see what happened. Like running Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare when my i5-4670K was running with two cores at 1.6GHz. It warned me it might suck at running it, but nope, it ran just fine. I also ran Doom and had its affinity set to one core and it ran at 50FPS or so. But I suppose setting the bar too high is better than setting the bar too low. Trying to run Oblivion on minimum requirements may as well be "it technically runs"

Well I believe that's to blame on the power we've recently tapped into. The 2010's have been glorious for advances in technology and most people take it for granted when just ten years ago you were dropping hundreds upon hundreds on a Core 2 Quad that could cook an egg when you gamed with it.

[Mira Yurizaki]

5 minutes ago, BarnacleStinson said:

Well I believe that's to blame on the power we've recently tapped into. The 2010's have been glorious for advances in technology and most people take it for granted when just ten years ago you were dropping hundreds upon hundreds on a Core 2 Quad that could cook an egg when you gamed with it.

I'm just going to blame the expectations that people have with PC gaming as well. It's even worse when you have people who want Titan XP/i7 6850K performance for like $500 (okay, I haven't seen that, but it wouldn't surprise me if this person exists)

[Katsunaka]

I agree. Personally I'd say anything older than a 670 is in need of an upgrade. Anything older than a Haswell for i3's or Sandy Bridge i5 or i7 needs an upgrade.  That would be a good line for 1080p 60fps I'd say. Anything older than what I said above probably won't handle 1080p gaming, and whatever else BS people want.

 

@BarnacleStinson Just because you won't game on less than an i5 doesn't mean someone else won't. People will try to get a super cheap $250 budget PC to run AAA title games at max 1080p, and act like they bought 6950X.

 

I understand not everyone has a budget to just piss away 2k every 3-5 years on a new PC, but they need to realize that buying low end hardware gets them the result. Sure the new Skylake i3's are amazing, but that's the new ones, not whatever they pull out of the air. 

 

My i3-6300 machine with 1 stick of 8gb of ram is doing surprisingly well. For an i3 I was expecting less, and not a machine that can handle GTA 5, steam, Teamspeak and music playing. Maybe it's the fact I got a 100 dollar cpu in a nearly $300 Z170 mobo. I don't know but it works and works well.

 

[BarnacleStinson]

Absolutely. People come over from console gaming hearing that a PC can out perform a console for $100 more than the console's price, or even the same price as the console, and they assume that it's this $500 beast that renders theater grade movies in 2 seconds. Then they're all confused when a "console smasher" is the bottom of the barrel for PC gaming. And they argue with you when you try explain how weak consoles really are! LOL.

[Dark_Fuzzy]

53 minutes ago, BarnacleStinson said:

snip

After going to an i5 i don't think i could go back either. That said, iv'e got a friend that built a pc with a 6100 and absolutely loves it.

[Praesi]

I want all sliders to the right!