[SOLVED] anyone else given up trying to keep up to date with PC gaming hardware?

[robertbhart]

I'm curious how others feel about the current gen of games and whether it is still worth spending thousands of dollars on the latest GPUs and CPUs?

I was up to date until the GTX600 generation. Back then I ran an I7 3930k with 3 GTX680's in SLI on 3 1080p monitors. It was a high-end set-up for all of 6 months until everyone started talking about the 700 series.

For the first time, I couldn't find any excitement about the next gen of games or hardware. There just wasn't much of a difference in how they looked or played.

Now, 7 or 8 years later, I feel the same. Sure, I can see some differences. A little more detail and 4K displays instead of 1080p but it is just not enough to justify investing another $3000 to have the latest hardware for 6 months.

Instead, I started looking the other way and began rediscovering the gargantuan back-catalog of "vintage" gaming hardware. "Vintage" now includes the PS3, PS2, the Sega Dreamcast and every consoles that came before along with every PC game up to 2012. There are many tens of thousands of games to choose from and old games often sell on eBay for as little as $5.

Most consoles pre PlayStation 3 have now been cracked allowing people to play "back-ups" on original hardware. It's a great time to be a gamer!

I still have my I7 3930k but that PC is now used only for emulators. Groovymame to be specific outputting old arcade games at their native res and refresh rate. Between that and my old consoles, I now have thousands of games and I haven't had this much fun with gaming since the 90's. Many of these old games have never really been improved. There is literally enough amazing games to discover in the back catalog to last the rest of my life.

So.... until Nvidia stops rushing to bring out new generations of GPU without any meaningful progress, I'm on strike. No more rat race to keep up with it all. I'll be here playing Time Crisis 3 with a real light gun with recoil on my CRT arcade monitor with a grin on my face.

What do you guys think? Am I missing out on some PS4 or latest gen PC games that would change my mind? Are you planning to continue dropping thousands of dollars to keep up? Or have you also started rediscovering vintage games?

 

[Gam3r01]

People who "keep up" with every generation have money to spend and thats their hobby.
I never recommend this. Upgrade when its needed, thats all.

 

[Math Geek]

sounds like you are tying your enjoyment on pc to playing high settings at high resolutions or on multiple monitors. yet for console you're enjoying it with an old RCA connection at low resolution.

you can't enjoy your pc game at 1080p and the same 30 fps you get on those old consoles? sounds like a bit of a paradox for you. maybe you got caught up in having the latest and greatest with the most fps and so on that you forgot to stop and enjoy the game itself. but playing old "vintage" games you don't feel the same pressure and can enjoy the game.

just stop trying to keep up and just enjoy the games. when you can no longer play them then upgrade. should not be every year or 2 but more like every 3 or 4 really if you wanna play the latest and greatest AAA games as they come out.

 

[Peter Martin]

I gave up pc gaming. Too expensive. I still love my current gen xbox that can play thousands of older titles too. Nothing wrong with being frugal and having fun

 

[Dugimodo]

As a broke teenager and then into my early twenties everything was second hand or just good enough and I was constantly upgrading just to be able to play the latest game properly. A constant frustration was only getting to see how good games could look a couple of years later when I'd already played them to death at lower quality settings. Now that I can afford high end hardware I like to keep ahead of game requirements so I can enjoy them at their full potential from day 1.

I've been gaming since the 80s and have observed some trends. It used to be that if you built a mid range gaming PC you'd need at least a graphics upgrade at least every 2 years (ish) and often a full system upgrade every 2-3 years and if you built a high end machine it might last another year but would start to struggle.

What I think has happened as games have gotten more sophisticated graphically is that it takes longer and longer to develop them such that PC hardware has improved at a faster rate than the games that run on it a lot of the time. Case in point a 7 year old i5 2500K is much slower than an i5 8600K, but it can still play almost every game available at least at reasonable framerates. There are beginning to be titles you'd want a better CPU for now, but that's a recent occurance and gaming on 7 year old mid range hardware would have seemed impossible once upon a time.

I'm starting to build much better PCs but less often these days, My 6700K lasted me 3 years easily and was not struggling, the GTX 980 lasted 4 and also was not struggling (at 1080P). I just built myself a Ryzen 2700X for my 50th birthday and I'm loving it but the games don't honestly play any better on it. I enjoy the building of the PC almost as much as gaming on it though. I sold my old 6700K/ GTX 980 rig to a firiends son and He's over the moon with it playing all the latest games, pretty good for a PC with a 4 year old graphics card and a 3 year old CPU.

 

[robertbhart]

sounds like you are tying your enjoyment on pc to playing high settings at high resolutions or on multiple monitors. yet for console you're enjoying it with an old RCA connection at low resolution.

you can't enjoy your pc game at 1080p and the same 30 fps you get on those old consoles? sounds like a bit of a paradox for you. maybe you got caught up in having the latest and greatest with the most fps and so on that you forgot to stop and enjoy the game itself. but playing old "vintage" games you don't feel the same pressure and can enjoy the game.

just stop trying to keep up and just enjoy the games. when you can no longer play them then upgrade. should not be every year or 2 but more like every 3 or 4 really if you wanna play the latest and greatest AAA games as they come out.

I never use rca connections and very few old console run in 30fps. Arcade crt monitors use an RGB connection which, in terms of signal quality, is the same as HDMI or VGA. I use RGB for everything I play (including my pc games).

Most old consoles run in 240p 60fps. Playing them on 1080p displays makes them look a lot worse, not better. There is only one generation that made common use of 480i (which is 30fps) and that is the PS2 / Dreamcast but luckily, they can be forced into 240p for sprite based games and 480p / 60fps for 3d stuff.

If 30fps is the best you can manage then the hardware is not good enough for the game. Period. Games need to run in 60fps to look fluid. That has been true for every generation.

The issue for me is not the required regularity of upgrades for the latest PC games. It's the fact that those upgrades are not worth it to me. I am finding better games for a lot less money on older hardware.

Another way of saying it is that graphics have stopped getting better (to any degree I would care about). The numbers in the specs indicate a quantum leap in performance but I am just not seeing it on-screen, or, more importantly, in the gameplay.

I am not saying that PCs don't produce great graphics and fun games. Only that they looked and played great 5 years ago and they still do - just not much improvement.

The money I used to spend on PC upgrades now goes on buying fun arcade peripherals like light guns with recoil solenoids and driving game controls with arcade quality force feedback etc. it's so much fun!

 

[robertbhart]

As a broke teenager and then into my early twenties everything was second hand or just good enough and I was constantly upgrading just to be able to play the latest game properly. A constant frustration was only getting to see how good games could look a couple of years later when I'd already played them to death at lower quality settings. Now that I can afford high end hardware I like to keep ahead of game requirements so I can enjoy them at their full potential from day 1.

I've been gaming since the 80s and have observed some trends. It used to be that if you built a mid range gaming PC you'd need at least a graphics upgrade at least every 2 years (ish) and often a full system upgrade every 2-3 years and if you built a high end machine it might last another year but would start to struggle.

What I think has happened as games have gotten more sophisticated graphically is that it takes longer and longer to develop them such that PC hardware has improved at a faster rate than the games that run on it a lot of the time. Case in point a 7 year old i5 2500K is much slower than an i5 8600K, but it can still play almost every game available at least at reasonable framerates. There are beginning to be titles you'd want a better CPU for now, but that's a recent occurance and gaming on 7 year old mid range hardware would have seemed impossible once upon a time.

I'm starting to build much better PCs but less often these days, My 6700K lasted me 3 years easily and was not struggling, the GTX 980 lasted 4 and also was not struggling (at 1080P). I just built myself a Ryzen 2700X for my 50th birthday and I'm loving it but the games don't honestly play any better on it. I enjoy the building of the PC almost as much as gaming on it though. I sold my old 6700K/ GTX 980 rig to a firiends son and He's over the moon with it playing all the latest games, pretty good for a PC with a 4 year old graphics card and a 3 year old CPU.

I agree with a lot of what you said. For me, the most pertinent part is the time it takes developers to learn how to optimize games for new hardware.

Something striking when you play vintage games is the noticeable difference between games at the beginning and those at the end of a consoles life. It clearly takes developers a good few years to get the best out of new hardware. Virtual fighter 1 and 2 on the Sega Saturn is a great illustration of this point.