Are we overpaying to run games maxed out?

ColEx said:
In this current gen, a lot of games with medium to ultra settings have very small visual impacts the higher setting you go, and i don't think it justifies the cost of a super high end graphics card right now. I think games still look great at medium-high settings @ 1080p.

I am still using a 5770 and its a 3 year old card running games at medium to high settings at 1080p. My next upgrade is to be my graphics card, and i think i can get away with not upgrading until this generation is over.
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I agree many games still look very good on medium and high.
 
chaparral said:
Crazy thread...

As you could build a gaming system for around £500 if you wanted that would run just about every game maxed out...

I.E
Two secondhand GTX 480's/580's in SLI
Secondhand I5 2500k CPU
ETC


(Ps two GTX 570's just got sold in the MM for £150 for both..That just shows how cheap you can get highend GPU's if you want to build a rig on the cheap ;))
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What's the MM and do we all get access to it?
 
PooBrain said:
Right so chaparral was just chatting non-sense then as we can't all get to those juicy deals straight away..:mad:
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Am going let you into a little secret.......But you got promise not to tell anyone..

There more then one place in the world where people sell secondhand PC Components ...
 
Final8y said:
I agree many games still look very good on medium and high.
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This pretty much, but at the same time the majority of games that fall on their knees at max/ultra settings are due to bad optimization. A few more samples of AA or the softening of the Occlusion... and pow, your FPS drops in half. The only settings that should ever greatly effect FPS are draw distance & possibly PhysX, anything else isn't down to the hardware not having the strength, it's down to sloppy coding.
 
Omaeka said:
. The only settings that should ever greatly effect FPS are draw distance & possibly PhysX, anything else isn't down to the hardware not having the strength, it's down to sloppy coding.
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There loads of settings that will greatly effect the amount of FPS which have nothing to do with sloppy coding...
 
chaparral said:
Am going let you into a little secret.......But you got promise not to tell anyone..

There more then one place in the world where people sell secondhand PC Components ...
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Not for the guesstimate you proposed earlier. The average person even remotely interested wouldn't find it.
 
Surely there is no over priced way of playing things at max settings? As long as a cheap PC can play the game how the developers intend it to play IE 30fps on medium-High settings at 720p then everything else is a bonus. If you think most low-end gaming rigs can run most games fairly well at 1080 on high-ultra with 30-60fps then I find that rather impressive!

It gets expensive when it becomes a hobby or something you want to put your money into. Same a with a car, you buy a much more expensive car for more horsepower so it can go faster etc.

The scaling on PC sucks though :p You end up paying double the price for SLI GPUs but might come away with +60% performance tops on games? Then many others have no compatibility etc.
 
chaparral said:
There loads of settings that will greatly effect the amount of FPS which have nothing to do with sloppy coding...
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Good example being shadows, in the vast majority of games I've seen that have a range of shadow settings, it affects performance considerably. It can't be that all those AAA studios are sloppy every time.
 
It depends more on the graphic card itself rather than one setting in particular. Usually the culprits are MSAA, SSAA and different implementations of Ambient Occlusion.

At "premium resolutions" you are going to pay a "premium price". You need a fast, powerful car? Then make sure there is enough money for fuel and other expenses. :)
 
The majority of games tend to run even on i3's with mid range cards and bog standard branded 1600mhz RAM.

SSD's, SLI etc etc is normally overkill and at that, some games like Crysis 3 that have ultra settings, the money spent to the prettyness gained is really not worth it. Even at that it is mainly things like AA and shadow density, as wel as post processing that really hamper the FPS, turn those down a little and you honestly don't lose much.

Infact at 1080p, some games don't even need AA due to the fact well, theres enough pixels to smooth it out enough lol.

I have not struggled to play anything on my i3 3220 w/ a 7850 and 8gb Kingston HyperX 1600mhz.

Any game that is worth it's salt is all about the gameplay and story rather than pretty graphics, in this case even a 7850 is overkill.
 
Calin Banc said:
Not the gameplay excuse again. :D
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lol well what I was getting at, if I ever came across a game that I couldn't run in high but it was actually a good game (rare) then I would crank down the graphics to play it :p.

I like pretty graphics but most games don't get the balance of graphics, gameplay and story, its either too much of one thing and not enough of the other.

Anyway all I am saying is, any game you through at a decent £500-600 rig, is going to run it in high or ultra with AA/Shadows toned down, anything with decent gameplay is going to run anyway :p.
 
It's not about some name in the settings, but how good it looks at certain FPS. Even Crysis ran smooth on most PCs. All games, no matter how demanding they are, will run fairly well on not so powerful rigs at lower settings. The problem appears when you want max ingame IQ at 60FPS. :)
 
I run with whatever settings give me my desired frame rate ie Skyrim anywhere around 30-40 and BF3 as high as possible, not 60fps, preferably a 100+ if I could (I can't average that as it makes my system cry).

There will always be a premium for the fastest GPU/CPU etc but that been said I think a well thought out PC spec gives good bang for buck these days.
 
I want to be able to "max" games and enjoy a luxurious framerate to go with it. My rig set me back in the region of 2k and I dont regret spending a penny. A friend of mine recently sat down to play tomb raider on my setup. He has a mid spec system and was always happy to compromise on graphics to keep the cost of his builds down. 20 mins of tomb raider and he has ordered a titan.

Point is, some of us want max details and some dont care. For me..every game under my command owes me 100 frames.

And I want my frames.
 
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