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What game encouraged you to make your new PC, or upgrade?
Since the minimum and recommended specs for Starfield have come out, I've been budgeting to do a big upgrade on my PC with an AMD 6800 xt and a fancy new 1 TB SSD (which is the first game I've ever seen that requires an SSD) just so I can run the game in all it's space epicness.
What was the game that you were so excited for that you made the jump to upgrade your PC to the next gen of hardware? New or old!
When I was a child my parents sued some dude for hurting me (long story), and so I had some money locked away in a bank, held by the courts until I was 18.
When I was 14, Skyrim was on the horizon, and I really wanted my own proper PC so that I could play it. I went through a fairly lengthy process to apply for some of the money to buy an Alienware Area-51 ALX (in hindsight, I spent the money unwisely). I waited weeks for it to arrive, spent almost a day figuring out how to set it up, and when I finally got it up and running and got Windows and Steam installed...
... I opened my browser and loaded up RuneScape.
I too rock an RTX 2080, Ryzen 3900X, and 64 GB RAM to play the likes of oldschool RuneScape and Terraria
I don’t play many new games but Starfield is probably going to be it for me as well. I was really hoping for the 5600X3D from AMD but it looks like it’s going to be only a limited run and exclusive to Micro Center in the US, so I will have to come up with a different plan.
I was even thinking about getting an Xbox but if other Bethesda games are anything to go by then mods are not something I will want to just pass up…
I mean Bethesda has implemented mod support for Fallout 4 and Skyrim on Xbox (other than the Creation Club stuff) so I wouldn't be surprised if Starfield released with a similar feature. However, obviously you can't get the same stuff on Xbox as you could from like, Nexus.
This has me hyped:
Oh damn, I completely missed that, that changes a lot.... hm. And yeah, figures but I am not really after stuff that would appear only on Nexus and not Bethesda's own mod repository :)
Starfield is going to push a lot of us into an upgrade I think. I would bet that there's a lot of people like me who have an (until now) perfectly serviceable 4GB card, and haven't really considered upgrading it due to GPU price craziness over the last few years.
Well if your not planning on leaving am4 platform the 5800X3D is very much worth spending the difference between the 5600X3D.
I upgraded almost specifically for Cyberpunk 2077 lol. Managed to grab a very specific 3080 when they were rare too, because I bought a NCase M1 and only 2 of them fit in my case. I won't need an upgrade for another couple of years so it's nice, but I hardly played Cyberpunk with all the issues and haven't had time to go back either sigh.
I bought it when I had a 970GTX, it was slow and buggy as hell, almost two years later I built a new pc and reinstalled it. It's a great game now. You may want to give it another shot, I experienced no game breaking bugs. Or wait for Phantom Liberty.
The new Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty DLC is supposed to completely change the game to be closer to the promises that they made upon release. We'll see if it comes through, but hopefully you can put that 3080 to work for it's original purpose!
Anywhere I can read up details on the stuff being reworked?
Wow this all sounds great. Maybe I’ll hold off on finishing my current play through and start fresh with the new update. Thanks for the breakdown!
Yeah I'll probably give it another shot eventually! I have a lot of random games that I need to work through but it'll get there! It's exciting though, I remember really loving the original vision so I'm ready for it to break my heart again haha
I came here to say this game too. Probably the case for many people 😂 Funny enough, now they’ve turned the game into an Nvidia tech demo and even with a 3080 I still can’t get decent frames at the max fidelity it can offer. I’m not buying a 4090 this time though, I’m onto you CDPR !
I personally got my computer specifically to play Nier Automata. Its not super fancy, I think it cost me like $800 3 or so years ago, I've just got a 1660 Super, so not going to be doing raytracing on Cyberpunk but more than enough to run most games on high graphics.
Unfortunately I spent like a year after I got this computer playing actual games that I need it for, like Mass Effect and Cyberpunk, and since then I've mostly been playing either strategy games, league, or mid 2000's visual novels that could probably run on a toaster. So I'm not really getting my money's worth out of it. But then again Nier Automata was fantastic so maybe it was worth it just to play that, and of course its going to last for a while so maybe I'll get back into AAA quality games at some point.
Control on PS. I'm an older gamer who has been rediscovering gaming after a 20 year hiatus. I started off with a used ps4. I frickin' looved Control but the ray tracing effects and quality of graphics weren't too good on my console. It got better over time but I was becoming spoiled by the good graphics of other games so I looked into upgrading. Eventually got a ps5. Control looks gorgeous on it and now I'm anxiously awaiting Alan Wake.
Elden Ring. It was playable on the PC I had built back in 2012 (and had upgraded the graphics card a few times along the way), but load times were abysmal.
It's release coincided with a job change that came with a pay raise and a signing bonus. I decided to treat myself!
Upgraded my system for VR and AI. I really need VR since cardio is such a bore otherwise.
Same, upgraded because I got a Quest 2. That being said, No Man's Sky VR was what made me want the Quest 2, so I guess that's my real answer.
I also upgraded for VR some years ago. But then sold the Vive because I didn't really enjoy the games, got nausea all the time, and my eyes started hurting. So now I have a nice PC that can still do well for other games.
Do you wear a VR headset while running on a treadmill or similar? If so, how easy do you find it to keep the headset clean?
Sweat isn't that much of a problem, I usually get exhausted before the headset get truly soaked. Still, the face place can be taken off and washed. (should probably do that)
Here's some game I liked:
Beat Saber (slash cubes to the beat of a song. The game felt a bit barebone at first, but once you start improving it grows on you)
Blaston (two-player duels with costumizeable weapon loadout. One of the few games that give a full body workout instead of just swinging your arm)
Until You Fall (Roguelike)
Eleven Table Tennis (simple table tennis sim)
The Thrill of the Fight (boxing sim. Gets me exhausted in no time. Having so music playing help, since it
X-Fitness (kinda same concept as Beat Saber, but aimed at cardio)
Total War is kinda my benchmark on when to upgrade. Hopefully Pharaoh doesn't push my current setup too much because this current round of GPUs is one I'd rather skip.
Total War is fairly dependent on the CPU so you're probably fine. Yeah, ultra group sizing does tax your GPU more but probably won't be too demanding over WH3.
Yeah, I'm a total war junkie as well. But mainly have stuck to Rome 2 and Attila.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
I was running a relatively old i3 at the time and it was doing the job, but I felt like the game ought to be performing better than it was. Checked out my FPS and my GPU/CPU clocks and noticed that I was having issues with the CPU and it was bottlenecking the GPU; so I found a decent deal at Microcenter for a new Mobo and Ryzen 2500x, which completely solved the issue. This was back in December 2019, I think.
Also picked up some more RAM to bring me up to 32Gb from 16Gb, as Spider-Man was having some issues loading in the city that I wasn't seeing on my other system with 24Gb.
That was a good game. I'm not much of a side worst person so I finished the game in about 50-60 hours. I never quite got combat down tho.
Skyrim.
My PC was showing it's age at the time so I used it as a guide on what to get next.
It proved to be really bad timing, in retrospect, since back then Thailand was flooded and hard drive prices and RAM prices were insane.
I tried to wait for TES6 to come out to get a new one but after 8 years I just gave up and got a new one, during the Crypto mining hype when GPU prices went ballistic.
I always seem to buy/upgrade based on console releases rather than games. Instead of upgrading with the PS5/Series X release, I went and got a Steam Deck. I'm sweating a bit to see how Starfield plays.
I do something similar. I usually upgrade my PC when new consoles come out. That way I'm not competing with them. Then a year or so into the new console generation I might pick one up to see exclusives I want to enjoy. After enjoying consoles for a year or two I go and find some great games for PC to invest in. But I'm a PC gamer at heart so I'm always playing something on my PC.
Curious to know what the most intensive game you've played on your Deck is? For one reason or another I always see it benchmarked with indie games or Skyrim so I'm curious how it'd run with something AAA modern.
I've played Elden Ring, Cyberpunk, and Hogwarts Legacy on the deck. Running textures on high, lighting on low, and everything else medium. Doesn't look bad at all!
Only noticible quality drop is when I dock the deck. Output is 720p. I'll see if I can find a picture I sent to a friend that asked me.
Last year, I upgraded to an RTX2060 (I never buy current gen, way too expensive) from a GTX750Ti for RDR2.
After that, I noticed that my old 3570K became the bottleneck even when overclocked to 4GHz, so I upgraded to a used 5600X in April this year. That upgrade was just a general quality of life investment (even my non-gaming laptop had a stronger CPU at that point) and not for a specific game, even though it still obviously improved gaming performance noticibly. Also, I can transcode video files much quicker now which is nice.
Always a big fan of this methodology. I love pushing "old" hardware and upgrading with used parts when I can.
Buying used tech can save tons of money. You can get as low as $200 for very decent laptops that are 2-3 years old.
I just don't do that for mobile devices since their batteries tend to be done for. Unless of course replacement batteries are available from the original manufacturer and replacable with reasonable effort, but especially the former is practically never the case and I don't trust the safety of aftermarket lithium batteries.
I generally don't mind used devices with batteries and in fact, I pretty much exclusively buy used Thinkpads when I need a new laptop. Granted, they can generally have their batteries replaced (which I've done relatively recently on my T480s), but I've had good luck with my other devices. I relatively recently bought two Microsoft Surface Go's, as well as a Thinkpad X1 Tablet and all had 95-99% of their battery life left, but I was also hunting for lightly used devices, which takes a little more effort and generally a little more spend.
Makes me feel a little better too about generating less eWaste. Though, I grant that I did upgrade my desktop from brand new stuff a couple of years ago, but usually try and sell my old components to someone else.
For me it was Star Citizen. When the guy who made the Wing Commander series was going to make a follow-up with an unlimited budget, I figured 'what could go wrong? But I'll need a decently specced modern pc.' thanks to people online, I was able to put together a 3570k and r9 280x for dirt cheap even though they were close to top-spec. I ran so many games full blast so I was introduced to games I would never have tried like Soma and Subnautica while Star Citizen sat in development hell.
Recently the r9 died so I decided to replace with a 5600xt (I actually put in a 1660 super last year but I think it was an ex-crypto-mining card because it had weird problems from day 1). Rdr2 runs full blast close to 60fps and I can play Tears of the Kingdom so I'm quite happy. The processor is my main bottleneck but I'd need to change the MB, memory, and processor in one go and so far it's not the kind of bottleneck that prevents me from playing so it's hard to justify upgrading. Especially when the gains I would get wouldn't be outstanding without spending a ton. Budget video cards are finally coming back (so long as you don't need ray-tracing) but cpus are still lagging behind badly.
My 4770k was starting to slow down so I got an x570 and a 3800x...then last year I made a shitload of money so upgraded to the 5800x3D a red devil rx6900xt ultimate and a seasonic 1000w
I have the ballinest shit for the am4 platform and won't need to upgrade for a few more years
I have pretty much the same system and I play 7+ year old games lol
No specific game, more just ray tracing being a thing that would require a new card mixed with M2 drives coming out. I was finally making good money and spent a bit more on a build than I ever had, and got the exact case/setup I wanted. This was around cyberpunk 2077 so it was of course my first test bed for it, but I was willing to wait if my old machine wasn't so big (different priorities then but now it was taking up too much space).
Elden Ring. It was the first game ever that I was interested in but my current GPU was finally in the minimum recommended specs, and it also reminded me how old my CPU was. I could still run it, but I figured a game coming any day now would finally make that leap beyond my specs. Now that new games are making the leap to SSDs required, guess I was right.
Personally, no games in particular. The only games I still play on PC are league, CSGO and genshin, so my old dell precision was still pretty good for what I needed. What made me upgrade was that xeon processor and it's ungodly wattage and heat output. It made my room unbearable to be in while it was on during the summer.
Same with me, I had an old MSI laptop I bought for uni. But recently its fan became loose and started to spin with high pitch noise. I started to hate lugging it around because of how bulky and (relatively) heavy it is. I secured myself a job after uni, saved up for over a year and treated myself to a prebuilt pc. It was a decent mid spec pc but miles better than my old laptop. It is my genuine belief that this pc will be my forever pc with upgrades along the way.
The two machines that my wife and I have were very different in build and mine was starting to get long in the tooth hardware wise. I was debating on when I should do it until I got an offer for two high end graphics cards for half off because they were clearing inventory for the 4000 series cards. I jumped kn that chance and built two completely new rigs for the two of us
I have been prepping a heavy CPU/Memory upgrade for Satisfactory, but I am also building at a stupid scale (currently using about a quarter of the entire game world's resources on the way to half)
NASCAR Heat (new CPU) and Thunder (new HD Display 720P), the video card ATI Saphire had 512K or 256K (I can't remember) of on board ram! Owwww!
My last upgrade was for Microsoft flight simulator and I have had zero regrets about it. I went to a 2k curved screen from an ancient and small 1080p monitor. Using it for the first week made me dizzy until I got used to the size. Jumped to a GTX 2070 super and ryzen 3500K or 5500K, I can't remember which.
I did this just before all the prices went crazy with crypto mining, so I feel lucky I got in before all that. Nothing that has come out recently has looked good enough to convince me to consider upgrading anytime soon, it runs everything well enough at 2k with 60+fps as long as ray tracing is off.
I figure I'll be able to get another half decade out of it before I need to seriously consider a major upgrade, and hopefully things won't be quite so crazy then price wise but even if it is, I'll be able to go to trailing-edge tech and not pay an absolute ransom and still get a huge upgrade.
It was a long and tedious battle trying to find optimal settings to make games playable yet not looking like complete garbage both for me (RX480) and my wife (RX580). We’ve played (and suffered) many games like this until an opportunity to visit the US and buy a card at about half the local price presented itself.
We are now both proud owners of 6750XTs and enjoying games once more.
Not me personally but my dad: Battlefield 2.
My dad has never been much of a gamer but I downloaded the demo for BF1942 when it was around (for anyone who remembers, the demo was Wake Island and it was VERY popular), he saw me playing and loved it. We ended up getting 1942 and then later Vietnam, and had a ton of fun playing them together taking turns on the PC.
When BF2 came out he was majorly hyped - personally I wasn't so much for the modern combat aspect. But despite not being a huge upgrade the game didn't want to run well at all on our PC, it was a mess - iirc we had a Radeon 9200 (which at the time I, and probably my dad, didn't realize was like the lowest end card you could get from that line). Anyway he went out and bought a new GPU just to play BF2 and then played it endlessly.
I upgraded my 1080ti to a 3080ti to play the full ray traced quake 2 on steam. Ray tracing is really cool. I guess I don't need all the polygons after all.
I was ready to upgrade in the fall of 2020 because I had a budget and was struggling to play any newish game on my old system. I did a whole new build and was ready to buy a brand new 3080, but was unable to find one for retail price. I ended up with a 3060 and even though it was a big upgrade for me, I wish I was able to get a more powerful card.
I think I'll upgrade my graphics card again when Avowed comes out. I'm really excited for what I've seen of it so far.
Probably Witcher 3. I had GTX 750 woth 1GB of VRAM and while the GPU power was still enough for thegame, the 1GB was the limiting factor. I got GTX 1650 right at the start of GPU shortage, for standard price still!
And it can run Cyberpunk at... well, playable framerate for me.
Duke Nukem 3D.
Since then, it's only things like video encoding that has caused me to upgrade, or operating systems and running VMs, etc.
PC wise, I don't really game. If I do its Urban Terror, Pingus or Hedge Wars.
I got my desktop largely to play Classic World of Warcraft. It's a fairly weak machine for US standards but quite the luxury where I'm standing.
The last time I had to upgrade was for Fallout 4.
So I waited for sales and only spent about $500 for a total upgrade with a full size AM4 ATX motherboard with M.2 slots, a 1TB nvme ssd, Ryzen 5, 32GB DDR4. an RX570, and a new case with built in fans that doesn't overheat like my old one.
Doubled my FPS.
Haven't needed to since.
Fallout 4 was the previous time for me as well, kept getting crashes with my old GPU so I went all out and got a VR ready gtx 1080, crazy to think we're far enough out now that a gtx 1080 isn't nearly enough anymore. Like everytime a new Bethesda game comes out that's the new benchmark.
The one time a game got me to upgrade was Control. I really wanted to play it, but at the time I had an AMD Phenom-II x6 1100T processor, and it didn't support SSE4.2, as its feature set only went up to SSE4A. I could bypass that and make it run, but the performance was terrible with emulated SSE4.2, so I broke down and upgraded. I was a little pissed off about it at the time, as that old hex core was still running most new games at 1080p just fine at the time, and a few other games had released before Control with SSE4.2 requirements, and some of them got patches that added a code path that didn't need it without any real performance hit or feature loss, but the Control devs weren't interested in doing so. On top of that, the successor to the Phenom IIs were those garbage Bulldozer, Steamroller, and Excavator processors, which forced me to buy an Intel chip to get decent gaming performance, something that I hadn't done since the Pentium 3. That said, it was probably one of the games I most enjoyed in the last decade, so I can't be too bitter about it.
In 2020 I finally upgraded my Windows box in large part due to wanting to play RDR2 - my previous games computer was still struggling through everything else semi modern I had bought with various levels of reduced graphics settings but it simply refused to run RDR2 without locking up when I got that game (on special after hearing about it for ages). Ended up building one based around a Ryzen 1600 and a GTX1660 and now I had a capable computer I then proceeded to not really play much at all of RDR2...
I upgraded last year for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (not to be confused with 2009's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2). My old computer was struggling with Warzone, so I wanted a new one for Warzone 2. Cost me a pretty penny, but it feels gooood.
I already need to upgrade it though. Nothing huge, but there's been some recent-ish patches to Crusader Kings III that pushed the RAM requirements up above 16 GB (on Linux at least; it's possible it's less RAM hungry on Windows and MacOS). I can play the game for a few hours, then my computer runs out of RAM and everything freezes.
My last upgrade before that I think was for Civilization VI.
Does your distro use zram out of the box? If not, you might want to look into enabling it first and seeing if it solves the issue for you. I've had a lot of luck using it for old netbooks/chromebooks with limited memory to make them more useful. I mean, I mainly give them away to kids, so my priority has been to get modern educational websites and Minecraft to run reliably, but it might help you, too.
Good question. I use Zorin OS, which is based on Ubuntu, which from what some quick ducking tells me doesn't have zram activated by default. I'll look into it when I get home from work.
Thanks for the tip. :-)
Grand Theft Auto 5 - heavily modded graphics wise for realism.
+
Arma 3
Boneworks, VR game. I had a 580 I think and the frame rate was making me sick within 20min, now I can play for 2 hours before I feel any negative effects. So I limit set an alarm for an hour then go to VR chat if I still want to play VR.
The last game that made me want to upgrade my PC was Cyberpunk 2077. I originally had plans to upgrade to a 3080, but with the great GPU drought of 2020 I got a 3070 instead. Now with current prices and where I am in life I don't know when I'll next upgrade; perhaps when this one is unusable @ 1440P.
I upgraded GPU when Cyberpunk came out (1070->3070), funny enough I upgraded GPUs for Witcher 3 as well (570->970), damn CDPR driving me to upgrade... I got the 1070 because I mined for a little while and it made sense, kind of paid for itself but since I got a 1440p monitor, demands shot up a little so it didn't last as long as I planned. I also upgraded my CPU but it wasn't for any games, I just felt like it was time (4790k->5800X) especially since I tend to use VMs a lot but it was just one of many small reasons I wanted to upgrade.
For me, that was Kerbal Space Program 2. Now granted, the entire game was a complete and utter disaster, buuuuuuuuuuuuuut...let's not talk about that. I ended up upgrading to a PC with an RTX 4090 and 128 GB of DDR5-6400 RAM (limited now by ASUS's garbage BIOSes that can't even allow XMP usage).
Wow, that is quite an upgrade. I hope to an afford a -90 series card one day lol
This is what happens when all of my friends move away, so every bit of my budget goes into a PC. I also got kind of lucky walking into a MicroCenter where they had a few in stock.