Dear Devs: Please Make Games with Lower End Machines in Mind

[neogunhero]

This will be an open rant about the state of modern gaming graphics, coming from a low-end machine scrub.

Lately, there has been a trend in modern games where they put a lot of focus into the visuals but not much thought into performance. This comes in many different ways, such as ditching baked-in shadows in favor of ray-traced shadows, minimally compressed textures eating up your VRAM, over-reliance on AI upscaling techniques like DLSS, "fake frame" methods like Frame Gen, and a general lack of optimization passes.

On one hand, we have to keep pushing boundaries and innovating on old techniques. This is especially important in the tech industry. We can't rely on the same CPU designs for more than a year, there needs to be something newer and better almost every year. This also translates into gaming where we have been chasing realistic life-like visuals since gaming first began. Each year there is a new game that takes the crown for the most visually impressive game ever. This is fantastic and all, but then there is the other hand: it alienates people without the hardware means to run these games properly.

Budget/low end gaming used to be a viable option for PC gamers. Hardware manufacturers even used to make budget card for this specific reason. The GTX 1660 SUPER was released in 2019 for an MSRP of $229 and was meant for budget gamers in mind. This was around the time crypto mining was taking off, so I'm unsure how close to MSRP it stayed, but I know that it wasn't hundreds of dollars more like GPUs are today. As I stated in another thread, the 4 year old RTX 3060 still comes to around $400 on Amazon today, and it launched with an MSRP of $329. I know MSRP doesn't mean too much especially after board partners make their tweaks and distribution costs etc., there are so many factors to contribute to a card not being MSRP, but it is still ridiculous to pay that kind of money on hardware that has been surpassed many times over by now.

The main thing I'm trying to get at is if we don't introduce more options for lower-end gamers to enjoy modern games, then PC gaming as we know it could have a larger issue. Of course these gamers could always play indie games, older games, games that don't look very good, but of course that is not how the general gaming audience is. We want to play the latest and greatest games, and we want them to look good and work well.

When GTA 6 finally comes to PC, what will those specs look like? Someone with an older graphics card will definitely need to upgrade, but when they start shopping around for a new graphics card, they will only find GPU's the price of buying a new PC. If this person doesn't have the means to buy a whole new PC, then maybe looking at a console would be a better alternative, ditching their PC for a box that is a fraction of the price that plays all the same games without issue.

Devs need to keep these gamers in mind. They can have different options in their games to let gamers tweak settings to be able to run on their PCs. Don't for RT shadows and ambient occlusion, make it an option that you can enable or disable. Offer more options to get the game running better without looking like total crap. I know these kinds of things are easier said than done, but I think it would prove beneficial to games companies.

In the past, good graphics pushed hardware sales, but I just don’t think that is the case anymore with how expensive things are.

 

[Colif]

The reason why features are the focus over raw power now is power draw. The 5090 uses almost all of a 600watt cable can provide now, and expecting more raw power out of it would require more power into it. Fire problems exist now so they would need to make sure that fixed before adding 2 cables to a GPU. Even it is pushing features, its just the best at maintaining 4 fake frames at once.

So while I might hate the idea, features are the only way to make it look better going forward. IF you want it look better each generation. I don't value graphics as highly as gameplay as its been ignored for years now. Glossed over by ever prettier graphics.

Games are built to use the features of their engines and most use UE5 now, and its got its detractors. We don't need the entire industry using the same engine. It might be part of the restrictive requirements in some games.

Of course these gamers could always play indie games, older games, games that don't look very good, but of course that is not how the general gaming audience is. We want to play the latest and greatest games, and we want them to look good and work well.

Consoles exist for them.

You want games that scale to lower as well as high. That increases development time, so unless game has a long burn time, they need to pick a minimum and recommended specs to show the suggested builds. that or you get Star Citizen that is suffering from mission creep and ever changing graphical possibilities. Just release it already.

They could in theory have a high res texture pack for those who want better, Diablo 4 had that.

 

[Pifanjr]

Presumably enough people can afford high end PCs, otherwise games that require high end PCs wouldn't sell.

 

[Zloth]

In the past, good graphics pushed hardware sales, but I just don’t think that is the case anymore with how expensive things are.

Prices for graphics cards have gone WAY up. On the other hand, the advancements are much smaller, too. There's no point in buying a whole new PC every two or three years like before. If somebody handed me a free 4080, I don't know if I would bother to swap out my 3080. I don't think it would make any noticeable difference in any game I'm playing. It might have given a bit of a frame boost to Horizon: Forbidden West that could have helped, and certainly would have helped with Cyberpunk, but that's it for the past couple of years.

GTA6 is still a long ways away for PC. It wouldn't surprise me at all if lower end graphics cards were able to support it just fine - or maybe old higher end graphics cards, if it needs a lot of video memory.

 

[Colif]

Buying a new card every generation doesn't make sense anyway, especially since the gains are getting smaller per generation.
The advantages to not updating every generation are getting smaller though, as if there isn't a lot of change between them, you have to wait longer to get any uplift.

Soon there won't be any point at all.

Most of the people who used to come here and want to post about GTA5 wouldn't be able to play GTA6 if they made its requirements too high. I expect if anyone has a wide range of requirements, its likely Rockstar. They have had years to make it.