New graphically demanding games?

[PepZeb]

I am looking to build a new gaming PC at the start of next year but I am really starting to ask myself if there is any point at the moment. I currently have a 2080ti and was looking at a 4090 / 4080 but I am questioning if there is any point as I cannot see any games coming out next year that look graphically demanding.

There is nothing pushing the boundaries of graphical fidelity or anything that looks markedly better than we have at present. The Calisto Protocol, Dead Space Remake, RE4 Remake all look good but none look performance intensive. The biggest blockbuster I can see next year is Star Field and that definitely doesn't look like its going for graphics.

Is it worth me waiting another year until more UE5 games start coming out before I look at a new PC?

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

From a pure performance level, a 2080Ti is still up there, almost the same as a 3070.

You didnt mention your resolution, but if it was me I would hang on at least until AMD releases the 7000 series. Even if you're set on Nvidia only, rumour is AMD will be strong this time around and that could affect pricing all around too.

 

[Colif]

Shame we will never get another Crysis which was so graphically demanding it took 5 years for PC to run it well... it was the result of a misunderstanding, they thought CPU be 10ghz by time it was released.

Games companies don't like to make games too out of reach for most players.
That and the better looking a game is, the longer it takes to make... so it might explain the general slow down in game releases... that and some of us need the game to be fun and to actually work on release, and it seems when you need really pretty graphics and want game released this decade, one of the 3 has to suffer. Games aren't just movies.

 

[Slasken]

What resolution is your monitor?


As for the most demanding game right now, it's probably Cyberpunk 2077

 

[Frag Maniac]

...I am questioning if there is any point as I cannot see any games coming out next year that look graphically demanding.

STALKER 2 looks like it could be, but it's always hard to be sure based on trailers, because the games often release not looking as good as them.

 

[Zloth]

Even if there is a graphically demanding game coming out, that doesn't mean you're going to really like the game. Why not build the PC with a good power supply, then buy a new card when you're ready to buy a game that can use it?

Shame we will never get another Crysis which was so graphically demanding it took 5 years for PC to run it well... it was the result of a misunderstanding, they thought CPU be 10ghz by time it was released.

There was a box-out in a recent USA PC Gamer showing a few things in Crysis that are STILL rough on modern computers!

 

[Slasken]

Often graphically demanding is the same as poorly optimized. It doesn't mean best graphics.

 

[DXCHASE]

What resolution is your monitor?


As for the most demanding game right now, it's probably Cyberpunk 2077

Red Dead Redemption 2, Metro Exodus, Call of Duty Cold War/Latest WW2 one and BF 5 are pretty graphically demanding too, especially at 4k max settings. A 2080ti would be put to the test to run these games too

 

[Slasken]

Red Dead Redemption 2, Metro Exodus, Call of Duty Cold War/Latest WW2 one and BF 5 are pretty graphically demanding too, especially at 4k max settings. A 2080ti would be put to the test to run these games too

True that, but not as demanding as CP2077. I am playing both RDR2 and CP2077 on a 3080 12GB, and I find CP2077 to be the most demanding of the two, by far. RDR2 looks better imo, but could be because I like the scenery there more.

 

[Colif]

Even if there is a graphically demanding game coming out, that doesn't mean you're going to really like the game

this goes back to the point: Games aren't movies, you don't just watch them. You have to actually enjoy the game as well. Graphics only impress once, bad games live forever.

Why not build the PC with a good power supply,

Should be starting point to begin with. Hard to see future, can buy a high quality 750watt PSU and very next year Nvidia GPU need more power... oh wait, thats what I did.
Don't cheap out on PSU, it might seem a last moment decision but everything in PC relies on it to work.
I am backwards, the 2 things I concentrate most on are after thoughts for others, the case and the PSU.

 

[Frag Maniac]

Often graphically demanding is the same as poorly optimized. It doesn't mean best graphics.

Anymore, that is very true. To me, games like Control and Hitman 3 just don't have good looking enough graphics to justify the performance hit.

 

[DXCHASE]

True that, but not as demanding as CP2077. I am playing both RDR2 and CP2077 on a 3080 12GB, and I find CP2077 to be the most demanding of the two, by far. RDR2 looks better imo, but could be because I like the scenery there more.

Oh yea it depends on if you like cyberpunk settings or wilderness/old timey. I prefer cyberpunk but i too think RDR 2 is amazing looking, and a waaaay better story. I think what makes CP so demanding is its unoptimization and i was trying to just go on pure graphical fidelity. The ones i mentioned are pretty optimized, BF5 maybe not as much as RDR2 (after all the patches mind you) or Metro but

 

[Zloth]

With all the things graphics cards can do these days, it has gotten pretty hard to tell what's demanding at what isn't. You might look at a beautiful view and think that it must need a really powerful graphics card, but someone who's knowledgeable about how to really make computer graphics may see it very differently. Those trees are far enough away that they don't need to have detailed leaves, there's no reflective surfaces anywhere, the sun is high so shadows don't have to be drawn on very many blades of grass, everyone has short hair.... "great looking" and "difficult" simply don't link up very well anymore.

 

[Colif]

The next EOS needs to have individually modelled blades of grass so that people whose entire purpose on Youtube seems to be making EOS videos can make a series trying to find the 2 blades of grass the developers put in that are identical... that should give them a hobby.

its perspective. People will have screens that refresh at .00000001ms and have photo realistic graphics and still complain about seeing frames.

I want to get past this graphics are everything stage and back to making games fun again. Maybe they had to try harder when people couldn't see what the devs mean and had to be given enough information to use their own imagination to spell out whats around them. Was Zork better?

Graphics is a crutch. It holds up bad games. Its a distraction from real problems.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

There was a box-out in a recent USA PC Gamer showing a few things in Crysis that are STILL rough on modern computers!

@Slasken pointed out what I was thinking. Is it still rough on modern computers because it was so advanced? Or is it because they did a really crappy job of optimizing their code? At this point in the tech timeline, I'm starting to think it's somewhat the latter.

I want to get past this graphics are everything stage and back to making games fun again. Maybe they had to try harder when people couldn't see what the devs mean and had to be given enough information to use their own imagination to spell out whats around them. Was Zork better?

I expect both, good graphics and a fun game. Why should we expect anything less?

I'll clarify two things, though. 1) I'm willing to scale my expectations to the size of the dev team. I don't have the same expectations out of a small indie that I do a AAA studio. And 2) I'm open to different art styles. Good graphics to me doesn't necessarily mean the most realistic. I like fantastical graphics, too.

All I'm asking for is that they actually put effort into graphics and gameplay.

 

[Slasken]

I'll clarify two things, though. 1) I'm willing to scale my expectations to the size of the dev team. I don't have the same expectations out of a small indie that I do a AAA studio. And 2) I'm open to different art styles. Good graphics to me doesn't necessarily mean the most realistic. I like fantastical graphics, too.

All I'm asking for is that they actually put effort into graphics and gameplay.

Totally agree on everything. I can relate a lot when it comes to the bolded part. I love the graphics in Terraria.

 

[Zloth]

Is it still rough on modern computers because it was so advanced? Or is it because they did a really crappy job of optimizing their code? At this point in the tech timeline, I'm starting to think it's somewhat the latter.

Well, they were aiming for the future, so they had to make guesses on what tech advancements would show up. So, you could go either way. Either they optimized nicely for a future that hasn't shown up yet, or they optimized badly for modern computers. Here's a paraphrase of the list:

• High sample motion blurring
• Bumps on the floor casting more than one shadow (they didn't have tessellation back then, and the box-out indicates this was used to give a sense of depth)
• MANY destructible objects, large and small
• Not optimized for multiple cores. They were banking on CPUs going faster, but speed hit a wall, so CPUs just put in more cores.

It's in the Tech section of the USA's September edition.

 

[Colif]

The cores thing was an answer to the "oh crap we can't go faster than 5ghz" thing that is still the case now though they almost at 6 in some boost modes on some CPU now.

So crysis wasn't made for multi core systems as they didn't exist at that time. Outside of maybe servers...

All I'm asking for is that they actually put effort into graphics and gameplay.

i can get behind that message. Just need a balance and in many cases, its not even.

 

[Frag Maniac]

I remember when everyone was saying original Crysis was a PC breaker and unoptimized. I kept telling them with the many CVARs Crytek made available, it could be tweaked quite a bit for performance. Many of the graphics features affected performance, but also made the image quality less sharp. I studied TweakGuides.com's guide on it, and employed some tweaks, and came up with one of my own, that allowed me to run it at 1200x900 (I had a Viewsonic 22" G Series CRT 4x3 monitor back then), at pretty decent settings, on just a Pentium 4. I'm pretty sure the GPU was the X800 XT I bought back when it debuted in 2004. If you had a normal gamer amount of RAM, you could use the CVAR for Texture Streaming and turn it off, which made distant mountains look WAY sharper with no performance hit.

One of the annoying things about the game was they forced some features like a milky fog-like affect if you used High Shaders Quality settings. So I settled for Med Shaders. The one that took the most time was how to set Object Quality to Low, but have High View Distance for it (LOD). What this does is place the minimum amount of objects like beach rocks, vegetation, etc, in the foreground, without making them draw into view at very close range. That took well over an hour of trial and error to see what view distance CVAR to use.

Now I'm not going to tell you I could play the game any way I wanted to with that spec. If I got into heavy fire fights, the FPS would drop to 25 or less, but I tended to play it mostly with stealth anyway, so it wasn't a problem to keep FPS at playable levels.

TweakGuides.com - Crysis Tweak Guide - PCGamingWiki mirror

A central resource for PC optimization information.

tweakguides.pcgamingwiki.com

Here's a demonstration of how bogged down that system would get when too many effects
were on screen at once. This is a little bit of fun I had with the demo I called Raining Cars.
Note that @ 900p, the game looked far better than this, YouTube just sucks for low res.
It's also that I had to capture at low res due to software capture performance at the time.

 

[Brian Boru]

Raining Cars

Now if you can feed that into Car Mechanic Simulator, you and @ZedClampet are set for co-op for the rest of the year.

With a couple of side visits to Theme Hospital, so it looked…

 

[ZedClampet]

Now if you can feed that into Car Mechanic Simulator, you and @ZedClampet are set for co-op for the rest of the year.

With a couple of side visits to Theme Hospital, so it looked…

All the body work and welding would be a pain. I prefer customers who just claim there's a strange noise coming from the engine

 

[Frag Maniac]

Now if you can feed that into Car Mechanic Simulator, you and @ZedClampet are set for co-op for the rest of the year.

With a couple of side visits to Theme Hospital, so it looked…

Yeah I included the deaths from cars hitting me just for fun, especially the one that eventually dropped on top of me. It must have shot pretty high. LOL

The game has weird physics too. It took quite a while to load all the barrels in the trucks because even when sitting still they would often start moving and sparking on their own, then blow. That's why they all went off that one time when I had only hit the rock I was using as a ramp.

I'm not sure body work would apply to most of the wrecks though. I inspected them closely and they were not only total losses just from the explosion, they were burnt to a crisp as well. It would be more expense than it's worth.

 

[PepZeb]

I only game at 4K nowadays and have done for the last 5-6 years. I had 1080 SLI before which handled 4K well and the 2080ti handles almost everything I throw at it in 4K. RDR2 runs at almost maximum graphics without a hitch. Its games like Metro, CP2077, RE Village that I am having to start turning some of the settings down a bit and especially with ray tracing.

I want to be gaming at maximum graphics with smooth fps (60 being the absolute lowest the fps drops).
The last game I played this year was Elden Ring and I am really looking forward to the following -

Company of Heroes 3
Homeworld 3
The Calisto Protocol
Dead Space Remake
Resident Evil 4 Remake
Star Field
SQ42 / Star Citizen (in the far future!)

 

[farhanrizq]

pubg mobile and genshin impact maybe