What games can or cant your pc run.

[mjs warlord]

Yes i know its a strange question so i need to explain why i chose that as the thread title.
I have been a gamer since 1982 and got into pc games in 2002 , in 2016 i got my first cost built pc , as i was choosing the componants pc gamer dropped through the door and i saw a report that the gtx 1080 had just been released so i removed the titan from my build. The rig cost £3k ..... Not bragging just saying.

NEW GAMES
Before i buy a game i always look at what problems some players have reported in discussions tabs in say the steam client and other places.
Their does not seem to be any set pattern as to why some new games wont run on certain pc's , example , i see reports of players saying cpu 100% and they are only on the menu page and not actually playing the game. maybe its down to bad programming. I have seen players report tons of problems with a new game that has worked ok for me. Some have better machines than me and some have lower spec machines that me. Example ... BLACKSAD on steam threads is full of crash reports that i never experienced , that said , i tried to use SEA OF THIEVES and for some unknown reason i just could not use it. Regardless of the price of a pc their does not seem to be any hard fast rules as to why something may not work.

OLDER GAMES
A lot of players have problems because their pc is just too good for an old game and dont understand how compatability mode works , in one of the myst games if you jump onto a cliff you just fall through it but if you use compatability mode you land on solid ground.

One guy said his son got a refund on a game just because it would not run with all settings at max !!!

One of the commonest problem areas is that some players dont understand how AI works , simply "knowing" what to do is not enough , the games AI needs to recognise that you have done a certain something , example , in games that give you quests and missions you can walk round the whole of the games playing area and nothing will happen. The game will not give you any missions unless its AI recognises that a character has told you to travel to a certain place , only then will the person your looking for give you a mission.

 

[Colif]

My PC can run every new game that exists now, but it can't run many games from 15 years or so ago, as they were made for hardware that existed then, and not for what I have, and often that is the barrier. If the game was loved it might have a modern conversion but many don't.

 

[Brian Boru]

their does not seem to be any hard fast rules as to why something may not work

A great strength of a Windows PC is the huge choice we all get re hardware and software. This results in at least trillions of unique system configurations, and of course only a few hundred can be tested for any new release of hardware or software.

With ~1.3Bn Windows installations, even if 999 out of every 1,000 run just fine with something new, that still leaves 1.3 million people with a problem. 1.3m can make a lot of noise, and of course people mainly publish their dissatisfaction, not their satisfaction.

In short, it can look like something new is a piece of crap, when in fact it's performing great for the customer base.

 

[Zloth]

It's definitely difficult to gage if a game is "too broken" by reading Steam forums. Sometimes you can tell because the forum practically melts down, but often times you can't tell the difference between a broken game and a game where the players just flat out don't know what they are doing.

One guy said his son got a refund on a game just because it would not run with all settings at max !!!

The Crysis rule (in my own vernacular): developers must limit their maximum settings so that a new PC with top of the line hardware can run all settings at maximum with a very good frame rate. If the developer wants to give the player the choice of cranking up one graphic setting at the price of lowering another (or living with lower framerates), they can do that - but only in a way so that the high end gamers can max both out and still do well. Why? Because many of the people who've just coughed up 3 grand for a computer desperately want that purchase validated. If you don't let them have that validation, you're going to catch hell.

Crysis found that out the hard way. They put graphics settings in that no hardware could handle at the time. The game still looked great with the far more accessible settings, but many players' ego simply couldn't handle putting so many settings at "medium".

 

[Colif]

Crysis was built at a time they thought CPU core speeds would be 10ghz by time it was released. Reality was what made its specs too hard to match.

I personally don't mind games that need higher specs than what I have as it means next system might play them better.

 

[ZedClampet]

I can play everything I've tried, including the old to very old games (DOSbox).

 

[MrShadow]

i only have a ridiculous 256GB SSD internal drive which is mostly used up by FORZA horizon 4,creative cloud and lightroom, plus lots of DSLR photographs.
so i have a sophisticated bit of gaming kit-an external WD P50 SSD game drive which has lots of vents and transfers data at blisteringly fast speed so games can be played off it with no slowdown or crashing which you usualy see if attempted on regular external hard drives.
i also sometimes run an arachni web server off it (which many people think is for hacking, its actualy for the website user to see if their own websites are exploitable and how to fix them if so).

in terms of games only,i havent tried to run anything more shiny and mind bogglingly pretty than FORZA H4 or assetto corsa competizione yet, they work fine, though ACC did a weird graphical glitch and it took a while of messing with settings to get rid of the glitch.

my RTX 2060s anti aliasing is quite crap so things dont always look smoothed out, i woudnt go to the level of saying it makes games unplayable though.
the only games i have problem with are ones run on the xbox game pass format-it rarely detects my external game drive,and when it does detect it, the games dont boot.i ended up getting money back and canceling the paid account.

on steam,the only game that ive tried and it wont run ANYMORE are both doom64 and quake II RTX, they used to run fine but now they crap out since a nvidia driver update and rolling back hasnt made a difference.
i have GTA san andreas running fine-it set up no problem, which i was shocked at, i woud love to buy both PS2 classics; manhunt and bully/canis canem edit on steam but aparently they need a lot of faffing to get running on windows 10 ,and some people have more issues than others.

 

[mjs warlord]

Thanks for the feedback

first to Zloth ..... i remember the crysis incident when lots of pc's had problems which begs the question what hardware did they use when the wrote the game , did they use something that the general public could not buy.

To mr shadow ... i am w10 and recently re-installed manhunt from the origonal discs i bought when it first came out , it ran ok without the need for compatability modes or patches ,that was a surprise ! ..... it is still possible to legally buy it. I also have a legal copy of manhunt 2 , general searches say it was not made for pc but that is wrong .i think it was ported from a games console version by a small indie company before the legal bods stopped it. I know some who thought they were getting manhunt2 from file sharers ( no i dont use them ) but ended up getting more than they bargained for.

On your last comment , if you mean schoolboy bully it is still possible to get that and runs ok without any problems.

 

[Zloth]

first to Zloth ..... i remember the crysis incident when lots of pc's had problems which begs the question what hardware did they use when the wrote the game , did they use something that the general public could not buy.

It only had the issues when you cranked up the settings, so I'm sure they just didn't do that. Or at least they didn't do that and play. They can let it go down to 1 frame every 3 seconds and still see if the settings are working right.