How good is good enough (PC specs and settings for gaming)

[peanutbutter]

I'm playing FF7 remake at the moment and it's getting a lot of flack for having a really crappy PC port that doesn't push it to the levels it should be capable of hitting with issues around framerates and variable resolution and so on even on relatively decent machines.

Now, I'm playing it with a i5-10400 and an RX580 and have so far had _zero_ issues playing it but...
1. I'm playing at 1080p: I've a 4K monitor and have had issues with nearest pixel matching stuff on some other things when doing 2K with little perceivable visual gain so I just stick with 1080p and a 2:1 ratio. Don't notice the difference at 4K tbh...
2. I'm playing at 30fps: Just never seen any point in updating, I rarely play things that require crazy precision outside of VR too so I see little gain in getting used to something much more power hungry

Really I could probably tolerate 20fps, variable frame rate on the other hand tends to annoy the hell out of me.

PCs at the top level at the moment seem to be crazily powerful machines and high framerate monitors come at a massive markup too. Is it just a built in part of being a PC gamer that half of the fun is spending ages at the start configuring the game to look as awesome as possible? Is it just a bit of a slippery slope you get trapped in where once you're focusing on all the ways a game may be playing suboptimally? Maybe one game that runs quite effortlessly at 120fps on your shitty computer just makes you hyperaware of all the ones that can barely manage half that?

As far as image quality goes I'm far more interested in OLED and miniLED than 4K/8K/whatever. When a GPU for 4K level gaming costs more than an 60 inch OLED TV I can't comprehend getting the former first.


So yeah, have you kind of landed on a happy point with this kind of thing? Are there performance options you couldn't give a shite about? are there ones where you seem to have an insatiable thirst for higher settings?

[falafel]

Yeah, got a 580 too. It was great value at the time, couple of years ago, and it's held up great for my purposes. Zero fucks about 4K, raytracing would be nice, but honestly graphics don't impress me more now than they did in 2016. I can see they are better technically, but the art direction isn't better to my eye. Ryzen 5 2600 more than keeps up with my needs too. Will upgrade when I perceive the gains to be more than marginal. More excited by my new Oculus, spend more time on my Switch, the tech itself is less interesting to me now than what people do with it.

[ImmaculateClump]

I've had a 1080 TI since 2017.
I use it to play 2d shmups at 60fps :S

My monitor gave up the ghost recently and I went with the VG279QM.
It has terrible input lag at 60hz, but I have a separate monitor for console gaming (a trusty old w2363d) and I just keep this at 280hz on pc and it's 1.7ms at that refresh rate, so jobs a good un.

Coming from a 144hz monitor, I can't tell any difference in terms of refresh rate, though I do wonder if that's down to me switching panel tech from TN to IPS.

I've always been a TN diehard, but I'd read enough about these ultra fast IPS panels being as good as 144hz TN panels, and I think that's definitely the case. This is the first IPS panel I've seen that I consider suitable for gaming.

It's "144hz TN" good, which I'm fine with as if I could have just rebought the monitor I had previously that died, I would have.

The great thing about high refresh displays is that you can turn off vsync and tearing will be unnoticeable.
Even if a game is locked to 60fps, for example, you will still get lower lag running it at a high refresh rate.

I really don't care about graphical frills. As an example, I'm playing an ARPG at the minute that's still in early access and the game started chugging at a certain area where the scenery was a bit more hairy, and there were loads of enemies spawning so I knocked everything right down to low, but it was still chugging, so either it's just too much shit going on in that area or the game needs some more optimisation.
Even though I haven't seen any real performance gains, I didn't care enough to want to turn all the bells and whistles back on.

I find fluid, smooth motion and responsive input to be the most important thing when it comes to gaming so I don't worry about how it looks.
Most of the fancy bells and whistles only clog the pipes of the engine anyhow, and it's usually not worth it.

If a game feels woolly, I'll turn down the settings. If it feels fine, I won't touch it.
If I start playing a shmup and it feels laggy, I'll force off vsync.

It all depends on the type of game I'm playing. An fps, I'll want 100fps+, and the mouse is such a direct input device that fast, consistent visual feedback is essential.

God this is fucking boring. Sorry everyone.

I just stick with 1080p

Yes, I don't think I'll ever feel the need to go higher than 1080p. Like you say, that power is better spent on performance than a slightly higher resolution. It's such a waste for such minimal gains.

I'm assuming you play with a pad if you're happy with 30fps? Yeah, if you're totally happy to spend the power that you'd waste on doubling your framerate on sexier graphics, that makes total sense.

i don't understand why anyone would spend longer than 30 seconds in a settings menu or editing a config file, but it takes all sorts, like you say, some people are into tinkering and experimenting in that way.

[aunt mildred]

I'm also playing ff7r with a r3600 and vega64, seems like a very good port to me. It runs smooth as silk at 1080p/60 even during intense battles and it's a pretty game. It's just PC master race twats moaning about the fact it has only two graphics options imho. There are mods to stop the variable resolution on nexus but tbh I haven't noticed if it's even dropping resolution.

Great game.

OTOH Halo runs like shit on my pc, that's what I'd call a bad port but hey it's got thousands of graphics settings that do fuck all to increase the framerate.

[Pink Gregory]

i don't understand why anyone would spend longer than 30 seconds in a settings menu or editing a config file, but it takes all sorts, like you say, some people are into tinkering and experimenting in that way.

Really wish more games had like a sample mode where you can just be dropped in an environment and adjust the settings before you start the game.

I have a 1060 6gb, so at 1080p depending on the game engine or the optimisation I can either run everything on max or I have to bust everything down to medium, and I'd really rather not be doing that when the game is setting itself up to me.

[oggyraiding]

I've got a 1060 6GB and am comfortable running newer games on medium-high at 1080p and at least 30FPS. Don't give a shit about 4K/120FPS. I get 45-60FPS on high settings during massive Total War Warhammer 2 battles, which I'm happy with (and hopefully TWW3 has similar system requirements). I don't particularly notice water reflections or dynamic shadows or motion blur, so I have a tendency to bin those off to get a higher FPS.