Let’s just take a second to reaffirm the reality we find ourselves in with PC gaming as we approach 2024. We load up a game we quite fancy playing, set the graphics preset to maximum, and then start the game. If the frame counter that we constantly have running reads anything below 60, at any point, we then stop playing the game and decide we must pay somewhere between £1,000-£1,500 on a chunk of circuit boards to make that number go up to 60 again.
And that’s not just a bit of self-deprecating humour. That’s the behaviour loop that the hardware industry’s– how many newer games offer higher fidelity visuals? And how much more performance did you get from CD Projekt’s updates in the interim? If you bought a good GPU in the last four years, the game industry hasn’t given you a reason to buy a newer one. Nvidia’s taken to putting numbers at the end of its DLSS versions to convey a laddering up towards ultimate fidelity, but back in the real world, most games offer about the same fidelity as they did when you last upgraded.
