Page 1 of Square Enix DirectX 12 tech demo

Just amazing what games could look like in a few years time on a mid-range system (obviously this isn't mid range!)...

The heat from that rig could warm my house. Not that I could afford the electricity bill mind you!







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This item was edited on Sunday, 3rd May 2015, 02:25

PC games keep upping the spec each year, so the computer you have is useless and will not run the game, thus I gave up PC home gaming* a long time ago.

*Except for old games that still work.

Yeah, I love gaming on my ZX81...

Of course they keep upping the spec; that's the whole point. However, games are scalable and you can quite easily play the latest titles on older hardware with a few minor compromises. Case in point, up until November of 2014 I was playing stuff like Shadow of Mordor, Ryse Son of Rome and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare on a Core 2 Duo 3GHz system with 4GB of ram and a 1GB video card. Clearly they didn't run in 1080p or above with all of the bells and whistles turned on, but it was a seven year old system (save for the video card, which I'd upgraded as one can with PC hardware), not a year old system.

Consoles are also refreshed every six-seven years or so and they don't scale.







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Chris, I'm in a position myself where building my own gaming Pc is making more sense than adding an additional Xbox One to the house hold. The kids are now quite avid gamers and between the 4 of us, we're likely to spend between £200-300 between now and Christmas on console games. That figure would more than than half of I was buying from Steam.

If I were to build a similar rig to the one you recently built and was happy with settings that at least matched the console versions of games, how long do think before and upgrade would be necessary?

It would see plenty of use and the price difference of games would allow me to justify an average upgrade cost of £150-175 per year. Does this seem realistic?

When I looked into it I went for a spec that should allow me to game at ultra settings @ 1080p (max res of my monitor) for a few years to come. The GPU was the most expensive individual component and it's what really seems to count for games these days, so I'd advise reserving a decent slice of cash for that alone.

My system was a little over £700 including the CPU, GPU, 8GB RAM, a 512GB SSD and the motherboard. I was able to reuse the other components. I doubt I'll be spending anything on it for at least a couple of years as right now nothing comes close to maxing out the spec at the resolutions I run.

This will probably change, as there are already some games that can use over 4GB of GRAM for games, but those are higher resolutions. The one minor fly in the ointment with the card I bought is what's been referred to as the GTX 970 memory issue (or Ramgate!). Basically it's a 4GB card, but due to the architecture it's actually a 3.5GB card with an additional 0.5GB of slower RAM, which can have a moderate performance hit when games demand over 3.5GB of video memory. In real terms I doubt it'll be an issue for me for a long time (certainly not during the natural lifecycle of the card). Mor einfo here:

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-memory-issue-fully-explained/

I'd still recommend the GTX 970 as the best price-to-performance ratio card, but there are now other options if the memory thing worries you.

BTW, neither console could match my PC all things being equal, so you'd be future-proofed. If you don't want to spend as much out of the gate there are other options that would match (if not exceed) console performance. It's a difficult comparison though, as a lot of PC ports aren't optimised so you don't see much improvement even with a super-powerful PC. Shadow of Mordor, though, looks better on PC. Higher density foliage, better framerate, higher resolution etc.







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This item was edited on Sunday, 3rd May 2015, 12:05