While people are a bit over the top. A 960 is a decade old and 3gigs literally wouldn’t be able to turn on with a large number of games released this year even on the lowest settings.
It’s objectively out of date. Hell lanythjng ess then 6 gigs frequently crashes or flat out refuses for the most part.
Your literal hard cut off is basically this year with unreal 5. Ue4 games, most proprietary engines like decima, frostbyte or dandelion all will do fine at 3gigs of vram. But they are last targeting last gen consoles as their low end. So your low end is looking back around 6-8 years.
2025 has been almost exclusively full of games that are finally dropping support entirely for that standard and the new standard is 6-8 gigs of vram minimums and 16-24 gigs of available ram not counting system utilization.
Going forward if you don’t have a 6gig card and 16 gigs of ram. You functionally don’t have a computer that can do new high end games. And fuck that’s not even a hard ask. We NEED to move the fuck on from 3gig cards and 8gigs of ram.
Hell a few games are even pushing for 8gig vram/20gig ram as the minimum. But I doubt that’s going to catch on.
Iv also come across a few Chinese games that flat out won’t install if you have a spinning hard drive in your system at all full stop. Not that you can’t install to one, it flat out won’t let you install it to any drive.
At some point we do need to just move the fuck on and accept hardware is out of date. And a full ten fucking years. Is a pretty damn good arbitrary line. Gaming is a very specific work load and it’s getting noticeable how problematic it is in multiplayer games between having allies with shit computers and good ones.
Having 10+ min wait times after your queue cause a random is working off a low end PC and a spinning drive to start a dungeon in an mmo. Is fucked.
When I was a child and first saw a 3d game, I imagined the lighting to be done by ray-tracing (without the actual name of it, of course).
Until then, I only knew 2d games with no lighting mechanics and just a bunch of pixels for sprites.
I remember playing a game, I think it was either Spiderman or Control with Ray Tracing on and I was like “wow, these are amazing!” Then I realized I didn’t actually turn it on. My dumb ass can’t tell the difference.
Exactly. One of the benefits of patient gaming (shoutout to [email protected]) is I don’t need top of the line hardware to enjoy my hobby. I’m sure the GabeCube will run multi-year old games very well.
Between working >40 hours a week and raising a kid I only really care if the game I spent 2 hours a week on is going to run and look good enough. If I have to play on high instead of ultra I’m not gonna have a meltdown.
People in this thread may be hardcore and spend a lot on their game consoles, but Valve’s statement is probably accurate, they’ve got the most data on computer hardware usage.
I’m still chugging along with a 1070 Ti. Then again, I don’t play many top-of-the-line AAA titles these days. For example, I know Doom Eternal and Dark Ages won’t run on this card unless I mess around with tweaking ini files or something, but I wouldn’t bother.
What games? the overpriced crap pushed by big companies, that massively fails on using UE5, that do look worse than 10yo games with worse performance? Sure popular, but I’d be happy when they fails.
Fuck ea, ubi, actiblizz and all their copy-paste year to year shit!
Alan Wake 2, Indiana Jones, Doom TDA, Stalker 2 all have no fallback lighting option and won’t work on PCs less capable than a Series S or Nintendo Switch 2.
Which is totally fine. Not every game has to support older hardware. Games are allowed to use “newer” tech.
Worth noting that I played Indy at 1600p/60 on an RTX 2080, which is a card from 2018 that I bought used for 200 bucks two years ago. This card can still run every single game out there and most of them extremely well, despite only having 8 GB of VRAM.
The whole debate is way overblown. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t games that could run a whole lot better, but overall, PC gamers with old hardware are still eating good.
Depends on the price point. Obviously, it’s not going to be competitive with a $2K gaming rig. But if the price is right, I might get GabeCubes for my kiddos as their first “desktop” computers. They should run CachyOS flawlessly, since it’s also Arch based, so it will work great as a desktop computer and a gaming rig.
My midrange computer from 3 years ago should outperform it, I would hope. If not, then it’ll be priced out from what I’d consider buying.
granted but i feel like the expectation there ought to be on the dev to not rely on resource intensive post processing gimmicks to make their game not look like trash
itt gamers act like anything that doesn’t do ray tracing is literally a commodore 64.
yall got some spoiled child ass ideas about hardware longevity, im over here on a 3gb 960 running most things just fine on lowered settings.
While people are a bit over the top. A 960 is a decade old and 3gigs literally wouldn’t be able to turn on with a large number of games released this year even on the lowest settings.
It’s objectively out of date. Hell lanythjng ess then 6 gigs frequently crashes or flat out refuses for the most part.
Your literal hard cut off is basically this year with unreal 5. Ue4 games, most proprietary engines like decima, frostbyte or dandelion all will do fine at 3gigs of vram. But they are last targeting last gen consoles as their low end. So your low end is looking back around 6-8 years.
2025 has been almost exclusively full of games that are finally dropping support entirely for that standard and the new standard is 6-8 gigs of vram minimums and 16-24 gigs of available ram not counting system utilization.
Going forward if you don’t have a 6gig card and 16 gigs of ram. You functionally don’t have a computer that can do new high end games. And fuck that’s not even a hard ask. We NEED to move the fuck on from 3gig cards and 8gigs of ram.
Hell a few games are even pushing for 8gig vram/20gig ram as the minimum. But I doubt that’s going to catch on.
Iv also come across a few Chinese games that flat out won’t install if you have a spinning hard drive in your system at all full stop. Not that you can’t install to one, it flat out won’t let you install it to any drive.
At some point we do need to just move the fuck on and accept hardware is out of date. And a full ten fucking years. Is a pretty damn good arbitrary line. Gaming is a very specific work load and it’s getting noticeable how problematic it is in multiplayer games between having allies with shit computers and good ones.
Having 10+ min wait times after your queue cause a random is working off a low end PC and a spinning drive to start a dungeon in an mmo. Is fucked.
When I was a child and first saw a 3d game, I imagined the lighting to be done by ray-tracing (without the actual name of it, of course).
Until then, I only knew 2d games with no lighting mechanics and just a bunch of pixels for sprites.
I remember playing a game, I think it was either Spiderman or Control with Ray Tracing on and I was like “wow, these are amazing!” Then I realized I didn’t actually turn it on. My dumb ass can’t tell the difference.
Exactly. One of the benefits of patient gaming (shoutout to [email protected]) is I don’t need top of the line hardware to enjoy my hobby. I’m sure the GabeCube will run multi-year old games very well.
Between working >40 hours a week and raising a kid I only really care if the game I spent 2 hours a week on is going to run and look good enough. If I have to play on high instead of ultra I’m not gonna have a meltdown.
People in this thread may be hardcore and spend a lot on their game consoles, but Valve’s statement is probably accurate, they’ve got the most data on computer hardware usage.
I’m still chugging along with a 1070 Ti. Then again, I don’t play many top-of-the-line AAA titles these days. For example, I know Doom Eternal and Dark Ages won’t run on this card unless I mess around with tweaking ini files or something, but I wouldn’t bother.
Do you blame them? So many games these days force ray tracing. If your card can’t do that very well, then that game runs like crap.
What games? the overpriced crap pushed by big companies, that massively fails on using UE5, that do look worse than 10yo games with worse performance? Sure popular, but I’d be happy when they fails.
Fuck ea, ubi, actiblizz and all their copy-paste year to year shit!
Indies, too. Not just big publishers/developers using UE5.
UE is a bane
Please do tell which games force ray tracing?
Alan Wake 2, Indiana Jones, Doom TDA, Stalker 2 all have no fallback lighting option and won’t work on PCs less capable than a Series S or Nintendo Switch 2.
Which is totally fine. Not every game has to support older hardware. Games are allowed to use “newer” tech.
Worth noting that I played Indy at 1600p/60 on an RTX 2080, which is a card from 2018 that I bought used for 200 bucks two years ago. This card can still run every single game out there and most of them extremely well, despite only having 8 GB of VRAM.
The whole debate is way overblown. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t games that could run a whole lot better, but overall, PC gamers with old hardware are still eating good.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, The Last Caretaker, Squad, anything using UE5 and Lumen.
not to mention the joy of emulation, which older hardware does very well these days
True. But it doesn’t change the fact that it is still quite crap for a brand new gaming pc/console
Depends on the price point. Obviously, it’s not going to be competitive with a $2K gaming rig. But if the price is right, I might get GabeCubes for my kiddos as their first “desktop” computers. They should run CachyOS flawlessly, since it’s also Arch based, so it will work great as a desktop computer and a gaming rig.
My midrange computer from 3 years ago should outperform it, I would hope. If not, then it’ll be priced out from what I’d consider buying.
Some modern games look like absolute dirty brown water trash when you lower the settings a ton
That’s HROT on max settings and it’s fucking amazing!
granted but i feel like the expectation there ought to be on the dev to not rely on resource intensive post processing gimmicks to make their game not look like trash