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It’s objectively out of date.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At some point we do need to just move the fuck on and accept hardware is out of date.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.
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It’s objectively out of date.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.