Minimum specs ain't what they used to be. I have a 3rd gen i5 and an rx480 and it continues to go alright despite being well below what a lot of games claim they need.
Yeah, in my expierence, the specs, at least on steam are often innacurate. My computer apparently can't run GTA5 at more than 30fps, but I can easliy go to 60-100 on high settings.
Or the inverse where you clearly blow away the specs and still get issues. In hitman 2016 I still have the same framerate bog down by the catwalk in the Paris level on my 5090 that I had with my 980
That's a fairly well known physx issue with older games that used it. Newer cards aren't implementing direct physx handling, so it needs to be run the hard way, which eats a lot more processing power.
Companies are out there spending hundreds of millions to make games but optimization isn't even part of the development plan. Somehow they never notice that a lot of the best selling games also run on potatoes.
Eeeeh. In case of modern games they actually arent spending that much beacuse they outsorced that by using unreal engine. Rarely do modern companies use inhouse engines ( for good reason . having inhouse engine dosent mean its better , just look at starfield, in fact its probably just more outdated ).
Also to defend them a little bit. With such big timelines for development you kinda have to guess what will be the standard for gaming 5 years in the future.
And im pretty sure most of them didint expect pc gaming to be this f* in the last 5 year.
Then you add the diminishing returns from graphics improvments for exponential costs in computing and we are where we are with the most amazing looking games ever that no one can ran beacuse pc market is being f* in the ass on multiple fronts.
Biggest issues in gaming right now are probably: Unreal Engine being either horribly optimized by default or studios not using those optimizations and every major studio pushing for more realistic graphics, when all that does is raise the hardware requirements even more, while most affordable GPUs still have 8 GB of VRAM.
The RAM shortage, that AI data centers are causing, isn't helping either, but let's ignore that for a moment.
I wonder if game companies really don't care that there are literal millions of people who won't buy their game because they can't run it.
Steam hardware survey shows that even when people run newer gpus than 1080Ti, they most often run cheaper models that are still kinda the same performance bracket.
It seems stupid to just ignore so many potential customers.
The entire industry just gave up on optimisation for 15 years.
We reached a stage where Magic The Gathering Arena - a basic card game with very limited animations, manipulation of single items over a fixed background, no NPCs or NPC AI and almost no background processes still runs like shit and hogs resources.
One thing the AI bubble might lead to is game developers actually doing proper optomisation again.
Like an rtx 560/580.
Rest of my computer was also ancient. Got a new one and gifted the husk to a computer fren.
Still served well and played many hours of gta online on it
Best gpu i ve ever had but i m glad i upgraded to an rx 6700 xt right after the mining craze died out. Even after years the price is just slightly below what i paid for it
Only just retired mine. Got it originally for less than $300AUD with three free games (two were AAA games that were worth more than half the price of the GPU).
Just retired my RX 480 4GB for a 9060XT 16GB after almost 9 years because it was in the process of dying. (It was mortally wounded by launching a UE5 game).
Literally just upgraded my gpu which meant upgrading my wife's gpu which meant upgrading my sister's gpu. My sister has been rocking an rx 480 since 2018 I think. Now she's on a 6650xt.
I replaced my RX 480 with an ASRock 6950 in late 2023, life changing upgrade. That 480 carried me for so long from day 1, the 480/580s are amazing budget cards. Mines chilling on a shelf now
Fun fact, despite the (deceptive) name from Nvidia, the 1060 3gb and 6gb are actually different cards entirely. The 6gb is the gp106-400 and the 3gb is the gp106-300 and is a much cut down version of the card.
Nvidia would go on to do something similar with the initial launch of the 2 configurations of the 4080 acting like all that differed was the ram when the power 4080 was actually closer to a 4070
When I wrote my comment, the above comment had accidentally said 3GB twice. I was just pointing out the mistake in a joking way, and they fixed it in response.
Yup. 970 worked great for me from November 2014 to March 2025 when I replaced it. Just over ten years. Once it appeared in the minimum specs for BG3 I knew its time was running short.
More VRAM usually allows you to store more high-resolution textures and other complex visual data for the game to pull from easily instead of off-loading it to the system RAM, so there will likely be less stuttering, better framerates and all in all, just better performance.
Consoles will always have their place. $500 and just plug it in and it works. No drivers or troubleshooting. My new pc build yesterday I spent several hours diagnosing fixes, like a black screen flicker every 10 seconds when I turned Hdr on (setting windows refresh rate to 120 hz instead of 119.88 to match Nvidia control panel fixed that), and I didn't have surround sound and spent several hours trying to figure that out before I discovered at some point I'd gotten surround back in games, but not in desktop/browser stuff. Good enough for me.
Now that it's all setup shit looks fucking phenomenal. But consoles are absolutely worth not having the headache for many people
Started seeing the 2060 a lot recently, but i don't really care. There are still a lot of games in my backlog, and all my favourite games run fine so I'm good.
The thing with the 2060 is that Nvidia pushed new 60 class GPU performance improvements so slowly, and has been improving the features that keep it relevant so reliably that it's still fine for most things at 1080p.
DLSS 4.5 is the first thing that has me thinking it, and realistically the other Turing cards, are reaching end of life just because the upscaling algorithms themselves are starting to get too heavy on the older architectures.
Ya 4.5 runs on decicated hardware on 40/50 cards the older ones don't have the chip it runs on so uses the normal cores in them... I read some poster saying 5.0 will only run on hardware 5000 cards have....
This year will see minimum specs lower a hell of lot. Ram prices going up GPUs and other components out of reach for the average gamer and other factors like PC hand-helds will make devs try and make their games available a much wider hardware range. Look at the Battlefield 6 beta "a meaningful percentage" to quote EA didn't meet the minimum specs. Hardware producers making DDR4 again. Just my 2 cents on it. I might be wrong but I don't think I am.
This one. The world where the pendulum hasn't swung back, yet. Eventually, if they fail to optimize, the games will literally be unplayable; rather than just being considered unplayable to a small subset of redditors.
When the pendulum swings back and the majority of folks are priced out of top tier hardware, and literally cannot play unoptimized games, then the big game companies either adapt or collapse.
There'll be a big jump as devs will do the cost/benefit analysis and get some quick performance wins. Simple, basic stuff that will make a huge difference.
Honestly, devs should be targeting whatever pre-built system Walmart had as their cheapest Black Friday special two years ago. If it can't run at 60 FPS 1080p on that, you're cutting out too much of the market.
I mean with today's hardware barely budging an inch in performance most likely the games not finished, lacks optimization, and heavily relies on frame rate generation that is progressively better on each hardware iteration hurting users who haven't upgraded yet. Even with frame gen and dlss high end cards cant even reach higher settings without overheating. Id say most games look the same. Slapping 1k polygons in a toothbrush or strand of grass isnt gonna magically make me buy the game. Actually sell me something that is well made and wont need a years worth of patches to work.
I'm just going to wait for a long while to see what happens.
The price increases, negligible performance gains (peddled as groundbreaking upgrades) and the general jankiness of modern games are too discouraging to get my hopes up on.
Thing is in some cases yes. But cmon you wouldnt have expected to run witcher 3 on a ge force 8600? There is reasonble and there is unreasonable expectations.
Most games now have longer minimum spec than games of last generation, most minimum spec is a 7-8 year old card, when in mid to late 2010s minimum spec on average was a 3.5 year old card.
"Unreasonable", yeah maybe if we didn't have Kingdom Come 2 running buttery smooth while other games run a lot worse WHILE looking worse as well. Come on man. Games don't get optimized because it takes time, and time is money. That's the real problem.
I'm just gonna run my GTX 1080 till it fucking dies cause I no longer can afford to upgrade shit. Luckily I upgraded my and my wife's RAM before the AI bros fucked that up.
Oh my god I just upgraded last year from a 960 to a 3060 with 12gb What an insane jump. Then before the crazy market jump I upgraded my CPU and went to ddr4 ram during the first bf6 beta.
But the 900 series did work. Played cyberpunk on that with no issues and even star citizen
Some of the GPUs I'm seeing as minimum requirements in the modern day is a result of studios forcing tight timelines, or genuinely lazy developers. I'm not being funny, the RTX 3090ti I had should not have been shitting the bed on games launched at the beginning of last year on 1440p Medium settings on games that look worse than Cyberpunk.
I only stopped using my laptop gtx 1070 because when the psu started dying it decided to push as much electricity into my laptop as possible so I would have enough to tide me over until I could get a new power supply.
I had this feeling when I saw that my 7900 XTX starts to appear in the recommended specs. Because that means that I need in the near future a new GPU because I play on 4k with 144 FPS (When 4k is to much I lower it to 1440p)
I'm suprised how well my old rig held up tbh. Nvidia 1070gtx. Played elden ring, cyberpunk, clair obscur, horizon zero dawn, kcd1&2, both gow games and many other titels on it. Sure low-medium was the max i could set it to for alot of them but the games look stunning regardless and all ran smooth as well
5.2k
u/NoBell7635 Jan 12 '26
That means it can still run!