Most of the actually good games don't need strong hardware.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
901 points (98.4% liked)
memes
21646 readers
1906 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads/AI Slop
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live. We also consider AI slop to be spam in this community and is subject to removal.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.
An appreciable rise in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. Rapid growth of productive capital calls forth just as rapid a growth of wealth, of luxury, of social needs and social pleasures. Therefore, although the pleasures of the labourer have increased, the social gratification which they afford has fallen in comparison with the increased pleasures of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the stage of development of society in general. Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.
kmarx wagelabor and capital
Write a better story or create better game play and all of a sudden, the hardware doesn't mean as much. But that's so much harder to do. So poor stories and difficult game play it is!
Why is the implication here that difficult gameplay can't be good? Hard disagree
It can be. But many times that difficult game play is just lazy and shitty design.
Not doubting you, but curious to hear some examples
Don't worry, gpus don't have much growth anymore anyway, next generation of cards will be incremental. The green company has not been able to truely innovate since the 1080ti so anything you get now will be relevant for a very very very long time. Hence why they've had to change to enterprise customers to keep line going up with empty over hyped promises in ai. It will come to an end when shareholders demand returns on investment. Pop.
Happy day of cakes!
We don't do that here. Now go on, git
Oh, it is! Thanks.
I remember thinking that the 3090 is ridiculously expensive. Today, a 5080 bought for almost as much seems reasonable.
We are being conditioned.
Time to catch up on some older games you missed. More fun for less money.
And indies. Many indie devs do bother with optimization instead of telling people to buy more RAM.
!retrogaming@lemmy.world
Retroarch is love. Retroarch is life.
Ok, I'm not a gamer, and I have a real honest question: we had fun with gamesetsin the 90's. We had LAN games in the 2000's, and over Internet quickly after. People were spending hours, days playing. Each new GPU was so much better, sharper pictures, "so realistic", etc.
Are you genuinely having more fun now than with good games from 10years ago? Even 15years ago??
Because it looks like this whole requirements thing is pure marketing, and studios needing to keep selling: "Look, shinier graphics that will make the previous generation of games you loved and found incredibly sharp and detailed when theé came out look mild and of bad quality now!"
I've been enjoying the graphics in Satisfactory. Although I believe most of that enjoyment comes from their creativity and art choices rather than technical specs. Factorio is dark, dirty and depressing to represent the reality of mining and manufacturing, but for those same reasons I didn't want to play it. However, Satisfactory's bright and cheerful-looking landscapes, creatures and art drew me in to actually want to pick up the game. Then the juxtaposition of that natural beauty with cutting down trees and machines marring those landscapes spewing pollution was a highly effective choice to drive the same point home. I began to notice my GPU fan was spinning up and I dropped the framerate until it wasn't. And I've made other greener choices in my life as well, just because I played a game.
EDIT: fix typo
Are you genuinely having more fun now than with good games from 10years ago? Even 15years ago??
I mean yes? Certainly I can put another 1000+ hours into a game from 10 years ago or 15 years ago, but people aren't playing those games any longer, and those who do in a team setting are so far beyond anything a casual player can do it's not even close to being remotely fun. LAN parties were amazing, but they existed because most of us didn't have incredibly fast internet and we wanted to show off the PCs that we had cobbled together.
These days it's easy to fire up Discord or whatever chat you want to use, play a new game with your friends that looks great, that plays well (enough), and then you can buy a new game. I'd rather play Doom Dark Ages over the original Doom. Or to go to the 10-15 years ago metric, I would much rather play Doom Dark Ages over Doom 3. But hey, when Doom 3 came out, this exact same conversation was happening, because Doom 3 wasn't easy to run.
Are you genuinely having more fun now than with good games from 10years ago? Even 15years ago??
On the contrary, I'm still playing those games sometimes. At the moment it's Need for Speed: Most Wanted from 2005.
And recently indie games are growing in popularity, those are often quite simple visually, or go for a retro style. Megabonk for example, or Mewgenics or Slay the Spire 2.
This has nothing to do with quality of enjoyment but access to it.
Requirements are not marketing. They are mechanical limitations specified by the developers. That's the difference between "Minimum" and "Recommended". We are talking about the minimum requirements here.
Maybe I wasn't clear, but my point was these requirements are indeed driven by the studios and the GPU makers.
These are marketing decisions, because the day it stops (imagine studio claiming "we're good enough, no more need to improve graphics!" then GPU last 10 years or more before needing replacement (I write a conservative 10, as they are heavily stressed while in use, but a computer can last longer than that).
Similarly, if graphics stop improving, studios will have a much harder time coming up with new games players want to buy. They will need to actually innovate in games mechanisms or find other added value features, or accept that the market will significantly decrease as new shiny graphics on the same game will no longer work.
So game advertisements are all about blasting you with spectacular graphics and animations.
I’ve been a pretty avid gamer for most of my life, not really the guy who goes out to buy the absolute latest and greatest graphics card but let’s say I’ve been playing most games between medium and high settings most of the time.
For about a year or two now I’ve just stopped. I’ll play some og doom, Klondike, worms,…when I have 0 energy and some time to piss away. But honestly, even that has become less and less.
Probably age, but also, it’s a drag getting into gaming. Create 5 accounts, sacrifice your privacy and your soul. Learn these super weird controls that you’ll never need again, grind 3 weeks away or spend half a months pay,…
Mfr I just wanted 10 minutes of fragging.
load more comments
(7 replies)
This Steam Next Fest killed Unreal Engine for me.
Every single game with that splash screen ended up as a slide show, and not even prettier, I play 15 years old games that look better than most games I saw coming from UE5.
I used to recommend Unreal 4 for everyone, but they are already going for 6 without optimizing the 5.
No need to upgrade, just give a chance to other games, devs and engines that cares for their customers.
I got into Cassette Beasts a while ago and notice all Godot games run well on Steam Deck and my older hardware. Cry Engine looks beautiful and still run well on stuff.
Cassette beasts was so good and absolutely gorgeous
Kingdom Come Deliverance II was made on Cry Engine, day one it run pretty good on my setup (Ryzen 7 5700 X + RTX 2060 at the time, i got more or less 45 - 60 FPS on medium high settings, didn't remember if i disabled upscaling).
Meanwhile The Outer Worlds 2 with way less realistic and impressive graphics was a messy pixelated slideshow once i finished the tutorial, i was running on everything on minimum.
Cry Engine and REngine are a memento from a time where videogame companies used to squish every bit for performance and make games look and feel fantastic even in weak hardware
load more comments
(3 replies)
Upgrade to Linux to extend the life another ten years.
Don't worry, maybe china will flood the market with cheap ram soon or something.
load more comments
(8 replies)
"Good" news is that AI companies killed the gaming upgrade market, so studios will need to target the same hardware for a while. We might even see the come back of the smart tricks to go beyond the hardware limits era.
They're prob going to try to push cloud hardware for everything. GeForce now, Windows 12? Online subscription!
There is no probably about it. Jensen Huang has talked about nothing else (besides AI) for quite some time now.
load more comments
(9 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
Not if you picked the right platform. AM4 serves me well since 2017, all the way from ryzen 1700 and 16gigs of ram to 5700X3D and 32Gigs now. Same motherboard - and I expect it to serve me for another 5 years
Things move forward. I'm with a 5900X, it was one of the best CPUs to buy 4-5 years ago (it's still doing well for me), but recently, just out of curiosity I found out that a current laptop CPU beats it by a solid 15-20% in single thread performance.
I'm still angry at myself that I didn't upgrade to AM5 before the current crisis - mainly because 32 gigs of RAM aren't cutting it for me any more (and it didn't make sense to pour money into the old platform).
Upgrading each year seems pointless, but once every 3-4 years is I think reasonable.
That'll save money but I don't think it nullifies parts being expensive. My GPU is now legacy (1050Ti) because I didn't upgrade it when I did my 2019 AM4 build (sale prices were great). Ryzen seems like it's more expensive now due to it's success.
I'll probably keep using these parts until I stop using a computer, with how prices are.
I'll be DEAD and BURIED before I play PC games that require a 1000W PSU-powered graphics card.
software that uses excessive amounts of resources is usually poorly written and shouldn't be used in the first place, so don't worry, you're not missing out on anything important :)
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next ›