• I don’t get it, I’ve been playing minecraft and rimworld for about 10 years now. The minimum requirements haven’t changed really…

  • 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

  • I remember thinking that the 3090 is ridiculously expensive. Today, a 5080 bought for almost as much seems reasonable.

    We are being conditioned.

    • Gamers who speedrun NES games briefly poke their head out of the cave, see that life is more than shadows on a cave wall, reject that reality and return to the task at hand.

    • 5 days

      Seriously, I barely play any new games, and pretty much no AAA that have come out the last few years. This year I’ve finished:

      • Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Conviction, and Blacklist
      • Super Mario World
      • Grim Dawn (co-op)
      • 999 (9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors)
      • Across the Obelisk (multiple times, wife and I play this co-op)
      • Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin
      • Stella Glow
      • Ball x Pit
      • Rainbow Six Vegas 2
      • ChainStaff
      • 9 Years of Shadows
      • Ace Combat X
      • Live A Live remake

      And currently I’m playing Megacopter: Blades of the Goddess solo, and Divinity: Original Sin 2 with my wife.

      I’m having a blast tearing through the backlog this year, and I’ve barely bought any games compared to previous years. My Steam Deck alone has like 150+ games on it I’m looking to play through, and that doesn’t even account for all the retro games I’m looking to play via emulation.

      • I have never hated an engine before UE5. But god it is just a steaming pile of unoptimized, bloated dogshit.

        • 5 days

          The engine isn’t bad itself. The problem is it has some really cool tools that are expensive to run, but developers just turn them all on instead of optimizing. See: ARC Raiders for how it should be done. It’s UE5, but they aren’t using Nanite or Lumen. UE5 can run very well. Game developers thinking the only thing that matters is having the most photorealistic games is what’s causes the issue.

          • These features are enabled by default in UE5, devs aren’t going out of their way to enable them. Epic lies about them being beneficial to performance, which is only true if your assets are shit. Nanite is especially bad because Unreal Engine doesn’t have a different approach for automatic LODs; you either need to do it all yourself or use nanite.

            Not to say that devs aren’t to blame - they should know better - but they are just following Epic’s recommendations and defaults.

          • I wish it was possible to disable lumen. I have a feeling that alone is whats robbing FPS, and that alone is why a lot of ue5 games have resolution scaling forced enabled and cant be turned off

            I bet things would look better, too.

            • 5 days

              The developers can, or they can add a toggle. It isn’t fundamental to UE5. ARC Raiders and Squad are both on UE5 and don’t use Lumen.

              The issue is supporting Lumen and another lighting solution requires them to make sure both work. For multiplayer games especially, having both isn’t an option, because then it gives an advantage to some people. Squad, for example, looked into it, but they ended up going with a different GI system that’s more performant so everyone can (and must) use it.

              For single-player games, it’s possible to have Lumen and another option. It’s just extra cost to development. They’d rather go with the option that creates better trailers and not worry about people struggling to run it. They can run at an upscale 240p for all the executives care.

              • For multiplayer games especially, having both isn’t an option, because then it gives an advantage to some people.

                Not if the option is configurable. This is akin to how Rocket League has all kinds of stylistic options, but most pros disable them all. I’m sure that will hold true for their UE6 migration, too.

                • 5 days

                  No, I mean they can give you more information. Shadows can tell you where players are before you can see them, for example. You can also get information from reflections. Players who have hardware that can’t support these features are disadvantaged. Lumen is not equivalent to, for example, texture resolution.

      • I’m getting like that for Unity games.

        No idea what it is but just about every unity game makes my CPU run hot and starts pumping 40 degrees C air into the room.

        • 5 days

          What? Which ones? Escape from Tarkov is the most expensive Unity game to run that I know of, and it doesn’t have this issue.

          The issues with UE5 aren’t the base engine. It’s Nanite and Lumen, and how easy they make them to just toggle on. Unity doesn’t have any features like this. You can get things like them on the store, but they aren’t baked in. They do have ECS, which is designed to have a ridiculous number of entities operating at once. I could see how that could cause this issue if unoptimized, but not many games are using it yet so it’s not what you’re talking about.

          • Raft, Software Inc, Tinberborn, Big Ambitions. None of those are heavy games, but all of them make cook my i7-9700K

            Guess when I launched Raft and it hit high 50 degrees and when I exited the game.

              • Problem is it then pumps 40 degrees temps into the room which sucks when the temp is already in the 30s.

                • That’s exactly what’s going to happen with any CPU with a TPD of 95W and 30+ degree ambient temps.

                  Your CPU is actually running extremely cool if your temps are only hitting the 50s in that scenario.

                  You need to fix the rooms airflow.

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • “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!

      • They seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that internet infrastructure in the US* is horrible and a lot of people outside of major urban areas have shitternet that makes streaming games laggy and unreliable. Unless they spend serious money upgrading infrastructure, it’s just going to be Stadia 2.0. Except even then people still really do not like gaming as a service so it’ll probably fail again anyway.

        *I don’t know how good other countries’ internet is but I would include them if I did.

        • My internet is fine, good bandwith, good latency. But even then cloud gaming introduces delays i am a) not accostumed to and b) not tolerant of.

          I do not want to have 100ms delay between my action and seeing the reaction. I do not want to be dependent on perfect connectivity to achieve even this delay, making every small issue which would only annoy me while browsing make my gaming hell. Even Bluetooth for my controller is too much delay for me when playing stuff like Dead Cells - it’s either a dedicated receiver or cable-bound. Everyone who actually wants to play something fast paced can’t be happy with cloud gaming. Well, the turn based strategy crowd might be tolerant of that, but i will never be until my body is too broken to play anything faster than solitaire.

      • 4 days

        There is no probably about it. Jensen Huang has talked about nothing else (besides AI) for quite some time now.

        • 4 days

          Because they are mainly producing components for datacenters, which will be used for cloud computing. Only consumergrade hardware is overpriced.

          • Only consumergrade hardware is overpriced

            Well no, the memory price increase is specifically here to price gouge AI datacenters. If you’re running a non-AI datacenter, and if you’re targeting consumers, like with remote desktop gaming, you have AI-like costs (literally, since servers GPUs are gaming GPUs), but without the enterprise customers. Oh and you also need the best bandwidth possible, because a few added MS might make the “remote” use unbearable, which is an added cost datacenters don’t have to deal with on the same terms.

            • 4 days

              That is prety irrelevant since consumers aren’t the customers for AI datacenter hardware, rich megacorporations with unlimited VC capital are.

              • Well yes, megacorps have unlimited budget for AI datacenters, that’s my point; consumer facing offerings don’t, such as cloud gaming, and they’re competing for the same price-gouged resource (“competing” is too generous tbh, consumer facing companies are getting curb stomped)

      • I tried playing on Amazon Luna and it was a buggy laggy mess, even for a single player “offline” only game.

    • the gaming upgrade market was kinda ridiculous anyway.

      We dont need new, more powerful GPUs every 12/16 months

      GPUs should, like, a new GPU every 5 years at a bare minium. New Cards being churned out every year is why gaming is shit, because theres no time for devs to learn, to optimize…instead they just target apis and get it out, and tell us use DLSS/FSR3 if performance is shit, even at 1080p there are still games they expect us to use stupid ass scaling to make playable.

      • 5 days

        APIs are… how you tell the GPU to do things. Nobody’s doing low level hardware access like it’s 1990 and you’re running MS-DOS.

        • Yes, summer child.

          They also used to optimize for cards, too, to get the most performance for players. They don’t do that anymore, hence they only target the APIs and shit it out regardless of performance.

    • linux is good but it’s not magic either… it’ll help a 50-55 fps game run at 60 fps, but the game that crawls on windows won’t fare that much better on linux unfortunately

      • 5 days

        It depends. On linux i have 10+ year old laptop pc running indi games while playing youtube videos on a second window, all while keeping the temps below 70°. The same pc fans scream murder by simply open a browser in Win 10.

    • By the end of this summer, it’ll be a full year on Linux for me. It’s giving my old hardware some more life, and I have no reason to go back.

      • 5 days

        Been on Linux since 2015 as my daily driver, and since 2023 for my gaming PC. Pretty much zero issues, and in some cases, much better performance and compatibility than Windows.

    • Yes, but it’s still not gonna help dramatically with the minimum requirements for games 😄

      • 4 days

        Most likely not. They are using it for their own datacenters.

        • At the moment - for sure. When they scale production (could be more than 5 years) they may be able to exceed the dc demand. Chinese manufacturing of anything is running on much lower margins than others. They don’t play the limit-supply-to-increase-margins game. I think it’s a CCP policy, as it’s a harmful practice for the rest of the economy. So if they scale chip manufacturing to the point where it exceeds dc demand, they won’t stop scaling because their margins won’t fall. They’ll scale further to increase profits by making and selling into other markets - consumer, etc. including abroad. I think the limiting factors to this future are the mass producrion of high quality lithography machines in China as well as the availability of high performance CPU and GPU designs. They’re moving to solve all of those though, now faster than ever with the embargo on US tech.

    • Isn’t that what this is? Some trade war with China?

      Kinda what happened to Japan?

      I don’t know

  • 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 its success.

      With how prices are I’ll probably keep using these parts until I stop using a computer.

  • As a kid I used to basically only play emulator games because I didn’t have money for a real gpu. As an adult I basically only play indie games cause AAA games are all soulless trash.

    • Yeah, I reached my limit years ago for games that spend a bazillion $ on graphics, but their gameplay is just running from cutscene to cutscene with barely engaging combat in between.

      Indie games tend to be actually fun.

      • 5 days

        Fr. I was playing corekeeper with a friend and randomly found a really pretty oasis mini biome, it had no ‘use’ but it was a chill safe area I found by accident, you could tell the devs just wanted you to enjoy their game. It feels so nice to play something that isnt trying to milk you for money at every corner!

  • 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!”

    • 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!”

      This is exactly what’s happening. Its been going on for a long time, and is in some ways holding back the industry from progressing in other areas, such as new and innovative forms of actually interacting with game worlds and their narratives.

      I’d personally say once 3D graphics were able to represent things without it looking abstract from too few polygons (say, around 2006 or so?), the medium could’ve slowed down the pace of graphical advancements significantly, and the industry would’ve benefited enormously.

      Modern indie games that do not have AAA budgets for graphics instead have focused on unique and attractive art-styles, sometimes with retro aesthetics, and are generally able to create far more compelling experiences due to the lack of emphasis on graphics.

      • I think to myself, only half-ironically, “textures were a mistake” (pre-rendered cutscenes, too). Or at least the practice of unique textures on every model being the standard rather than the exception. It adds a lot of workload, and IMO is probably diminishing returns in many cases.

        Sure, I get that it was a logical/necessary step when a texture/sprite saved on polygon budget. These days I think (visible!) vertex color is a very practical technique that didn’t really get used to its full potential. It even makes a lot of sense when making a model to think about color via geometry. There’s a lot of room for aesthetic choice with meshes, colors, materials/shaders, character/map design, and yes textures if they don’t become bloat.

        This is also why I dislike the idea of many remasters/remakes. Losing arguably the smartest* and most scalable solutions and switching over to much heavier (data and rendering-wise) replacements. Sure they made it visually stunning, but now I don’t know if I can comfortably download/store/run a game that probably still has game-design warts from 20+ years ago (and new glitches added).

        * For example, Spyro’s vertex color skyboxes being replaced in Reignited. The original were iconic, aesthetically pleasing, they had a gamefeel reason (portals, seamless fly-into portal+fly-into-level), free by modern standards (so a toggle should be viable) they’re just mesh globes! I could even see even some verts added to improve, or use of layers or more distant geometry to give it more depth.

    • 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.

    • Maybe that’s the silver lining. If AI companies are the main customers of GPUs, not us, then they won’t need to keep up-selling us every year with nonsense.

      Back in the 90s, most people didn’t have PCs because they were PC gamers. They just played games on their normal PC, and game devs tried to make games that would run on anything. If the average person has old hardware, then game devs will be incentivized to build to that.

      • Rollercoaster Tycoon comes to mind. That beast of a game used to run with 16 MB of RAM and no 3D card.

    • 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.

    • 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 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.

    • Graphics, I think the most fun I had was PS one, SNES and NES era with a little in PS2 era and the last of it was the Batman arkham games. Not much has sparked true joy since.

      The developers are noticing and indie is going retro. Free and paid games are adopting the simpler 3D models and 2D sprites, imposing artificial limitations to have to deal with, intentionally creating developmental challenges that will manifest as stylistic choices later.

      It is working.