Let’s just take a second to reaffirm the reality we find ourselves in with PC gaming as we approach 2024. We load up a game we quite fancy playing, set the graphics preset to maximum, and then start the game. If the frame counter that we constantly have running reads anything below 60, at any point, we then stop playing the game and decide we must pay somewhere between $1,000-$1,500 on a chunk of circuit boards to make that number go up to 60 again.
And that’s not just a bit of selfdeprecating humor. That’s the behavior loop that the hardware industry’s actually counting on. It’s been three years since Cyberpunk – how many newer games offer higher fidelity visuals? And how much more performance did you get from CD Projekt’s updates in the interim? If you bought a good GPU in the last four years, the game industry hasn’t given you a reason to buy a newer one. Nvidia’s taken to putting numbers at the end of its DLSS versions to convey a laddering up towards ultimate fidelity, but back in the real world, most games offer about the same fidelity as they did when you last upgraded.
There’s actually quite a lot riding on our obsession with framerates, then. And that, of course, means that if we could just dislodge this inherently broken way of thinking, PC gamers could force both the software and hardware sides of the game industry into real positive change. And if you were shaking your head at me calling this a broken way of thinking just now, consider this: while we sit there furious, changing the soft shadows setting and running benchmarks, console players are playing the actual game. At the equivalent of the ‘medium’ or even ‘low’ preset. Without a frame counter. And they’re having fun. You know that’s true, because you’ve been that person too. Historically I’ve been guilty in the extreme of this typically PC gaming thinking. Perpetually dissatisfied, unable to let an imperceptible drop in fidelity go. In my first staff job in gaming media, I spent a large part of my day benchmarking components for the late great PC Format magazine. I couldn’t very well go back home and play things on ‘medium’ after that, could I? Not when I’d seen the Heaven 2.5 benchmark whizzing along at 60fps all day.