Since the minimum and recommended specs for Starfield have come out, I've been budgeting to do a big upgrade on my PC with an AMD 6800 xt and a fancy new 1 TB SSD (which is the first game I've ever seen that requires an SSD) just so I can run the game in all it's space epicness.

What was the game that you were so excited for that you made the jump to upgrade your PC to the next gen of hardware? New or old!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] AnonymousLlama@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Total war games have historically pushed both my GPU and CPU upgrades. I'm still amazed how poorly their engines are optimized, how I can run into the high 200 FPS+ range on some demanding games with my 4090 but playing Warhammer 3 on ultra quality at ultrawide 1440p pushes it to almost 100% GPU usage at around 100 FPS.

Really great game when when your can have massive battles without lag, but still amazed that even with a 4090 / 12900k the campaign map and battles aren't perfect

[–] BudgieMania@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah that's true, Total War games are super weird about that! Like, I get that they are doing lots of impressive things under the hood, but it's still weird how, past a certain point, they just flat out don't scale with any more hardware. I've always been curious about what's going on inside them and what kinds of bottlenecks prevent them from performing past certain limits.

As much as I love the series, I've stopped taking them into account at all when deciding my upgrades because I know I'll be disappointed about the expectations vs result.

[–] AnonymousLlama@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

At least with Warhammer 3 / Troy the game does at least leverage multi-core CPUS, however it really seems to cap out at 5 or 6 cores. I've noticed on the 12900k that it works really hard on 3-4 cores and somewhat on the others.

I'm hoping the next total war mainline game has a full engine refresh, one made for modern multi-core CPUS and leverages at least FSR 2x/DLSS 2+. If there's a game that I think could use upscaling support, it's a total war game.

Still amazed that I can play multiple games at 4k anywhere from 144-288hz at maxed settings with everything cranked, but I'll get GPU capped on my 4090 in Warhammer 😮

[–] BudgieMania@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, an engine rework that is up to current standards and can make the best of 2023 hardware is the dream... But I fear that one of the reasons why the series is still worth it for SEGA may be because they don't incur any crazy costs and investments like that and stay cost effective with minor iterations. Well that and because they release 25 dlc per game lol.

Personally I think that, until one of the potential competitors starts putting all the pieces together and becoming a real alternative, we will not see a significant technological change like that in the series again. At most I see some simple upscaling implementation but not much else.
I would be soooooo happy to be proven wrong on that though.