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Warcraft III. Voodoo2 wasn't cutting it, upgraded to a GeForce4 MX420.
.... which still wasn't really cutting it, so I spent every penny to my name and upgraded to a Radeon 9700 Pro like 6 months later.
Man, I loved that card. Used it for years. To this day I think it was the card I held onto the longest.
That's when I went from no dedicated graphics to Voodoo3. I think it was already old by then, but worked well.
Doom - we upgraded to 16MB of RAM so we could play it through Windows 95.
Win95 wanted 4MB and Doom wanted all 8 that we had, so we had to exit, reboot, and go to DOS then run it manually.
Same here but my upgrade was 4MB to 8MB for better DOS performance.
I had to run a boot disk because we couldn't run Windows 3.1 and Doom 2 at the same time. Good times.
My brother had a friend who knew how to upgrade computers, but we never got permission to do so. And then some years later my brother's friend was taken by the state because his parents believed some of that early Sovereign Citizen bullshit and stopped paying taxes. I think there were also some drug charges. It was just personal amounts of pot, but it was the early 90s, so they were fucked.
Probably Dungeons of Daggorath for the TRS-80 Color Computer.
It was a Tandy Color Computer 2 circa 1986ish, pwent from 16K to 64K ram.
What a beast!
Half-Life 2. I remember being completely blown away by early source engine, even on low graphics to keep the frame rate above the 20s. I watched the weird little graphics benchmark animation probably a hundred times to dial in the settings. If you told me that in the future I'd be capping the framerate on highest settings to keep it from hitting the default limit of 300 I'da called you a liar.
Yeah, I saw that e3 demo with the pachinko barrels, water physics, and wood breaking, and I just knew had I to play it with no compromises. Spent my life savings at the age of 14 to build my first computer. Paid a friend's older brother to teach me how. 😅
I have no idea how Source went from being so taxing to so insubstantial in the course of a few years. By the time I really got into gaming around 2010, Source games were the ones we'd throw on our shit box laptops and play together in class.
I've been playing PC games since 1986. Started off with Kings Quest, and Heroes Quest. I can honestly say that no game has caused me to upgrade my PC until last year when I bought Cyberpunk 2077 because it was on sale. At the time I was running a 1080Ti, which is still a capable card, but I'm a whore for fancy graphics and visuals, and when I saw what CDPR was doing with Raytracing in that game I needed to have that. Pulled the trigger on a 4090 in January and haven't regretted it for one minute. My 1080Ti lasted me 5 years, I'm anticipating my 4090 will do the same.
Quake1 after voodoo came out with transparent water patch. It's so good it felt like cheating knowing some players have no idea that I can see through water. Resolution upgrade is a big enough advantage as well.(from 320x240 to 640x480 )
Then Quake 3 I upgraded to nvidia's TNT card.
I think most of time I stay roughly with the upgrades(usually 2nd place card) with the exception during the bitcoin/covid time.(I stick with my 1080 oc version until I can buy 6800XT from amd direct.)
World of Warcraft. I was on Windows XP with 512mb of RAM and who knows what graphics card but I was lagging so bad when WotLK came out.
With all the people standing at the entrance to Naxx I had to basically aim myself for the portal and lag my way in without being able to see where my character was walking due to the lag.
Exactly the same game and situation. 😂
The golden age of WoW man...
My parents needed a new family PC right before it first launched, and I convinced them to get a slightly better version just so I could spend the next decade of my life raiding with the homies
Blade and Sorcery, because my PC with a Ryzen 3 1200 and GTX 970 at the time could hardly run this and a lot of other VR games. And also Cyberpunk 2077, to a smaller degree.
Not sure if this really counts, but I was given a copy of 'The Movies' when I was younger. Turns out it needed a DVD player to read it, but at the time I only had a CD player, so had to go out and buy an external DVD player to use it. Besides a few very lightweight PC games, I played on console most of the time and never got a true understanding of 'specs' until later in life.
Quake 4. I remember running it on a very cheap GPU and following tweakguides to get it running properly. The game that actually got me to pull the trigger on new hardware was Battlefield 2142.
Ohh man, shout-out to tweak guides and all the games they helped me with
Neverwinter Nights. I was scraping by on the 800x600 resolution and lots of slowdowns. 2006 I built a new computer with a 1080x1080 LCD and turned on that glorious high resolution text option.
I gamed in EGA, "back in the day". lol
Glad you did get the gear you needed!
Doom 3. It's still the only game I've upgraded my PC explicitly for.
Skyrim. I had that running in integrated graphics on an old gateway I got. Once I started Playing pc games I new I had to have the best. 15 years later my younger self would be jealous of the rig I have today.
Battlefield 2. My dad and I went wild building our first PC together. Good times.
Elden Ring. I really really really wanted to play it. Playing it on 8gb RAM felt like a slideshow.
Officially- Bioshock Infinite.
I was still rocking my windows XP old faithful, and Infinite required the upgrade to windows 7. My motherboard didn't support 7 though, so Old Faithful finally met its match
Heretic.
I bought a used hard drive at a yard sale in like 1996 or 1997, that contained Doom II and Heretic. The 386/40 that was my personal box wouldn't tun the latter, and I wasn't going to set it up on the family's rapidly disintegrating Packard Bell Pentium-100.
Plenty of games have made me say it, but I can't think of a single one that got me to actually do it.
X-Wing vs TIE Fighter. Got a 3Dfx Voodoo add on, going to real 3D was such a big difference.
The day I went from console to PC. Game, no clue.
I guess Planetside 2, it made me upgrade my PC 3 separate times
They literally stopped supporting the hardware I originally started playing on when it was still new. The game went from sluggish, to playable, to perfect, and then onto completely unplayable just with the updates to the game, since it wouldn't even start after that particular update.
Red Faction. It's the game that made me buy my first Video Card way back when.
I think it was either Arena or Daggerfall.
Age of Conan. Got one of the first quad cores. Game only designed for 2. Had to build another eventually.
It was Quake, but I didn't have the money to actually make it happen. That would come years later.
I mentioned in another post that Unreal Tournament 2004 was one of them for me.
Later on down the road, after I built my first gaming pc using an XFX 8800gts with a whopping 640mb vram - I tried to max out XCOM when it came out. Next thing I heard was a pop, then I smelled the smoke that was billowing out of my GPU. It was time to upgrade again!
Oh shit, I remember there WAS a game. I believe I bought a Geforce 2 MX or sth for it...could have been an FPS, possibly Unreal Tournament.
I came here to say Unreal Tournament 2004.
I remember on my laptop - trying to get on a hoverboard and my frame rate dropped to 3-5fps. I knew I needed to finally build and put my laptop away.
I can't recall exactly which one of the two it was but it was either Quake 4 or Doom 3. I remember I managed to squeeze out like 14 fps using RivaTuner on the family computer. I got my first job not long after that and put together my first PC.
Doom 3 for me by far, I remember reading the pcgamer article and it was the game that they were predicting would cause millions of upgrades. IdTech at the time was incredible with what it was trying to do, and they weren't kidding. Kind of funny that it's so accessible these days.
I don't think it was the first time, but I vividly remember Arkham Asylum, I played for several hours thinking that fights occurred in bullet time, slowing way down as more enemies appeared on screen. I later saw a gameplay trailer where the brawls were frantic and quick action. Felt pretty stupid after that.
Minecraft. It was probably the inspiration for my entire career path, to be honest. When I first played it, it ran horribly. I had an Athlon II and 4gb of ram running Windows Vista. After a few months I bought some AMD gpu that was waaaay too big for my Dell SFF case. I tried modding (read “hacking up”) my case, but couldn’t get it to fit. Wound up building an entirely new computer about a year later after scraping up all my birthday and Christmas money. After that I bought a high refresh rate monitor, then a better mouse, keyboard, and you know how the story goes from there.
Kena: Bridge of spirits.
It's such a gorgeous game and I loved playing it. But the fight scenes would drop frames so badly that I couldn't finish the game because of one boss battle that requires solid timing to win.
SWTOR. I did a whole new build so I could play it.
Duke Nukem 3D. I had a 486 SX 25 Mhz processor, but upgraded to the DX 100 Mhz processor. Can't remember if that helped and I just needed a Pentium to run it properly, but I think it worked.
I think that would've been the first Crysis.
Same for me. That was the first game I explicitly remember that "pushed the limits" in terms of graphics, as it was a big jump in terms of PC requirements compared to other games that were available at the time.
First game was Dark Forces. Family PC didn't have enough RAM so my dad and I ventured into the world of hardware tinkering.
Most current game is most likely going to be Starfield. I built my current PC in 2020 with those first pandemic checks. My specs are all at the recommended, except for my GPU, which is the minimum. So if the game is good at launch I'm going to probably look to upgrade my GPU.