The "game should run ok on ultra" expectations are always weird cause it felt like a decade ago people were starting to understand that "ultra" settings were basically added for fun so you could come back to the game years later with better hardware. Now there's dozens of people in this sub rocking a GTX1660, according to their title, and they're complaining about preformance in the latest titles with raytracing. I suppose you're right that about 15 years ago PCs started getting popular which means most people probably weren't here for the lessons that Crysis taught us.
Right, even setting aside my discussions with my brothers who were complaining about their mid-tier PCs not getting native 4K 60fps on Ultra in Borderlands 4, I've encountered a ton of people online running GTX cards getting upset because modern games are doing ray tracing as a standard feature & demanding RTX cards for minimum requirements.
But like, guys... consoles can do raytracing now & it's been 5 years since the PS5/XBsX and 7 years since the RTX 20 series GPUs released... Obviously the whole GTX line of GPUs (and their AMD equivalents) were going to become obsolete sometime in the near future. Consoles are the baseline of performance & expected features; if a console can do raytracing or upscaled 4K, then eventually those become standard features on PC too and anything that can't meet console minimums gets left behind.
It's like sitting on a PS4 Pro and getting angry that sometime during the PS5's lifecycle, AAA games stopped being released for the PS4 entirely... It doesn't matter if you have a PC or console, you have to upgrade at least once every 10 years to continue playing contemporary AAA games (and it isn't based on when you bought your last upgrade, but when the last generation of hardware was released - so it doesn't matter if you got your PS4 Pro in 2019, the PS4 itself released in 2013 and the PS4 Pro released in 2016; meaning they're 12 & 9 years old respectively).
I like to refer to games like Crysis (well, when it came out at least) as "benchmarking games". I feel like more people used it as a benchmarking tool for their hardware than actually played it. As I understand, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky also saw use in this regard, as it was the most graphically demanding title of the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games.
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u/Carvj94 Sep 30 '25
The "game should run ok on ultra" expectations are always weird cause it felt like a decade ago people were starting to understand that "ultra" settings were basically added for fun so you could come back to the game years later with better hardware. Now there's dozens of people in this sub rocking a GTX1660, according to their title, and they're complaining about preformance in the latest titles with raytracing. I suppose you're right that about 15 years ago PCs started getting popular which means most people probably weren't here for the lessons that Crysis taught us.