Patient gamers might be interested in this news.
I have a gtx 1080. 2025 games are mostly written in unreal 5. Unreal 5 is designed such that not even the highest end gpus can actually run it without framegen. And now also with mandatory raytracing.
Older games still work, and they look and run better for me.
And most U5 games look kinda the same
It does depend on the game, Satisfactory for example uses UE5 (5.3.2) and runs perfectly fine for me without framegen at 5120x1440. Admittedly I run it on an RX 6900, so not an average card. But at the other hand it’s already an older one and that resolution approaches 4K.
Unless something changed fairly recently the game also doesn’t use Lumen by default, let alone raytracing. Was RT made mandatory in later UE5 versions? Because it’s definitely not mandatory for every UE5 version.
UE5 is by no means a lightweight engine, but I do wonder how many of the issues are caused by lack of optimisation.
ue5 doesn’t force rt. But the number of games that do mandate rt (ex the latest indiana jones game) is increasing. I flat out can’t play those.
Ah, yeah, that’s a design decision that sucks. Those games I’ll pick up in few years when I have a card that’s capable of RT at an acceptable framerate. I get that tech becomes mandatory at some point, the same has happened with OpenGL/DirectX and the various pixel shading versions back in the day. But in my opinion enforcing ray tracing came way too early, seeing how it eats performance.
raytracing and upscaling will always go hand in hand because the hardware is far, far, FAAAAAAR from being able to raytrace a whole frame in realtime. Like, really really far.
I would love to play satisfactory more but it makes my cpu so hot :( and now that RAM prices have tripled or whatever I’m not gonna be upgrading any time soon
Yeah, RAM prices are crazy. When I built my current system I threw in 64GB so I could mess around with stuff like Kubernetes and virtual machines without worrying about memory shortage. Memory was cheap enough that it was a no-brainer. I feel like a millionaire when I look at how much that would set me back now. 😅
I kinda gave up buying new stuff because of all the editions bullshit. Complete, Deluxe, Gold, Ultimate, Season Pass, Whatever The Fuck Else Special Director’s Cut - yeah, yo ho ho ho your capitalist ass straight to the fire sell.
Same here, game on sale for $3, but then I see it had $200 in DLC to play the complete game. Major turn off.
Icarus, Conan, hit man 3, etc.
hitman 3 is fucking ridiculous. it’s a great game, I love it, but for the love of God just release it in one piece and kill the online mode
Literally just had that same thing with Icarus while I was looking at the winter sale. I went to reviews to find the catch for the game and people were saying the base game is pretty just a big demo.
Yeah, it dawned on me a few years ago that games are being sold in an unfinished state just so they can sell us the rest later.
If you’re still naive enough to spend money on things you can be getting for free (just to make someone else richer), at least wait until what you’re buying is complete.
yeah, i don’t mind DLC being sold separately, especially when it’s a full-fledged expansion like a good old add-on - not just an extra mission and stuff - proper 5-10 extra hours. But when you get this impossible to follow selection of options - it annoys the hell out of me and i switch to something that has only one package and doesn’t require market analysis skills to figure out the best version to buy. Or just yo ho ho fuck’em all instead because that’s what happens.
I definitely see much of AAA gaming as greedy, but when I’ve dipped into it this never seemed like an accurate take. The shit they’re selling for Ultimate Editions is normally teensy and inconsequential, like a golden gun or something. They’re selling to sons of Dubai warlords that just have Fuck You money to spend. I’ve never regretted getting a standard edition, except when I buy Deluxe off an indie game where I just want to support them (For reference, Expedition 33 had a Deluxe Edition)
Next year it is going to be even lower with how prices are going. Upgrades are just not feasible anymore.
Glad I got a 9070XT just before everything went bust. I’ll be sticking with DDR4 for a few years though.
I’m using 32GB of Corsair DDR4 I got back in 2016. Think I can safely say I got my moneys worth already and still intend to ride it into 2030 at this rate.
Honestly I think DDR4 is the right call for an everyday-use PC anyway. I might be showing my ignorance here, but when I upgraded my PC I got DDR5-6000 and the memory training times are INSANE. The first few times I tried to boot I wound up restarting because 5 mins after hitting the button it still hadn’t shown the manufacturer’s logo and I assumed it was busted. Once it finally does finish the training, it usually doesn’t have to do it again for a while… but sometimes it does! Totally randomly (as far as I can tell), I’ll go for a quick reboot, maybe swapping from my Linux install back over to Windows or something, and what should be a 15 second wait is now suddenly a full 5+ minutes.
Near as I can tell, DDR5 Just Does That Sometimes??? How is that an upgrade!? I guess I’m probably seeing some performance gains from the faster timing, but man, sometimes I think I’d trade it in exchange for never having to wait on a black screen for minutes at a time.
Yea you don’t really get to choose though, unless you’re willing to go with a 2 generations old CPU just to get DDR4. Even the newest generation is over a year old for AMD, the DDR4 compatible stuff is 5 years old now and leaves you no upgrade path.
Mind you, I’m on a Ryzen 3000 series CPU, I could still upgrade to a newer and more coreful AM4 CPU AND get more RAM without having to go DDR5. But anyone building in 2026 probably doesn’t want to get a Ryzen 5000 series CPU anymore.
of course i know, or id have put my money where my mouth is, and ram alone is too pricey for that now. id have to get a new motherboard too. i love my op cpu, this pc rocks when it’s working (which is 99% of the time), but when training time comes it’s still frustrating that the new shit is so busted for me
Yeah, I’m planning on leap-frogging this time for this very reason. I tend to get GPU-bottlenecked more often than not, so hopefully whatever GPU I pick up next year will extend my system long enough for a little more sanity to return.
I have never heard of memory training? What is this? Something new with DDR5?
You can turn off memory training in BIOS, fyi.
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Well I suppose it may depend on the bios you have but I can’t imagine any relatively modern one doesn’t have the option. My partner’s pc would take ages to boot until we turned it off, then it took seconds.
I hate to tell you this, but I had a DDR3 rig in 2011 and two of the four sticks of RAM died in 2021.
That means from regular gaming, the lifespan of RAM is about 10 years.
It’s 2026 next year.
That’s one datapoint and could depend on any number of factors, cooling manufacturer, uptime, etc. I have a couple of rigs 10+ years old running DDR3 with 0 failures. In fact in my lifetime I’ve only had one stick of ram ever go bad and that was ages ago and I tend to repurpose PCs a lot so they get some age on them.
The general trend, yes.
But then again, my computer is now many years old (some components more than others) and I’m pretty sure I could play every release from this year on the highest graphic setting (or at least on “high”) without performance issues.
What I’m trying to say is not “my PC is so great” but you you don’t actually need a current-Gen, high end PC to play even recent triple-A titles. Eventually it’ll get too old, but that is a very long time: probably close to a decade or something, if you individually upgrade some things occasionally.
You are absolutely incorrect. I have a really powerful modern computer, and I can’t do this. Well, I can, just with low framerate or significant upscaling (the latter I would call not the highest settings anyway). I can run them on higher settings usually, but not maxed. Hell, some of the worse performance ones I need to turn down to get a framerate I find acceptable (at least 60 for most games, usually 100+).
I mostly don’t care to play AAA titles anyway though. Not only are they performance hogs usually, I just don’t find them interesting. I’d almost always rather play an indie game that wants to experiment.
First you state I’m “absolutely incorrect” then you repeat and confirm what I said:
I can run them on higher settings usually
This seems awfully close to the “at least on high” in my comment, so what is the problem with my statement?
I also purposely kept it relative and vague, because personal preferences differ wildly on what is meant by “I can run xxx”, which you’ve basically doubled down on. I specifically do NOT expect 100fps in a triple-A on maxed out settings with ray tracing, and I thought that much was clear. But I can get to 100fps, with somewhat reduced settings, if that’s a game where I’d need that. To be specific this time: my general target is usually around 60fps for more visual titles, but it can dip a bit below in busy/dense/hectic areas. It also shouldn’t leave the 50s for significant amounts of time though.
That all being said, I also only rarely actually play AAA games. But I do play some indie games that are more on the demanding side, but then there’s most games I play that should run in a toaster… Which is another reason I never upgraded. It’s all still good enough.
My method of patient gaming is to only buy games that are $10 or less
Just got subnautica, hades 1, disco Elysium, oxygen not included, hollow knight (I’m sad to learn I don’t like platformers that much…), kerbal space program.
Shit, I have so much to play for the next 5 years just there.
Factorio and Hades 2 were my exceptions, got them full price.
THAT. That’s the spirit!
Got yesterday Tomb Raider pack for 5.60. Only because Tomb Raider 2013 was already in my catalog (that I probably bought also for less than 4 dollars) Still have plenty of games there that I’ve never played. Cant wait when me and my wife finish It Takes Two to move to Stardew Valley couch co-op.
Makes sense, most games were released before 2025
Like a true patient gamer I didn’t play a single game from 2025.
Respect.
Same.
Which makes sense because I didn’t even buy a game released in 2025
Silksong??
No thanks
The gaming industry for new games being released is brutal. The competition is sky high, and all you need to think about are games like Stardew Valley or Skyrim. There are so many options to choose from, a new young gamer has barely any reason to pay full price for any new games. We are entering the “Please play out game! It’s free!” phase, and still no one will spend the time. Time and attention are the most valuable thing.
“PAY attention” “How do you like to SPEND your time”
Those phrases don’t prove much but if more people viewed their time and attention as commodities… idk… they might chose to “invest” them in other things.
New games are expensive and the all those UE5 games run like crap, cause I can’t afford high end hardware either. Of course I’ll just play old games.
And thanks to AI hardware is getting even more expensive.I was just about to invest in a high-end PC when the RAM prices started to go crazy. I’ll wait it out. My PS5 is gonna make it easier for me to wait.
Wait for a PS6 that Sony will sell at a loss due to earning it back on games and salvage that sweet sweet ram and GPU for a home made PC lol.
Hopefully the gabecube will be affordable and able to run a lot well.
If they went by the same strategy as console manufacturers, that is, selling at a loss at start, they would kill off XBox and Nintendo and Playstation would also take a big hit
They’re not going to sell at a loss. The upfront cost will be a lot higher than for a PS5
Expensive and on top of that - there’s million different editions with different content and you get this long list of options and it just kills whatever interest you had in buying that thing because this is just obnoxious.
Unity and Godot also run like crap for me.
Whenever someone just uses SDL or something, I’m all over it.
I do buy new games even full price on rare occasion. Regardless of that, there’s nothing new games do much better than old games besides graphics and that mattering declined hard once league of legends, counter strike, fortnite, minecraft, roblox, etc became people’s childhood to their ongoing adulthood games. I’ve met people that haven’t spent a dime on genshin impact while having played for 5 years
No one is missing out on the best 2025 games if they’re playing the best games of 2015. Time is finite and if it’s filled with good, what difference does it make if it’s new or old. You’re not missing out if you’re playing the best games of 2000-2014 in 2025.
I follow emulation on Android communities and people love playing the greatest hits of the PS2, Gamecube, DS, 3DS, PSP, Vita and it seems to mostly be teenagers. And now we’re getting good PC emulation support and PS3 and X360 support is progressing. Switch on Android emulation is pretty good now. Android, Steam Machine, Steam Deck, Steam Frame, Legion Go, Rog Ally, GPD Win, Ayaneo. Even Switch 2. The relatively low power gaming scene is growing and that bodes well for “classic/retro/oldies” gaming.
It’s been 12 years since the PS4 launched. Early PS4 games don’t play much different than 2025 games. The classics oldie radio station of games are soon going to be very modern. 2007 Bioshock era games are already very modern and look pretty good too
According to Metacritic, there were only eight 9/10 or better games this year. Or two, if you ignore remakes, remasters, and sequels. Maybe the issue is a drop in quality this year…?
https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/all/all/current-year/
People don’t buy new games anymore because they often release incomplete. Why would I buy a game that is offering only 25% of its content. I’ll wait for it to be don’t and buy it at a discount in a year. Thanks
Fascinatingly, this number can’t even include Fortnite, since it’s not on Steam, and has got to be the elephant in the room in terms of play time going to older games. But that is something to keep in mind when you see stats like this. It’s not all “New releases failing.” A lot of it is “Games have a much longer lifespan now.”
Numbers wise, my top 3 were Helldivers 2, Warframe, and Vampire Survivors, all of which continued to receive content updates throughout 2025. These aren’t old games sitting on a shelf gathering dust that I went and unearthed. They’re in their prime. Warframe released a huge update specifically to coincide with the Game Awards, with a trailer featuring Werner Herzog. They’ve never been a bigger deal. Helldivers had their single biggest in-game event this year. I’ve also been spending a lot of time with Rogue Trader (just got a big patch) and Dark Tide (got two new classes and a lot of new maps added this year). Ready or Not and Insurgency also got content updates this year.
So, yeah, peeling people away from an existing title is a much slower process now. Games no longer land like a meteor. The real successes creep up.
This is not to say that there hasn’t been an absolute dearth of worthwhile content from the big studios. You’ll notice that every single thing I listed there is, by at least some definition, an indie game. Helldivers 2 has a big publisher in Sony, but Arrowhead were hardly a major or well known developer. Other than that, it’s all outside of the traditional publisher system. And that’s frankly a good and healthy thing. We’re seeing guys like Larian and Sandfall, Arrowhead, DE, Owlcat, Fat Shark, NetEase, Team Cherry, Super Giant, all just absolutely crushing it, and that’s genuinely fantastic news for the medium.
It’s weird how people look at the failures of Ubisoft and EA and act like this is a bad time to be a gamer. This is one of the best times there’s ever been to be a gamer. The medium hasn’t been this healthy since the glory days of the mid-nineties, and I say that as one of the old farts who grew up in those glory days. Sandfall made Clair Obscur with a team of 60, and it’s incredible. Owlcat made Rogue Trader for basically nothing in a shed and it’s one of the best RPGs you’ll ever play. Vampire Survivors had a budget of like three french fries and some pocket lint and it’s one of the most addictive gaming experiences ever. Balatro was like one guy and it absolutely blew up the world. The fact that we’re getting games this fucking good from outside of the big name publishers is genuinely amazing. I remember the mid 2000s when indie gaming was dead in a ditch, PC gaming was just nothing but console ports, and the only stuff we got was the endless drivel the major publishers shovelled out. Yeah, there were good releases sprinkled in there, but for the most part creativity and imagination were absolutely dead. Now we get stuff like Valheim, Stardew Valley, Project Zomboid, Space Marine 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Lethal Company, Among Us, Speed Freeks, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Escape from Tarkov, Shadows of Doubt, Hades 2, Forever Winter… And yeah, some of that stuff is janky or buggy or messy, but it’s inventive and cool and slick and all of it is coming from outside of the big names.
Which probably only proves that Steam Machines is going to be more than enough for everyone.
There were a lot of great fucking indie games released this year, from the comments a bunch of people here have missed some great indie games.
Hades II, Silksong, Blue Prince, Ball x Pit, Mandragora, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, Citizen Sleeper 2, Dispatch, Absolum, Megabonk, Constance, Wheel World, Cloverpit, that’s only a fraction of this year’s releases and I’m not even counting the more ambitious titles like The Alters and Expedition 33. Indie fans have been eating good for sure.
From the list I only own Silksong, Megabonk, and Expedition 33, I know about, but do not own and have not played Hades II, but I would still have a bunch of 2025 indie games I really liked. (The Wandering Village is an example from the country I live in even).
Don’t forget the one that SHOULD HAVE gotten GOTY: Kingdom Come Deliverance 2
KCD2 is not an indie game.
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Outside of a few notable exceptions, older games are ironically more novel and have more interesting gameplay.
And practically no one can actually afford the super duper premium Nvidia prices required to make an unoptimized UE5 engine game actually run well.
… Half of the gaming market in general is gacha games on mobile phones.
Most permaonline ‘hardcore’ gamers, people you see on game related discussion forums, as well as industry marketing execs, and yes, both pay for play gaming ‘journalists’, and most of your favorite youtube/twitch game opinion havers… they’re all delusionally out of touch with the basic economic reality most gamers are in.
This is why things like Stop Killing Games are important.
Publishers know that existing games are their primary competition, thats why they want them to be unplayable.
At this point, the disparity is so extreme that I would not be surprised if GTA 6 more or less ends up being the beginning of the end of Rockstar.
People are not going to be able to pay the prices they will need to charge for their basically ‘decade of investment’ game that primarily serves as an MTX platform.
The performance issues are a major one for me, nothing worse than firing up a new game and getting 40fps with tons of stuttering along the way.
I feel like most newer games also have trouble with low/medium settings not really being that much better for performance, so there’s no fix for it.
I remember older games where low was like staring at a character made from 12 polygons and everything looked awful, but it would run on just about anything.
Its because many game studios just started making many games that just assume you have some kind of raytracing capable GPU.
They largely stopped bothering to properly support and properly optimize for the hardware situations where you don’t.
A whole bunch of post processing and even just basic scene rendering?
Yeah, they’re now done in kinds of render pipelines that more or less blow up or chug without cards that have at least some ray tracing support, even if you actually have all your in game settings down to as low as possible.
Its hard to set up lights and bake light maps and such in the old fashioned way, its easy to just let the engine handle all of that for you as a dev, auto magically.
Problem is, very few dev teams actually know how to use UE5 properly, and on one level, I don’t blame them, it is absurdly complex.
Threat Interactive on youtube more or less has hours of extremely technical breakdowns of UE5 shennanigannery, and also comparisons to somewhat niche techniques used by select, older games, that are as, nearly as, or sometimes actually just better than many UE5 games at realistic high fidelity graphics… while also being more performant, running on older hardware.
Its exceedingly technical and complicated, but the upshot is: No, you’re not crazy, these idiots are often intentionally, often unintentionally, doing things in stupid ways, unnecessary ways.
EDIT: 12 polygons you say?
Runs on anything, you say?
… ok, hear me out:
What if there is more to a video game than just how graphically realistic it is… what if it could be immersive, convincing, memorable, complex, not totally railroad you through a blatently OP power fantasy, linear story, even make the player really think about some real world serious shit, while also having a bit of goofy levity from time to time?
Man if there was a game like that, you’d have to reinstall it or something, sheesh.
(This entire game fits on a single CD ROM, btw, less than 750 MB)
While I have no love for a lot of modern AAA devs, Threat Interactive is not an authority on whatever he preaches. No games shipped, only some UE5 snake oil config files. No proof of any experience or credibility, just bashing. I wouldn’t watch that stuff or bring it up as some sort of authority on 3D graphics.
Well, I also tinker with being a game dev, haven’t shipped anything yet, but I find his technical breakdowns comprehensive and enlightening, as far as it goes with render pipeline analysis.
Its also not just bashing.
As I said, he goes out of his way to showcase examples of better ways to do things, he finds rather rare or seldom used rendering techniques, and will do a whole breakdown of why he thinks these alternatives should be used instead.
His whole video on normal aware anti aliasing was fascinating.
He is suggesting superior solutions, not just criticizing poor ones.
If you can watch one of his hour long analysis videos and not think that they show any experience whennit comes to comparing, contrasting, and optimizing render pipelines, then frankly, I don’t think you’re qualified to have an opinion, as the breadth, and level of detail he goes into is superior to many others in the industry, and showcases itself.
I’m not saying he’s some kind of perfect game dev… there’s a lot more to being a game dev than optimizing render pipelines… but within that subset of game dev, I think he knows what he’s talking about.
Tim Cain (the lead on the original Fallout and a long time programmer) talked about his experience being a programmer for hire at a major studio later in his career. It as a culture shock for him to see younger programmers basically doing no optimization. When he talked to them about it the attitude was basically that it wasn’t worth the time to do, since none of the higher ups cared about it, and the programmers could easily get whatever they assignment was done with bloated, unoptimized code. There wasn’t any experience in optimizing or a culture of doing it.
I watch a good deal of his stuff on YT, and despite being I think roughly 20 years younger than him, I agree with his level of shock.
I used to work for Microsoft.
I have worked in varying different kinds of software dev, and have been making mods for games basically since I became a teenager.
… Almost no one optimizes anything these days, in my experience, be it a video game, a database or complex SQL query, … etc etc.
Most people seem to just be adding technical debt with reckless abandon, and its because management prioritizes slapdash, good enough solutions, over an actually maintainable and performant system.
This is a huge part of why Windows is a bloated pile of nonsense, which they think they can now fix with even more bloated nonsense (‘Copilot’).
Tech company managent and C Suite are basically cult members/leaders at this point, and their insanity is literally destroying the world, now that they think they can more or less build their idea of God, if only they can use all the economic capital in existence.
They’re insane.
This is partially why I’ve lost all interest in ultra-realistic, cutting edge graphics. I know that with them comes so much bloat that they are difficult to run, and really I realized how little I care about those.
Titanfall 2.
Metal Gear Solid V.
Decade old games on PC.
Still look pretty damned good, imo.
Hah! And here I am at a company where everyone does premature optimisations, that end up killing performance because they make the actually needed performance optimisations impossible without major refactoring.
He’s actually talked about that other extreme, though I don’t recall which video. Sometimes it will be ultra optimizing something that ends up entirely cut, or optimizing it to the point where it’s inflexible.
to your GTA 6 point: i will not be buying it until it releases on pc. rumor is, and history agrees, that it will be a console only release for like a year. and even then im gonna borrow it first to see if its worth a shit before paying a dime. and i might not pay even if i do like it lol
