I played GTA IV mostly because the mechanics were fucking awesome. The driving was incredible for an open world game like that. Euphoria was dope.
The first seconds of the GTA V gameplay trailers hinted that they neutered the driving. Then they announced the driving was ported from a Midnight Club game and that was the last nail in the coffin for me.
Tried the game once at a friend’s house and the gameplay feel was so shit I never played it again. I knew I’d always be distracted by it.
Whew. Some of you seem to be taking this like a personal attack and it’s kinda funny, tbh.
If you don’t like my use case or my suggestion, you can disregard it and move along.
I don’t live in a world where I need to min/max performance. All I want is for the games I play to look good enough to not distract me from the content. I don’t think I’ve ever used raytracing in my life. I don’t even overclock my shit or use any boost options on my hardware. All I care about is maxing put the lifespan of the hardware I buy and having fun with the games I play. Nothing else matters.
Buying games on deep cut sales years after the fact and enjoying excellent performance on a reasonably modern card is what I aim for. If that’s not for you, that’s fine. I don’t give two shits about modern games because half of the AAA releases are slop these days and you need to spend stupid amounts of money to have the hardware to make them look even remotely good on release. There are few exceptions to this.
So I won’t be made to feel bad about recommending that folks ditch Nvidia for AMD and live a couple years behind the curve. It works for me, it works for my friends, and it will work for some of you that read this.
I use AMD now because I migrated from Win to Linux last year.
I didn’t play The Witcher 3 until 2022. I had a Radeon HD 4890 until 2022 when I bought my first and last Nvidia card, a 2060. The 2060 could run it well enough that I never had to care about the gfx settings.
Because I switched to Linux and enjoyed it so much, I purchased a more modern card this time around to future-proof my PC. I got a 7800XT. I’m hoping I can get at least 6-7 years out of it before upgrading.
You’re 100% allowed to just enjoy it and not worry about the drama. That said, we’re looking at the fifteenth year on the horizon with no follow up to Skyrim.
A “AAA” studio taking fifteen years to make a game is unacceptable. Especially when its a game that guarantees massive sales thanks to the IP’s pedigree.
Bethesda leadership is incompetent.
Many people are going to say Linux. It’s probably annoying to hear, but its just the truth at this point. It probably seems daunting to switch over, but let me give you a very brief suggestion from a beginner on how to smooth over the transition.
Load up youtube and watch a few videos reviewing linux distributions for beginners just to see what’s recommended. My personal recommendation is to stick with a distro that uses KDE Plasma as the desktop environment since it will be very familiar coming from Windows. Once you decide what looks best for you…
Check and see if your computer has an available SATA port on the motherboard. If it does, grab yourself a SATA SSD and put your choice of a Linux distribution on it. Once Linux is up and running, set your BIOS to boot into Linux by default. Use Linux for everything you can and slowly migrate your workflow over to the new OS. Keep Windows as it is on its original drive and boot into it whenever you encounter something that doesn’t work or you haven’t set up on Linux yet. Don’t stress about rushing through this part. You have almost a year before Win10 is unsupported. Take your time and enjoy the process.
Over time, your Linux OS will become very useful for you as you uncover more ways to use it instead of Windows and Windows will be reserved for those infrequent edge cases where your needs are not met by Linux. This decouples you from the Microsoft ecosystem, making their enshittification less impactful on your life. I followed this exact path and I’m now a near full-time Linux user with Nobara as my chosen distribution and I could not be happier. I love my PC again.
The only thing I use Windows for now is sim racing games, as I haven’t yet dedicated time to find out how to get the expensive sim racing peripherals I own working on Linux yet. Apparently it’s possible and some people have had great success with it. This is something I will be actively working on over the coming year. Everything else I own runs perfect on Linux. I run a home studio so that means a lot of audio peripherals and specialized software. For 95% of my use case, Nobara just works.
The transition will take some work, but in the end if you can get yourself away from dependence on Windows, the options and freedom available to you expand like crazy. Its worth it just to show Microsoft that no, they no longer have a stranglehold on desktop PC users. The more we engage with non-mainstream options, the more the mainstream has to behave itself.
If that’s the case then that’s fine. It gives gamers agency over how they experience the games they pay for.