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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

On the plus side, PC gaming hardware seems to last ages now. I built my gaming desktop in 2020, I had a look lately at what a reasonable modern mid tier setup is and they are still recommending a lot of the parts I have. So I'll probably keep using it all for another 5 years then.

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Its a double edge sword. Yes, back then 2 year old computer was old, but at the same time every 2 years a new generation of games came out that were like never seen before. Each generation was a massive step-up.

Today, a layman couldnt chronologically sort CoD games from past 10 years from looks/play/feel, new Fifa and similar is _the_ same game but with new teams added to it, and virtually every game made is a "copycat with their own twist" with almost 0 technical invention.

Yes, thanks, I don't need "technical invention" in the form of more shaders for hiding the ass quality of the gameplay. Mirror's Edge Catalyst still looks great despite being almost 10 y.o. and manages to bring 2080Ti on it's knees in FullHD+.

This is fine? Today’s games look beautiful and developers are hardly restricted by hardware. Games can innovate on content, stories, and experiences rather than on technology.

Feels similar to how painting hasn’t had any revolution in new paints available.

AAA games suck compared to 10 years ago though.

I disagree, AAA games started nosediving with the seventh generation 20 years ago and only recently have they started to tentatively show signs of recovery.

Do you have any examples in mind from each era? I thought Fallout 3 was quite good around back then. Today we've got stuff like Borderlands 4 (or whatever the newest one is) that barely run on anyone's PC, and general game install size has also shot up drastically so it's no longer really feasible to keep most of your games installed all the time and ready to play.

I mostly play indie/retro/slightly-old games these days, so I mostly hear of the negatives for modern AAA, admittedly. I'm also tempted to complain about live service, microtransactions, gacha, season passes, and so on in recent big releases, but maybe that would be getting off-topic.

> Today we've got stuff like Borderlands 4 (or whatever the newest one is) that barely run on anyone's PC

Just like Crysis did 18 years ago?

>it's no longer really feasible to keep most of your games installed all the time and ready to play.

Crysis was around 5% of common HDD back then. Now, it'd be equivalent of around 80 GiB now. That would be just about what Elden Ring with the DLC takes.

It's not a one-or-the-other. One wouldn't want content, stories, and experiences to stagnate just because graphics were improving, so why would the opposite be assumed?

> "copycat with their own twist" with almost 0 technical invention.

I think he meant the software side (game-systems wise), not hardware innovation

But your stuff from 2020 probably isn't AI "enhanced"!! Throw it in the garbage!

Sounds like a plus to me.

I was planning on hanging on to my Win10 PC, which was perfectly fine except that Microsoft were both pestering me to upgrade and telling me it wasn't possible, but the death of its SSD after 7 years put paid to that.

I have a PC that is probably at least 10 years old but works perfectly well for browsing, spreadsheets and the occasional lightweight game but MS has decided, in its infinite wisdom, to say that it can't be upgraded to Windows 11.

So I will probably install Linux (probably Debian) and move on and forget about those particular games... (~30 years since I first installed Linux on a PC!).

What sort of lightweight games? Nethack? Solitaire?

World of Tanks...

I've got a computer that I built in 2008 and upgraded in 2012. It's pretty solid for higher-requirement games up until about 2015, and can still handle lower-requirement indie stuff today.

I built its successor in 2020, using a GPU from 2017. The longevity of the PS4 has given that thing serious legs, and I haven't seen the need to upgrade yet. It still runs what I want to run. It's also the first post-DOS x86/64 machine I've owned that has never had Windows installed.

I still have a 1080ti which does swimmingly. There just aren't enough AAA/"AAAA" games coming out that I care to play. Oblivion remaster almost tempted me into upgrading but I couldn't justify it just for a single game.

The only reason I'd upgrade is to improve performance for AI stuff.

On the other hand, you're also stuck with design mistakes for ages.

The AM5 platform is quite lacking when it comes to PCIe lanes - especially once you take USB4 into account. I'm hoping my current setup from 2019 survives until AM6 - but it seems AMD wants to keep AM5 for another generation or two...

Aren't they waiting for DDR6?

There's minimal demand for Thunderbolt/USB4 ports on Windows desktops. It won't ever make sense to inflate CPU pin count specifically for that use case, especially when the requisite PCIe lanes don't have to come directly from the CPU.

You'd be better off complaining about how Threadripper CPUs and motherboards are priced out of the enthusiast consumer market, than asking for the mainstream CPU platform to be made more expensive with the addition of IO that the vast majority of mainstream customers don't want to pay for.

One person's "design mistake" is another person's "market segmentation".

x16 GPU + x4 NVMe + x4 USB = 24 direct CPU lanes covers 99% of the market, with add-ons behind the shared chipset bandwidth. The other 1% of the market are pushed to buy Threadripper/Epyc.

Just this year I finally replaced my 3rd gen I5 system. It was well over 10 years old and still just able to keep up with my workloads.

Now it's a node in my proxmox cluster running transcodes for jellyfin. The circle of life

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