New System, Old Me

I spent a good portion of last weekend breaking in a new gaming PC that I ordered the day Nvidia 50XX series cards were listed. It was a new calendar year, so it was at least justifiable as a business expense. I also figured that, if we were rocketing towards a major global recession and authoritarianism in the United States, I’d at least have gotten a nice PC before everything went to hell.

I have found this less comforting than I imagined. 

Nevertheless, on Saturday morning I was unboxing a new PC and slowly logging back into every gaming service under the sun. With each new game library I added, I scanned the list of games looking for the ones I was most eager to try-out with new hardware.

This ritual used to mean more: in the breakneck pace of video card development in the late 90s and early 2000s, a new card meant that every game from the last three years might be utterly transformed. The game that barely ran at 640x480 a couple years ago was now running with silky-smooth framerates at a godlike 1024x768. Who could ever need more? Except of course there was always this year’s new hotness, mocking your upgrades. Because in the time it took you to save up for and install a new graphics card, a new wave of cards was about to come out and developers were targeting those specs instead. 

That “keeping up with the Joneses” quality of PC gaming was frustrating, but was also responsible for one of my favorite aspects of the hobby: with every upgrade, you kind of re-gifted old games to yourself. This Digital Foundry video on MechWarrior 2 does a great job of showing just how radically a game might change within the span of a few years, via new editions for different video cards or later “complete / collector” releases that rolled together expansions and a slew of updates. The MechWarrior 2 I played in 1995 looked and felt completely different than the version for ATI cards I was playing a year later, which was again different from the version of Mercenaries I was playing in 1997. What did the sky look like in MechWarrior 2? Well, it depends on what you played it on.

That doesn’t happen anymore. Performance gains are far more marginal and improvements in graphics technology and techniques are more subtle. You can give yourself eye strain trying to spot the difference between “high” and “ultra” graphics on a lot of newer releases, and the fancy upscaling that does such a good job of stabilizing framerates also means that it’s harder to tell without benchmarks how well a game is actually running. Nowadays, the only place I can really feel the difference in hardware is when I turn on ray-tracing and see whether the result is beautiful but unplayable, beautiful but nauseatingly choppy, or beautiful and tolerable.

Nevertheless, I still perform the ritual. I load up games whose performance and visuals I know intimately, and that I’m always happy to return to even if they’re increasingly unable to challenge modern systems. And then there are always a few games I have saved for later, knowing they are made to be technical showcases.

These are my current benchmark games. For the most part, they're old standbys, the ones that make a new system feel like home and remind me what great artists can do with all the tech crammed into a PC case.

Total War: Three Kingdoms

It’s really time to move on from this as a hardware trial, but this has been the first game I install on a new PC since it came out. Some other Total War games are harder to max out, but there are no recent ones I find as beautiful as this one and it’s easily the best strategy game Creative Assembly ever made. It couldn’t make a 4090 break a sweat on max settings, but I’ll be damned if I don’t love seeing huge armies crawling across  those huge expanses of Han China, or zooming the camera into the fray under a canopy of falling leaves in an autumn rainstorm.

Does Zhang Fei hit any harder when he dashes into a line of soldiers like a meteor striking the earth when you’re easily hitting 120 FPS on a big-screen TV? No, but it always looks awesome and reminds me of why I got into tactics games.

On the other hand, there are times an older games makes you start to wonder if the increasing number of tricks graphics cards are employing to eke out performance gains, and the scorching heat that modern systems generate, aren't going to wreak havoc with some older games. For instance, I have no idea why occasionally Three Kingdoms has a bunch of textures just come in as pure green pixels. But it doesn't seem good!