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PC gamers, which games pushed your PC to its brink, GPU and CPU wise.

Lightjolly

Lightjolly

Member
Oct 30, 2019
4,576
Your PC: "Finally a worthy opponent, our battle will be legendary"


GPU wise would be Metro Exodus all maxed out with ray tracing, definitely gave my 2070 super a hell of a time

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CPU wise would probably be Ai War 2, where the game can have thousands of simulated ships and lasers which can really get your cores burning, definitely my i7-7700
90
 
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redflamingolingo

redflamingolingo

Banned
Sep 21, 2019
2,594
Microsoft Flight Simulator is the new stress test for GPUs. Wipes the floor with my overclocked 3090 without breaking a sweat.
 
Vandal Deca

Vandal Deca

Member
Oct 21, 2018
420
Quake utterly destroyed my 486 DX/2-66.

Not since then have I felt like my machine just couldn't hack it at all with a game and needed an upgrade...until Flight Simulator came along. I was feeling pretty good about my GTX 1070 until then. And now that I have a 4K display, the 1070 is really showing its age in various other ways too.

Problem is...I can wave money around but there's not a 3080 to be found. It's gotten bad enough that I've considered buying a friend's 1080 Ti as a holdover, just to eke out a few more frames, but I'm standing my ground.
 

TinTuba47

Member
Nov 14, 2017
3,805
I have a 3080 and Ghost Recon Wildlands can really bring it to its knees if I jack everything up real high. When I do, such a beautiful game though
 
Xeonidus

Xeonidus

“Fuck them kids.”
Member
Oct 28, 2017
4,278
Unreal Tournament 99 with direct 3d rather than software renderer back in the day. Upgraded ram and it was fine. First upgrade I ever did lol.
 
Jay Shadow

Jay Shadow

Member
Oct 28, 2017
2,608
Picked up Rage a few years after it came out and it would max out my 6 core cpu and shut down my system from overheating until I upgraded from stock cooling.
 
Trago

Trago

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,605
Flight Simulator and CP2077 are the only games to get my 1070 to go above 77 degrees Celsius and sound like a box fan.
 
Xiaomi

Xiaomi

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,237
Excluding unoptimized games like WD Legion and Cyberpunk, MS Flight Sim and Fortnite with full RTX bring my 3080 to its knees. But in Flight Sim's case it's also a big CPU strain, and I'm still on an 8700k for now.
 

Deleted member 39374

Banned
Feb 1, 2018
5,083
Crysis in 2007 put my 880GTS and Q6600 to its knees at 1024x768 lol

And Cyberpunk in 2020 actually my 3070 and 5600x do decently 1440p60-70fps with RTX
 
ChoklitCow

ChoklitCow

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,189
Muncie, IN
Battlefield Vietnam was the first game I remember pushing me to not use onboard graphics.

Wanting to play WoW at higher framerates as a MT was the next big push, as I was mainly console. First custom build.

Diablo 3 caused a complete rebuild.

Modded Skyrim was why I got a 770.

Fallout 4 made me get a 980ti.

Division made me get a 1080ti.

Watch Dogs Legion made me do another full rebuild.
 
JumbiePrime

JumbiePrime

Member
Feb 16, 2019
1,896
Bklyn
Games like No man's sky and the division 2 without the frame lock and at 1440p ping my gpu at 99% some times (2080) ...haven't seen my cpu go really above 60% (Ryzen2700) . I'm one of those weirdos who keeps checking the afterburner overlay ..like a lot lol. I dunno why I just like stats.
 
dalq

dalq

Member
Feb 13, 2018
1,103
Back when Vice City released on PC, I played the entire game looking at the ground, because it was the only way it could run with half decent framerate.
Every time I had to shoot or drive, it would go to sub 10fps.
 
I Like Ginger Cats:3

I Like Ginger Cats:3

Member
Mar 31, 2018
538
Doom 3, Giants Citizen Kabuto with some flashy GPU functions, Theme Park World (lol)

e: Oh, how could I forget to mention Outcast.
 
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hersheyfan

hersheyfan

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,749
Manila, Philippines
Control beat the ever living shit out of my GTX 970 a couple years back (leading to my ill-advised, knee jerk purchase of a 2070 Super, which I thankfully still managed to sell a year later).
 
RedSwirl

RedSwirl

Member
Oct 25, 2017
10,061
The Call of Duty 2 demo fried my laptop's motherboard back in the day.

Obviously Crysis, Metro Exodus, etc.
 
Yunyo

Yunyo

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,824
Hunt: Showdown eats my CPU and GPU for breakfast. (i7 6700k, 1070)

Only on the lowest settings can I keep them running at 90% capacity and below.
 
Jokerman

Jokerman

Member
May 16, 2020
6,945
Pretty much any modern game in 4k on my 10850k/3080 combo. The second Dark Pictures game 'Little Hope' couldn't even hit a solid 4k/60fps.
 
Mindfreak191

Mindfreak191

Member
Dec 2, 2017
4,770
The first release of The Witcher 2 made my 8600GT give up and die, literally took me out of PC gaming for 3 years because I couldn't afford a new system but got a cheap 360 to tide me over until TW3.
 
Nacho

Nacho

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,115
NYC
Well it used to be every game pushed my i7-5820k to the brink these past 2 years, but i finally upgraded to a ryzen and now it's my 1080 ti that can't keep up, while the ryzen is basically taking a nap. It's only been a few days but I havent found any game yet that really puts it to the test.
 
Nali

Nali

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,654
Long games of Supreme Commander made my Core Duo sweat back in the late 00's.
 

DonnieTC

Member
Apr 10, 2019
2,360
Half-Life demo on my integrated SiS motherboard graphics. Bought a PCI Voodoo3 2000 just so I could play it. Awwww yeah, dedicated graphics with 16MB of blazing fast 166MHz SDRAM FTW. Granted the Cyrix MII processor didn't help either. After I upgraded the graphics I later upgraded to a K6-2 450 MHz.
 
PianoBlack

PianoBlack

Member
May 24, 2018
6,645
United States
First game I ever upgraded for was WarCraft 3. Initially I tried to swing it with just the video card (went from a Rage Pro 8 MB to a Radeon 64 MB - yes just Radeon, this might have been the first card with that brand). That didn't work at all, still a slide show. So then I did my first ever build, going from a Pentium II 450 to an Athlon 1700+ or something and from 384 MB of SDRAM to 512 MB of DDR. Incredible!

Later games that pushed me to upgrade included PlanetSide and Crysis.
 
TheMadTitan

TheMadTitan

Member
Oct 27, 2017
27,246
Only games in recent memory that I can recall are Mass Effect Andromeda; I had an RX 480 at the time and had to crank that shit down to sub-1080p in order to maintain 60fps, and Cyberpunk 2077 on my current 1080, where I just gave up and settled with the 47-60fps fluctuations.

Everything else I've been able to avoid the screen blur caused by lowering the resolution to hit 60fps. Though in the case of Assassins Creed Valhalla, I needed SpecialK because the game was buggy.
 
chrominance

chrominance

Sky Van Gogh
Member
Oct 25, 2017
13,641
My favourite example of this: back in 2006-7, the game that would destroy my CPU once I got to a certain level of complexity: Dwarf Fortress. Turns out simulating all them dwarves is a big CPU hit, even though the game is literally rendered in ASCII.

My second favourite example is Cities in Motion slowing my computer to single-digit framerates, again because of the sheer number of commuters the game had to model once your transit system got to a certain size.
 

Something Creative

Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,186
Is there a Flight Simulator PC graphics settings thread? I've got a 3070/10700k and will be giving it a shot soon. Hope as well is to try VR with my Quest 2, but by the sounds of it that would be murder
 
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