While I agree with the general sentiment, Gothic 1 is basically unplayable on modern hardware. It outright crashes, and a generation of players misses out on one of the best/most pivotal western cRPGs in history.
Not to mention, graphics cards and even the worst potato are so much more powerful than our gaming rigs in 2001 that we can afford more than 32 MB of video memory for textures that don’t look like blurry smears, or perhaps, characters with actual fingers.
I’ve got a 7900XTX Ultra, and FSR2 does literally nothing, which is hilarious.
100% resolution scale, 128 FPS.
75% resolution scale … 128 FPS.
50% resolution scale, looking like underwater potatoes … 128 FPS.
I don’t know how it’s possible to make an engine this way, it seems CPU-bound and I’m lucky that I upgraded my CPU not too long ago, I’m outperforming my friend who has an RTX 4090 in literally all scenes, indoor, ship, and outdoor/planet.
He struggles to break 70 FPS on 1080p Ultra, meanwhile I’m doing 4K Ultra.
The downside is with a realistic encumbrance system, you’d either:
A) Not be picking anything up, or:
B) Making so many milk runs your head will spin from the tedium of ferrying useless bullshit back and forth.
Being 70-80 hours into STARFIELD, there’s non-cheating ways to avoid the encumbrance penalty, such as the “Powered Assist” backpacks which lowers O2 / stamina consumption by 75% when overencumbered. You can also deposit your loot into your ship’s cargo bay and sell directly from it by pressing Q at any vendor.
In ITR/Into The Radius VR, a fully realistic military looter shooter survival horror like STALKER; I picked up and carried EVERYTHING, but through the use of an inane amount of utility items, such as a chest harness, backpack, lower back bags, leg bags, thigh bags, and so on. (My favorite thing to put in my belt bags was cake slices and energy drink cans, made for hilarious streaming content when you take a bite of cake in a dire situation)
I still spent like 20 real-life hours slogging knee deep through swamp to ferry back an entire inventory of artifacts worth 5K/ea.
So my takeaway is, people are gonna loot and hoard; if they do that, encourage it. If not, reward the player with more credits from missions and other things that don’t involve scraping and strip-mining every planet for every ounce of metal.
To be fair, Cyberpunk 2077 came out in the peak of Covid GPU scarcity, I was still gaming on a GTX1080 at it’s release and the only way I could have a decent experience was running it at 50% resolution scale with 100% sharpening.
Sam Coe: “Y’know, captain, I’ve been thinking, I’ve been talking about myself for a long time, but I’ve never really asked you about yourself. It seems to me that you’re a mute of some kind, and everyone just talks AT you, rather than TO you. So I’ve got to ask you, how does a Chef like yourself end up working for a mining company on Narion?”
[Camera turns 180° degrees to face the player like in BG3]
• My name’s FuntyMcCraiger and I used to run a restaurant before we ran into hard times.
You know, mining is a lot like cooking. I like mining rocks.
• That’s none of your business. After being mute for 80 hours, I’ve decided to have good dialogue and good writing because they paid their writers a living wage.
• Shut the fuck up, Sam Coe.
• Can you smell what the FuntyMcCraiger is cooking?
I bought Baldur’s Gate 3 on launch day, within the hour, not even realizing the GOG version was DRM-free. We could’ve pirated the game but all four of my friends bought it.
That’s exactly how I got my copy. The highest tier AMD GPU (7900 XTX, 24 GB) dropped to $800 on Amazon sometime in July, performing about 95% as fast as an RTX 4090 in most titles, which cost $1600-1900 (10% sales tax), and outperforms or matches the 4090’s performance in Starfield.
I’m getting 108 FPS on 4K Ultra outdoors, and 128 FPS indoors, with Resolution Scale at 100% and FSR disabled.
My SmartTV came with frame interpolation, while not the same as frame generation, it helped make the 20-24 FPS of Tears of the Kingdom that much tolerable (60-ish feeling at times).