These are hardly surprisingly high System requirements, at least if the game looks the part. Achieving 1080p60 at medium settings on an RTX 2080, which performs pretty much on par with an even older flagship card (1080 Ti) sounds about right.
CPU requirements aren’t that out of place either, and I doubt you’ll actually need a 14900K for 60 FPS.
Intel Thread Director has been backported to Windows 10, and it wouldn’t affect AMD CPUs anyway. Windows 10 has shown slightly better performance in games compared to Windows 11 in many tests.
What are you missing without it? If you don’t missing anything, I wouldn’t bother. The Nitro Deck seems to add back buttons for example, but they’ll probably be limited to simple button mappings, nothing fancy like you could do with Steam Input for example.
Oh I agree with that and I’m a PC gamer 99 % of the time (well, like 95 % desktop PC, 4.5 % Steam Deck, 0.5 % consoles). I mainly use my PS5 for playing BluRay nowadays. I don’t fancy paying more for games, a subscription for online gaming and getting a worse experience (in terms of graphics/performance and things like modding but also voice chat options etc.).
Sony also built up momentum during the second half of the PS3’s lifespan by focusing on what’s most important for a games console: games. And they made the PS3 more affordable and therefore accessible with a great, focused PS3 redesign in form of the PS3 Slim, saving costs while only cutting features that weren’t really important to most potential customers (PS2 backwards compatibility).
They took that momentum, watched Microsoft fail and made a home run with the PS4 based on the perfect storm that was created.
The PS5 was simply a continuation of their good form, and Microsoft has just been going along with their Xbox brand and consoles, seemingly not knowing where to go, buying studios left and right which then proceed to release mediocre titles. They also tried something with their subscription service, but it turns out most people just buy the games they want to play instead of picking from a selection of games of which they wouldn’t have chosen most of them if they weren’t included in a subscription.
I started a second (and third) run of Baldur’s Gate 3 (4 and 3 Player group respectively), one as a barbarian and on as a bard. It’s definitely my favorite game in recent memory, it might even be one of my favorite games or single most favorite game ever.
Besides that, Mario Wonder has also been great, although I didn’t play a lot of it yet. I did finally get a (used) Switch for that game though, so I’m definitely intending to play through this game at least once.
It’s not about unlocking everything for me. Even with a second playthrough you’re probably far from seeing everything. Sure, the main storyline somewhat repeats itself, but there are multiple companion side stories and all kinds of other stuff you can stumble upon by accident that you then incorporate into your playthrough.
This is probably one of the best games for you to just enjoy, because you can still continue when failing something (unless your party is completely wiped, but fights aren’t really that hard in easy and normal difficulties). It’s a pretty personalized experience.
If by “geometry stretching” they mean polygons being rendered all over the place, that being fixed means Vulkan should be the better choice in most cases now.
I hope they optimize performance in act 3 though. The amount of NPCs and stuff going on in the world causes severe frame drops, even with my 7950X3D.
I rarely replay games, but this is one I fully intend to replay with a different/bigger party (currently playing with one friend, but I’m gonna get two more to buy the game for the next run), a different class (currently playing cleric, thinking about barbarian or bard) and on the highest difficulty.
I think you technically miss quite a lot of content as some choices make other things impossible to pursue. I also take it as it comes, by that I mean I don’t reload save states because I failed a dice throw or made mistakes.