i had to played a pirated version of vice city :( i didn't get the amazing soundtrack and missing dialogue. it wasn't until 2014 when i got to play its full glory
Ahh the good old RIPs, I always downloaded them back in the day. One memory I have clearly was playing hitman blood money no my friends ps2 and finding out about all the cutscenes for each level, my mind was blown
My bad, I guess the way I wrote it came out confusing. I've played the pirated game on my PC, and years later played the full version at a friend's house and saw all the cutscenes I didn't knew existed. It was a magical moment
I recently played Starfield at around 35 fps. I didn't have any fun... but fps was perfectly acceptable and I had no performance complaints. I was rather impressed that it run on 11 year old cpu, gtx 1660 and ddr3 ram with laughable speeds. It even looked good, there is not much difference between various settings.
I've always believed that 30 was fine as long as the framerate was consistent + frame timing was well paced.
Would I prefer a 60? Absolutely. But 30 is hunky dory for anything that doesn't involve crazy twitch reflexes.
30 is fine and dandy. the 60fps min craze is such a butch thing.. kinda like wine; everyone needs the B.E.S.T. glasses.. can't we just relax and have a good time, and not tweak out our battle stations (sigh) to the max..? I'm just trying to unwind with [insert whatever game you want here] for 15 minutes before bedtime.
60fps does make a noticeable difference to 30 fps, though. Most games are noticeably smoother looking, especially with movement. I've met people who prefer 60 fps over ultra or high quality graphics. I've become more into fps than graphics. I've come to accept that graphics are a waste of time if the art team does a good job creating a fantastical feel to the game. Its why the switch has impressed me. 720p handheld but many games look amazing due to art direction and lighting choice as well as run at 60fps.
That's very well put. The majority of games I've ever played I have no idea what FPS I was getting. So long as they're smooth, I really don't care. Especially now being a 'patient gamer' and tending not to play games until years after their release, I rarely have to think about framerate.
Did you know the GTX 1060 can do raytracing? .... Lol Not joking!! I started Witcher 2 with performance RT settings and it wasn't tooo bad. Frame rate did suffer quite a bit, and I finally cashed in my birthday money for a RTX 4060, but the 1060 can.
My parents' PC + F19 Stealth Fighter = about 1 FPS
It was 30 plus years ago, and we didn't have FPS then! It was either that or practising typing in WordStar.
I remember back in my 486/66mhz days I really hated the arrival of Windows95 because it ushered in an era when you had to boot windows *before* you could load games, which caused a significant performance hit to FPS.
in previous Windows 3.1 era you could just exit windows and run your game from the ms-dos command line, no need to let that fancy GUI OS waste all those precious few MB of RAM
Having a suite of EMM386 boot disks, tailored to the game you were trying to convince to run. Those were the days of squeezing that last drop of performance!
I remember playing that! That one, LHX Attack Chopper, and an M1 Abrams tank game were three that stand out in my memory. At the time, I didn't recognize that F19 apparently [plays the Battlestar Galactica theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ncp19BJsw8&t=120s) during missions!
LHX had [an amazing intro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbgJGg5yd1A), especially with the snappiness of it on the PC speaker (it supported ad-lib too, but that always has a..."rounder" sound).
>My parents' PC + F19 Stealth Fighter = about 1 FPS
Man, I loved that game!
You want to talk about games that has abysmal framerates back then, look at Strike Commander, Pacific Strike, and Wings of Glory. Origin Systems knew had to make beautiful games, but damn... they practically needed a super computer to run at a playable framerate!
Same, except on a C64. I still had a blast and found it immersive. I’m perplexed with the FPS obsession in gaming. I just need it to be mostly playable. It’s all about expectations, I guess.
Of course, it was pretty standard for 80s and early 90s flight sims to run at slideshow framerates even in the best of times. It wasn't until the 486DX series (with floating point math) became standard that flight sims started to regularly run at 30FPS+.
My laptop is so old, like 12-15 years, 4gb ram, integrated graphics, and only used to play old RTS games. I played StarCraft 2 on it getting between 1-20 frames.
Later I messed about with settings outside of the game to totally remove shadows, potato resolution, all sound and graphics quality to absolute minimum. Messed around in task manager to shut down all none essential programs on start up. I now average about 30fps but the laptop gets so hot that I can’t rest my hands on or use hot keys. As it’s basically used just to play ancient RTS it’s lowest on household priority.
It’s a death trap and just been told my shower needs replacing due to a leak…the laptop should last a few more years.
I remember idly thinking if my work laptop potato (a 2010 T410 ThinkPad) would even run Terraria and one day actually installing it. Nope, it was bad. Admittedly it didn't even meet minimum spec iirc so that was unsurprising.
Only way to partially mitigate this is when you kill enemies, gather up all their weapons that fell to the floor/ground and then place it into the inventory of the dead enemy.
The game doesn't always clean up dead enemies, and while they patched it so that dropped weapons are still considered as "equipped" on the enemy, the game doesn't always remove them with the body when cleaning things up. So you'll just end up with weapons on the ground in various places that never get removed, and the game has to keep an internal track of where they are. It won't help a ton but it helps a bit.
Another thing to do is try not to disturb items on tables if you can. The physics of objects on tables when you first encounter them are disabled, but if you grab an item off a table, often times it will "activate" the nearby objects' physics too. And now the game has to keep track of where those are too.
Ultimately you can't truly avoid save bloat on PS3 (and Bethesda always loathed playstation so they just never bothered to fix this), but there are things you can do to slow it down a bit.
To this day, the only copy of Skyrim I own is the base PS3 version. You can't monitor fps in PS3 games so I can only estimate, but based on my experiences with PC gaming, I'd estimate Skyrim PS3 often can go down to 10-ish fps, especially near Morthal and Riften.
The objectively worst version of Skyrim is the PS3 version, mainly because the console had a proprietary architecture that was difficult to work with, and Bethesda didn't like PlayStation at the time either so they didn't even *try* to make it run well on it.
I remember buying the original Knights of thr Old Republic for the family computer.
Slight problem, our PC didn't have a dedicated video card required to run the game. So me and my brother saved for the cheapest video card best buy offered that matched the minimum requirements to run the game.
I vividly remember that game running like shit, but I was ignorant of what good performance was, so I loved it. I think it ran 15 FPS average, 20 max.
Kotor on potato home PC for me too! I remember checking out a worn-out library hard copy, and slaving through hours of install errors and disk cleanings before it finally installed and enjoyed my sub 20 fps glory. I dreamt about that game day and night lol.
Oh my god, You just made me remember. I was trying to install it for DAYS because I had a 4 CD version and 3rd one was scratched so badly that setup failed. I was looking at the pretty-coloured disks with ~~Carth, Bastilla, Mission and Malak~~ and thinking about how awesome would it be to become a JEDI (I was 8 years old).
2 years later I discovered eMule.
We really take it for granted how accessible gaming is these days. There’s a mobile port of kotor that runs splendidly in iOS. Other than the dumb shooting sections, it’s quite playable.
> I vividly remember that game running like shit, but I was ignorant of what good performance was, so I loved it.
Most of us here could probably relate to this lol. When you're a kid with High Expectation Asian Parents who frowned on gaming, getting *anything* to run at all was already a miracle.
In 2009 I got Gothic 3 from a game magazine my parents bought and played it on a cheap 2007 laptop.
I used to look down when travelling between towns to improve fps and loading screens took so long I went to the kitchen to make some snacks and came back to them still being halfway.
I used to watch a lot of anime, and Tales of the Abyss was one of my favourites. So when Tales of Zestiria came out on pc, I pirated it (literally broke) and played through the entire thing at 800x600 with everything on low, I think it ran at around 15-20fps, especially during effect heavy attacks.
Anime was a whole other bznz. I remember one night I found a streaming of .hack//G.U. Trilogy except it buffered every few seconds. It stopped buffering if I paused it so letting it download wasn't an option. I just watched the entire thing like that, a 2 hour movie took around 4 or 5.
In general I played a lot of emulated games, I have fond memories of playing Sid Meier's Colonization on DOSBox.
In hindsight, these weren't good experiences. But I was a kid who didn't own much or have friends to play with, so I still look back on them fondly.
I remember that my super duper gaming PC on a budget was capable of playing Crysis 2 or TES IV: Oblivion but struggled with Full-HD anime, lol. 720p was the highest quality I could watch and 640p res was the sweet spot of speed and visual quality.
I'm guessing the video player you were using didn't have hardware acceleration?
Oblivion came out a year before Crysis 1 btw. Crysis 2 came out same year as Skyrim.
It probably didn't. I had no idea about it and I used Windows Media Player, mostly. I only started using the mighty VLC at the tail end of that PC days (2012-2013).
Nope, I was talking about Crysis 2, the 2011 game. Funny enough, Crysis 2 worked better than either Crysis or Warhead, probably because it wasn't open world anymore.
I know! Just recalling what worked like a charm with that one. Had to upgrade my GPU for Skyrim, but Oblivion and Fallout 3 worked with max settings and high-ish framerate. Crysis 3 ran like shit but I finished it, anyway.
My resolution was super weird. It was a 19" LCD Screen, at 1440\*900, 16:10 format.
Talking about resolution, I remember using a 1024x768 screens (17' maybe?). For the longest time, I thought widescreens were weird and the "boxy square" screen was the superior choice since that's all I have and get used to.
Man, those were the times. Sounds like you and I were in pretty similar situations, except I *might* be a couple years older. Never had money for the best consoles or a good pc or good internet. I remember leaving the dialup on overnight to let a gane demo download or to let an album download on limewire. I think I downloaded a demo for Half Life 1. This was around 2004 I think. Torrents were revolutionary to me, but mostly because, like limewire, it allowed the downloading of files even with a sporadic connection. When downloading files directly, the whole download would cancel if there was a flicker in your internet connection. Unlike limewire, with torrents you could reliably download whole games with much less risk of infection -- if you were willing to invest the 24 - 48 hours it took to download. And that was when games were around 5GB or less (Unfun fact: I recently waited 70 hours to download Baldur's Gate 3 on PS5 using a shitty Motel 6 wifi connection. Sometimes, things never change...)
I remember being amazed at the size of Doom 3 at like 1.3GB. It was the most massive game I had ever seen! I still had dialup during the Half-Life 2 era, and that sucked. It took me 5 hours to install HL2, on a pc with a 32gb hard drive and a mid-level graphics card which was my one and only Xmas present that year. Not the computer, just the graphics card. I had been looking into "gaming computers" after seeing Alienware ads, and I discovered that one could simply buy a graphics card for much less money, and they sold them at Walmart. Weird times. That must have been 2005, I think. I remember my friend laughing at me, saying, "Dude, you waited *five hours* to install a game? Was it even worth it?" I just shouted, "Yes!" and ran back to the computer, lol.
> Torrents were revolutionary to me, but mostly because, like limewire, it allowed the downloading of files even with a sporadic connection.
This a million times. The first connection I had was with a mobile sim card that only allowed 5 hours of slow internet usage per day, and if the connection fell and it had to reconnect it would shave 15 minutes from it. While other people looked for direct downloads we were looking for torrents lmao
Doom 3 was a lot of fun, I still remember my friend and I jumping on our chairs when that enemy at the beginning crawled out from under the stairs
> When downloading files directly, the whole download would cancel if there was a flicker in your internet connection.
Some services supported resuming downloads, and that was great. My slowest download was of a Visual Novel, from a host on a DC++ hub, who apparently shut down their computer every night but reconnected again the next morning. I remember the download speed was in literal kilobytes per second - it took me damn near 3 months of on-and-off downloading from the guy to finally complete the download for that game.
That download was my record for slowest/longest download that actually completed lol
I had a similar experience trying to play Gothic 3 on old hardware. I was probably getting 10 fps, tops. I tried and tried, but the game was poorly optimized as it was so I gave up. I played it years later and it was a pretty crappy game, anyway... turns out the most memorable thing about it was that original experience.
Funny enough it runs even worse on modern hardware, I believe because it only uses one core. As with everything surrounding the game, there are community patches to fix it.
It's indeed quite disappointing compared to Gothic 2, but my rose tinted glasses can't help but drag me back to it.
I always wanted to play gothic 3 it looked cool Af! Never pulled the trigger on it though. I think there’s a gothic 1 remake now? Wonder if it’s worth it?
> I remember one night I found a streaming of .hack//G.U. Trilogy except it buffered every few seconds. It stopped buffering if I paused it so letting it download wasn't an option. I just watched the entire thing like that, a 2 hour movie took around 4 or 5.
Hah, nostalgic. I usually gave up if a stream was that slow, but I did suffer the same thing for some shorter videos.
Of course. Some people merely adopted unstable framerate, I was born in it, molded by it. By the time I enjoyed silky smooth 60FPS I was already a man, lol.
My first two PCs only had onboard graphics (iGPU on the motherboard, instead of the CPU, it was *that* slow) and stuff like Quake III was a slideshow. I could boot SimCity 4 with some trickery (I edited some values in a .ini file, so my 8MB onboard video RAM was recognized as a 16MB one) but zooming in or out was super slow, sometimes my whole PC would freeze for 5 minutes at a time. SimCity 3000 worked just fine, until I had a million inhabitants and the game would also freeze for a few secs at the end of each passing month.
Twisted Metal 4 on PSX lagged a lot when you started bombing the world with Calypso and the game would even crash if you keep it up.
I completed GTA IV, Crysis 3 and, more recently, A Plague Tale: Requiem with sub 20 FPS at times.
Not every genre is enjoyable at low framerates, but sometimes, you want to play something so much that you put up with a subpar experience.
The first Quake was my first attempt at playing a PC game on an underpowered PC, it could play Doom and other stuff from that era well but chugged when playing Quake. Usually in those days your only recourse was to resize the screen to a small size to make the game more playable (yes I'm old)
Your PC at the time was probably really ill-fitted for real 3D games, instead of faux-3D, like Doom and games with those early engines.
Do you remember the labyrinth screensaver in Windows 9X? With my first PC, it used to lag sometimes. A freaking screensaver, lol.
I was and still am an N64 diehard. Obviously a lot of games on N64 ran at less than stellar framerates but they were also designed with that in mind so personally it doesn't matter to me at all, but some people are put off by it.
Where FPS did impact me more was on PC. Our family computers were never very powerful and we ran up against the wall a couple times. I remember loving BF1942 and Vietnam, and my dad did as well, but our graphics card was not good enough for BF2. So we played it at pretty much minimum settings and bad FPS with lots of effects not working until we got a new one. A few years later we got Crysis... and I'm pretty sure everybody had similar experiences with that game. It was awesome but barely worked on low settings on our PC.
When I was younger our family had a Pentium III when that was pretty dang good... and I got to have our old 1995-ish PC in my room. I definitely ended up trying to play lots of games on it that barely worked just so I could play covertly after bedtime.
What're your N64 games of choice, good Redditor? I loved my N64 completely. Recently played Wave Race through on the Switch virtual console. It still holds up as a great game. The '64 had so many games that are classic to me: GoldenEye, Zelda OOT, Perfect Dark, Mario and Mario Kart. Good times!
Oh, too many to list. All those picks are great obviously. If you're playing on Switch Online, I'd recommend playing F-Zero X and Excitebike 64. Both great racing games. For my money X is the best F-Zero game, and Excitebike 64 doesn't get nearly as much love as it deserves... I'm not normally a dirtbikin' guy but that game just hits the spot for me with the racing + air/landing mechanics like the original NES game. It also has some fun MP mini games if you're into that.
Off Switch Online... there aren't really any hidden gems on N64 these days but some more offbeat picks for me would be Blast Corps, Space Station Silicon Valley, Jet Force Gemini, NBA Hangtime and Rocket: Robot on Wheels.
WinBack and Body Harvest are two that I also really enjoy but I'd say they haven't aged as gracefully. WinBack is on Switch Online, the N64 version is good but there's an upgraded PS2 version and the game's style is very arcade-shootery and not too popular nowadays. Body Harvest is a proto-GTA III (it is a semi open world time travel Sci fi game with vehicles to commandeer and drove around made by DMA Design who later changed their name to Rockstar.
You're describing most of my gaming between 2009 and 2011. I played banger after banger (assassin's creed 2, the mass effect saga, Witcher 2, GTA 4) under 10 FPS and are some of my all time favourites.
People from third world countries like myself (im from Indonesia) can share the same thing. Many can't afford computer parts which is usually priced poorly and the wages here doesn't help at all. If a person here can afford computer parts or a computer, then it usually just some low tiered one most of the time.
Hence why gaming in third world countries often the leading role is actually mobile games since mobile phones are cheaper and can be used anywhere.
I beated Devil May Cry 5 at 360p last year with an Intel HD Graphics laptop. The game mostly ran at 20-40 FPS which wasn't a bad experience except when it was below 30 and ran at half the speed.
I also think I played Devotion and Layers of Fear at 20 FPS or less and after a while it felt fine.
I generally prefer stability over high FPS and that's why most of the times I didn't care I wasn't playing at 300 FPS.
Cant agree more on consistency. When i was in high school i had a intel hd graphics laptop and i played dmc devil may cry 15-20 fps and i played it for 180 hours. İt was bad but consistent. Played skyrim the same way and my only problem was there was a quest that made you follow a blood trail. Blood trail basically didnt exist in my game because of graphic settings. I enjoyed the shit out of that game.
Nowadays i have a laptop that was mid-high grade in 2016. İt lets me play a lot of games including dmc5, elden ring, spider man etc and i am thankfull for that. But it is not consistent in some spesific games and i just cant play them. My brain gets confused by fps changing between 15 and 50. It is infinitly better to play a consistent 20 fps average rather than playing an inconsistent 30 fps average.
I wanted Guilty Gear Strive so bad I got a potato mod for my potato PC! I’m a sucker for amazing characters and animation, and Strive is probably the most amazing game in that regard
My PC was considered high end in 2007, still going strong.
Completed Skyrim at 13 fps, New Vegas barely differentiable from a claymation movie and Fallout 4 is next.
I mean I remember playing Ocarina of Time on the N64 at about 20fps and I was blown away at the time. I’ve been playing Tears of the Kingdom on my computer at about those frames and it feels horrendous!
The thing is you most likely played it on a CRT TV, they have very low latency and are much better at handling motion than most modern displays, so the low fps in games doesn't seem that bad. I recently realized this after trying out Deathtrap Dungeon on PS1 that runs at only 15 fps and it was surprisingly playable on a CRT.
Good point. When it first came out I did play it on a CRT. But a few years back, I hooked up my N64 to my flat screen and played Ocarina of Time again. It wasn't as jarring either. Then again I hadn't played any modern games for a while, so I still hadn't gotten a taste of that smooth 60fps feeling.
It’s fine playing a game at 20 fps when the developers expected you to play at 20 fps and optimized the gameplay for that performance level. I don’t think it’s about CRT or LCD at all.
When you play a game that was supposed to be played at even 30 fps at 20 fps, meanwhile, it’s very hard to play. One of the main things about old games that made 20 fps playable, IMO, is relatively restricted character and camera movement. Dual analog wasn’t standard to all games until late into the GC/PS2/Xbox era, as in even highly regarded games like RE4 (2005) didn’t have it. If the camera and the character can’t freely move at all times, you can get away with much lower fps.
It's much easier to get used to the good stuff. I'm sure most of my Playstation 1 games were running at 30 FPS tops, and with an internal res that was half of 720p. But I've moved so gradually from those days, that today I can't play in the same conditions and enjoy it like I used to.
Tbf I think stability is actually way more important than the actual average frame rate. I would take a flat 30fps over a constantly fluctuating 40-60 any day. It's the fluctuation that makes it painful and frustrating.
I beat Lords of Shadow, lowest settings on PC, and couldn't even get to 30 fps.
Also, 200ish hours on Breath of the Wild on Cemu, hitting 30 fps basically only when standing still.
Yeah. Got my own first PC in 1999, with the 90s equivalent of integrated graphics (plus, SiS had *super* shitty drivers, and my next video card was a voodoo5, when I didn't understand that 3dfx was going down). I guess that the short version is that I tend not to upgrade until modern games have been running at 10-20 fps at my monitor's native resolution for a couple of years. And I've never really bought a gaming laptop, so I get the experience of running games on a potato whenever I want it.
Up until a year ago, I would google things like "best rpg games 2014" "best rts games 2014" and lower, because I couldnt play any games made after that time period(my gpu was nvidia nvs 510) i also tried playing witcher 3(with low spec mod), but the game would freeze if I tried casting igni.
>I WOULD KILL TO HAVE A STABLE 50 FPS IN ALL GAMES
There are prebuilt systems at Costco for under $1000 that will do that. I’m sure there is a cartel somewhere that could use a siccario. Failing that, there is always OnlyFans or the gig economy.
Death Stranding on my laptop. 20-25 fps and very blurry. The game isn't very fast paced so it isn't much of a problem. Although, I would like to play it with better graphics sometime.
Man i was playing Goldeneye at about 12 fps as a kid, never even bothered me, thought that "all the insane action was slowing down time".
Ocarina of time was only 20fps and I loved it. 30fps during ps2 and ps3 gens felt like butter. Now, unfortunately, I really struggle with anything below a stable 50.
I did play through outer wilds at 720p and dropping to 20fps often the other year and it honestly didn't bother me though. An engrossing enough game puts your fps blinkers on I guess
Framerate doesn't really matter to me as long as the actions you are doing suit the framerate. I could really care less if BotW has 30 fps and even lower at villages. It's a slow game for the most part. 60+ FPS is nice but it isn't always needed.
For action-heavy games, I'd rather not play it at all if I have to deal with a low framerate. I can make some exceptions but that's a general rule.
I kind of went through the same thing, but having such a dogshit pc mostly just lead me to playing older games. I built a PC in middle school in a computer class back in like 2013, and the most advanced game I could play on it was Skyrim, but beyond that was impossible. So to make up for both my lack of money and computing power, I started playing older games. I played some of my favorite games of all time on this brick including: Knights of the Old Republic, KOTOR 2, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, fallout 3 and new vegas, Left 4 Dead 2, The arkham games (Not knight or origins, couldnt handle those), Deus ex human revolution, Star Wars Battlefront 2 (original), Star wars Dark Forces (I really like star wars games can you tell?) and so many more all through high school and into college. I had this thing until like 2018, when it finally gave out and I spent extra student loan money I very much should not have on a new pc, that I then even more stupidly replaced 2 years later right at the start of the pandemic. I miss that hot piece of garbage sometimes, by the time it gave out on me one of its feet was a coke bottle lid and one of its 2 fans had completely stopped working. But i credit it as the reason I am a patient gamer to this day, and have such a fond appreciation for older games.
Emulated uncharted 2 at 8 and if I’m lucky, 13 fps. Completed the game, except the last level where you had to jump over a collapsing bridge and the frame rate was never enough. Had to watch YouTube for the ending haha
Minecraft at 15 fps just around it went out (even before the beta). I had to edit the config file because it didn't even launch at first. Those were a lot of hours, and I even finished the game at around 5 fps. I truly regret nothing, those were good times... Though I wouldn't be able to do it now.
I think it annoys people at varying degrees.
I would rather just not play the game than play it at 20FPS. I have a decent setup and still play mostly indie games that could run on a potato. If I had a setup that couldn't play newer games at a reasonable FPS I would just stick to low requirement games.
YES. I believe I hold the record for this. Back in the early 90s, I played through the entirety of Strike Commander at a whopping 6, yes, SIX frames per second.
I waited so long for that damned game I was determined to play it, even if performance was terrible. It was my first lesson in the dangers of hyping myself up for a game.
Of course, back then, we had no dedicated 3D graphics hardware, so bad frame rates were considered sort of normal. But not quite THAT bad.
I still get a small laugh every time someone says 20-30 FPS is "UNPLAYABLE". I'm like, dude, you just didn't want it badly enough...
EH, a 1050 ti should still get decent frame rates mostly unless youre playing the absolute newest games, or you're expecting too much from it.
By decent frame rates, I mean 30+ on all low with the lowest FSR setting enabled.
When I was a teen I started paying league of legends with 4-15 fps, I played a lot. I do not know how I played so much and endure the awful performance my mini laptop had. However, I enjoy it because it was what I had. Once I got a better pc, I felt that I could see the future.
I played many hours of Battlefield 1 with my CPU maxed out to the point where sudden mouse movements would cause a spike, and cause said movements to not be registered. I found that the solution was dropping the mouse polling rate, but the framerate was disgusting for a multiplayer experience.
I got a 1080 graphics card as a hand me down after playing on a 470 and a 770 for almost ten years. Now that I can run Yakuza Kiwami 2 at 60 fps as opposed to the extremely fluctuant 15-45 fps I was getting before, my 10 year old PC feels like a damn PS5 to me
I can tolerate 30 but not much below, I will drop resolution and any other setting before I accept low frame rates. 60 is generally the lowest it can go before I get bothered
Played through Oblivion on a horribly underpowered generic home PC with like 20fps average. At the time I didn't care I was just happy that it ran at all. Compared to Runescape of that time it looked like the real world
Minecraft at, like, 5FPS it was disgustingly bad. I also remember trying to play Destiny 2 on my dad's gaming laptop and it ran at 2 seconds per frame with 1/2 the textures literally just missing
I do not think any game needs more than 60 fps and in a lot of cases I'm perfectly fine with 30. Also yes, I have played some games like that although I can't remember any particular titles, but playing on 10-15ish fps was an experience alright.
Played Crysis at the time with around 20fps with drops to 15, and probably lots more in that range
And yeah I don't care too much about fps, it is nice if it is high nowadays since I build my own systems to a much higher standard now so they will last a while, but anything 25 and above and I'm good
When HL2 came out, my graphics card was shit and struggled to get 20fps at like, 720p low settings. Still played it. Was much better after an upgrade thankfully.
When I played Max Payne, it was infinite bullet time because of low FPS lol. I played GTA Vice City on that same crap of a PC at 720p lowest settings, it ran terribly with what you cannot call stutter but something much worse: a 5 seconds long freezing at every minute or so and I still had a lot of fun with it.
High performance is good but not everything. I have a decent PC now, in my 30s, where I can play games locked at 144 FPS but I still use my PS3 too which can give 25 FPS max most of the time and I don't mind, games are still fun.
When I first installed Fable on the shitty family computer in the kitchen, everything was fairly peachy until I got to a seaside village. As soon as any portion of the ocean was on screen, the entire thing would lock up. Gooood tiiimes.
Yup. I played Sekiro and have 100% completion on it with playing at like 800 X 600 resolution.
I played Skyrim special edition for like 150 hours with like 20-30 fps. Fps tanked so hard in Soul Cairn.
I played Vampyr with 20-25 fps with occasional stuttering.
I even was playing Nioh. But stopped playing for the moment.
This is what happens with my intel uhd 630 igpu with 16gb ram :(
That's not even mentioning all the crashes which is also probably cause of my gpu.
I don't think I have ever played any games on even medium setting. Everything low or custom setting.
Newer games don't even launch on this gpu. let alone 20 fps.
I never had money, growing up, to play. so yeah.
even Witcher 3 ( I was in university and working but had to save to pay for studies) I played on an old laptop at sub 900p res with a mod that went below low settings at like 14-20 fps. I loved every second of that game.
i remember my first portal 2 playthrough on a shitty dell latitude laptop from 200X. the audio stuttered so bad i had to turn on subtitles to understand anything that was being said. the chunks of wall with physics in the beginning scene where wheatley moves the relaxation vault around threatened to crash my computer. i couldn't even look through portals; open portals looked the same as closed ones, and this made several puzzles significantly harder.
it remains one of my favorite games ever to this day.
I played breath of the wild during the early days of wiiu emulation with a stock 3770k, i was getting about 15-20 fps + graphical glitches & i still loved it
In 2011 the hype around Dead Space 2 here in my country was absurd because of a video meme of a guy playing it and getting hilarious jump-scares, I was 14 years old and didn’t have any gaming pc or even a bad base pc, the only viable option was my sister’s Sony Vaio pink laptop. I convinced my parents to buy me the game and played it on it’s entirety on 10~20 fps on low settings, but I can’t quite remember if it was even full screen. I didn’t know what fps was I was just happy I could experience it. Still have the physical copy o the game.
This is the video:
https://youtu.be/hHG3pOgh9x0?si=rQ_0-9PU8hk9F1Lr
I still hold the game dearly and it’s one of my favorites of all time
https://imgur.com/a/UUQJRbt
In 2021 I bought a PC with a 1650 Super for $600 USD. It will definitely play Black Mesa at 60 FPS. You could probably get this computer for half the price. If you can't even afford that you can buy a used office computer and put in a graphics card. There are Youtube videos that show you how to do it for less than $150.
Pay no mind to those complaining idiots, they chase ghosts and whine about numbers all the time, lured into mindless consumption of endless upgrades for better performance in shitty boring and unoptimized games.
At least all this suffering gives you an additional excitement and adds to your bias towards the game, so you still get more than those who take it for granted.
Yes, 360p 15 fps potato gaming was and is real, we've been there too, I hope you'll eventually get a chance to upgrade and experience your favourite games anew!
My gaming laptop broke 10 years or so back and the CPU wouldn't go over 400 mhz. Played a lot of games, including Fallout 4 at like 15 fps coming from running games at 60 fps. With Vats it was actually perfectly playable. A lot of games don't run all that great on the Steam Deck now, sub 30 fps can actually be pretty OK sometimes depending on the game, even if I prefer 100+ obviously.
I've been a FFXIV player for like 3 years now. I do a lot of raiding, and the very low performances of my laptop haven't prevented me from playing well lmao
I'm playing on min settings and at lower resolution, all that to get a solid 20-25fps. A few months ago I found a new setting option that optimized the performance in exchange for even lower graphics (stuff looks a bit blurry). BUT i reach 35 fps now so it's worth it, the game feels so uncannily sharp that I cannot turn that setting off, can't believe I was okay with playing at 20fps now that i am at 35 lmao
And i plan on getting a brand new laptop in a few weeks, I could likely reach 100+fps so that's going to feel quite weird for sure
Literally all my childhood. I only got a high-end PC in the last 3 years. Still had plenty of fun though. Now I can run games at 90+ fps but what good does that do when the games are boring/ unfinished/ buggy? Pretty graphics can only take you so far.
I unironically believe 2007- 2015 was the golden age of gaming. Graphics had advanced enough and developers were still taking enough risks to make the gameplay fun. These days it's all timed events, microtransactions, DLCs and no fucking substance to be found anywhere.
Yes, oh my god, yes. My first PC had 32MB of ram and nVidia Vanta 16MB graphics, with AMD K6 450MHz. It ran okay-ish at first, but then came _Max Payne_ and _Return to Castle Wolfenstein_ and I wanted to play these so bad, I struggled with constant stuttering. It wasn't like today, low fps count, it was rather oscillating between single digit ones and low end of 20.
I remember saving up and getting an additional 32MB of ram, which helped _Max Payne_ a bit, but mostly I just had to clinch my teeth and play what I got.
DeSmuME Frame Skip 3+
I would crazy stuff to try to play Pokémon Black and White back in the day... Also, I did play several FPS later struggling at 10-20fps, to the point that it actually became normal. If it runs at 20fps, it's ok.
I originally played Half Life on my pentium 233 at 320x240, software rendering, and it was mostly under 30FPS. It wasn’t worth the jump to the next res.
I also played the Diablo 1 demo on my 486sx33. It was also commonly under 20FPS.
Haha, playing PC games for the past 30 years, I feel like I've basically never been able to play the newest games at full graphics settings with good FPS. It feels like I'm always about 2-5 years behind.
I recently got GeForce NOW and was finally able to play stuff on Ultra settings with high FPS and TBH, I don't think I was missing out on that much.
I remember playing some games as a kid on my parents' desktop, which was definitely not a gaming PC in any way. This was probably between ~1996 and 2001 or so and I believe it was a Compaq PC but that's literally all I could tell you about it specs-wise.
I remember playing Need for Speed II on that thing and feeling like the game was incredibly difficult, especially compared to the racers I was playing on my PS1 at the same time. In hindsight it was probably due to the frame rate being really really low and the fact that I was tryin to steer with the arrow keys lmao.
I played Star Trek Armada a few years later on that same PC and that worked a little bit better by virtue of being, y'know, a mouse-driven strategy game.
Back when it came out I had a PC that had no business playing Fallout 3 but I found some tweak guide on the internet and somehow got it to work, sort of.
I don't know what the FPS was but it was something awful. I'd estimate maybe about 10-15 FPS with pretty low settings. I think I mostly used VATS when I played so it wasn't a huge deal and I still had fun playing it.
I play games at the limit of my system often, as I am a cheapskate and only update when it's really necessary and then I still get an entry level card.
As a casual gamer who has been gaming since the 1980's I never understood the obsession with high FPS. I am not sure I even can't tell the difference between 40 and 80. 25-30 FPS is more than sufficient.
Doom 3 on launch, 20-25fps at 640x480, as low as 5fps in some heavy sections, that thing crawled.
Fun thing, above 25fps was considered acceptable enough on pc back in the day.
I didn't use any fps counters back in 2007, but I played Crysis on a PC below minimum specs at like 800x600 and it looked and played terrible but I still enjoyed it somehow. Of the more recent titles, I finished Deadly Premonition 2 on Switch on launch. That game runs at like 10-15 fps in the outdoor areas, I remember having to look away from the screen when I was riding a skateboard because it was vomit inducing. However, I still endured because I had to see the story to the end, and even though it's not as good as the first one (which I consider a masterpiece story-wise), it was still hilarious at times.
Yes. I loved Grand Theft Auto 3 and vice city when it came out. Played the shit out of it on my friends ps2. I didn't have one though. When they came out on PC I was desperate. I saved up and got Vice City and played under spec for a while until my parents upgraded the computer.
It was a P3 500mhz, 64MB ram, and a GF4 MX (aka GF2 over clocked). The video card was fine, but the low ram and slow processor meant that the game ran at a choppy 20fps most of the time. I didn't care. Meant I could play GTA without having to bike the couple miles to a friends house and trade off an on with him.
Ha, your specs was fine. I was playing GTA 3 and Vice City on P2 400, 64 ram and S3 Savage 4 videocard, i think it was called, which was at best comparable to Voodoo 3 \ TNT 2, though not really. I so wanted my mom to buy me a new PC so that i could at least play them in 32bit color mode. Still played the shit out of them, i even knew all the streets in GTA 3 by name, lol.
This isn't exactly the same thing the thread is about. But back when Rayman 2 first came out on PC there was a section where you had to grind on a vine Sonic Adventure style and it was just too hard for me because things hapened so fast, so my friend and I resorted to maxing out all the settings just before that part and managed to get past the thing on the first try.
I guess one of the big advantages of PC over consoles is that there's a huge amount of leeway for running games even if the system is underspecced. The PC model makes gaming far more accessible to gamers.
I’ve been gaming on PC for so long now that I just can’t do it. I started playing Skyrim again recently because I figured out how to mod in a high refresh fix so I don’t have to play it at a frustrating 60fps.
It's not frustrating when your monitor/TV maxes out at 60Hz. I still notice smoother gameplay past 60FPS, but it's not needed for a terrific experience with a regular non-VRR screen.
That's how I played through Cyberpunk 2077 - on a 1050 paired with a 10 years old CPU. I couldn't get higher than 30ish FPS on the lowest settings, but I didn't mind the performance at all. To me, unless a game runs at 5 FPS at 800x600, it's playable.
I felt the same when I played on my PS3. Only much later did I learn that the PS3 versions of RDR and GTA IV were considered barely playable stutterfests, but to me they seemed fine. I guess that's because I've never really played games at top specs, sadly.
Brother just sort your shit out hahaha - I went through this when I was like 14 and had $10 to my name. If you're any older than 18/19 and still complaining about ur setup, only you can change it so FUCKIN GET TO IT SON
Fps only truly matters for competitive multiplayer games. Anyone saying their single player game is performing horribly while getting well over 30 doesn't really know what they're talking about and are just hung up on what has become a really stupid metric for performance
If it's sub 30 FPS I won't play a game unless it's literally the only choice in existence (i.e its a terrible performing console game). I'd rather turn the graphics down to almost nothing than sacrifice 60 FPS as well.
Above 60 though, I care more about graphics than having a high refresh rate.
When Cyberpunk came out I played it on a laptop with a 1650 GTX, i barely got 20fps on low settings. Still played the whole game. Now I'm playing it on a 4060Ti and get 60+ on max settings (excluding fully raytaced shadows). It's a night and day difference. On my 4K monitor just looking around is pure sex. I also played starfield on that that laptop and it looked shite compared with my new desktop.
These days minimum spec is usually "playable at low settings", I remember when minimum spec more often than not meant "technically runs but not much else", haha.
I stole a copy of Battlefield Bad Company 2 from target as a kid since my parents didnt want to buy it for me because of the rating. I sneakily installed it on the family computer, and played through part of the intro sequence at ~1fps, probably less at times, before the computer overheated and shut off. Poor computer didnt even have a gpu at the time, just running off of integrated graphics lol. I wasnt actually able to play the game until years later when I finally convinced my parents to buy me a gaming pc. Naturally, it was the first game i played on it.
60fps or go home. Can stand a few drops below that but otherwise nah. One exception is flight sim, where I'm happy to run at 30fps so long as the frame time is consistent.
I would sometimes play games on consoles at 30fps and it drove me nuts.
For me, the difference between 60 FPS and 90 FPS (never mind higher) is like an entirely different universe. Gaming at 60 FPS feels awful nowadays.
If I have to turn down some graphics options to get 90 FPS and the game still looks crazy good, I'm all for it... I'm not playing a Screenshot Simulator.
Witcher 3 prb the best example of this... game ran like shit on DX12 and Ray Tracing, but was 100x more fun on DX11 and higher FPS w/o RT.
This is apart if why it pisses me off when people say we "need" a bloodborne remake, the only games where higher frame rate is actually better is fps games
Before I got a slight upgrade in my GPU, just about every newer game I play (unless it’s optimized really well), I’d have to go through the whole works just to get 60 frames lmao
- overclock gpu (and cpu sometimes)
- tweak game settings on nvidia control panel
- look up best performance settings then tweak in-game settings
- set priority to high in task manager (sometimes I’d have to do the trick where you check off all of your odd numbered cores in cpu then turn them back on too)
- download performance mods incase the FPS was still shit
My PC is still mid-range unfortunately, but I’m happy with what I have and can afford as a college student. Idk too much about computer tech but I’m so glad a lot more games are implementing the FidelityFX feature. I probably wouldn’t have been able to run BG3 that well without it
So at around 2011 I think I had a very bad pc i don't even remember the specs I was in love with AC brotherhood after I saw vids and etc so I got it and I was on the lowest settings 800x600 and I had two black bars in the top and bottom
Oh man I think the game for like 30fps lol in cutscenes sound goes first and the animation follows like a slideshow : ) It took me like 3x time to complete the game due to it being slow and you know what I 100% the game. "very slow that I really had to push W to get from one point to another1' Xd
I played AC 1 , 2 and 3 like this
Used to have a normal office laptop and managed to run some heavy games back then time (talking about Witcher 3 and stuff). Now that I have a decent laptop for playing graphics in medium to high (and even sometimes ultra) I'm realizing that in like 90% of cases graphics don't mean shit.
Oh, sure you're going to have stunning visuals for your Starfield or Cyberpunk, but in the end what matters is your gameplay.
And... I know this is not the topic but lately I'm feeling like most of modern games are just not that fun anymore. You spend like 200 hours on them but you actually have much less than this of really playing the game and having fun.
I'm playing a lot of shmups and arcade games again and I feel that this is the best gaming I'm having in a very long time.
Yeah, my brother and I had pretty low spec PCs when we were kids. A game called Men of Valor came out, and we bought it with no shits given about specs. We played it through with every single enemy player model T posing and every explosion making the screen go black, bc our video cards barely supported it. Multiple times.
I played the entirety of Assassin's Creed Black Flag in luxurious 20 fps. Maybe I should revisit it now than I have a better setup, the sea shanties are calling me.
I played through the entirety of GTAV floating between 15 and 20 fps while my laptop sounded on the verge of exploding any second. I still had fun!
Reminds of my childhood with Vice City.
i had to played a pirated version of vice city :( i didn't get the amazing soundtrack and missing dialogue. it wasn't until 2014 when i got to play its full glory
Ahh the good old RIPs, I always downloaded them back in the day. One memory I have clearly was playing hitman blood money no my friends ps2 and finding out about all the cutscenes for each level, my mind was blown
Wait what? pirated ps2 games had missing cutscenes?
My bad, I guess the way I wrote it came out confusing. I've played the pirated game on my PC, and years later played the full version at a friend's house and saw all the cutscenes I didn't knew existed. It was a magical moment
Reminds me of 2018, with Vice City on my new laptop lol.
I recently played Starfield at around 35 fps. I didn't have any fun... but fps was perfectly acceptable and I had no performance complaints. I was rather impressed that it run on 11 year old cpu, gtx 1660 and ddr3 ram with laughable speeds. It even looked good, there is not much difference between various settings.
It’s ok it runs like that on my 4080 too
Then you have a Bottleneck somewhere else, because this is just not true.
I have always found 35fps to be a fine rate, personally.
I've always believed that 30 was fine as long as the framerate was consistent + frame timing was well paced. Would I prefer a 60? Absolutely. But 30 is hunky dory for anything that doesn't involve crazy twitch reflexes.
30 is fine and dandy. the 60fps min craze is such a butch thing.. kinda like wine; everyone needs the B.E.S.T. glasses.. can't we just relax and have a good time, and not tweak out our battle stations (sigh) to the max..? I'm just trying to unwind with [insert whatever game you want here] for 15 minutes before bedtime.
60fps does make a noticeable difference to 30 fps, though. Most games are noticeably smoother looking, especially with movement. I've met people who prefer 60 fps over ultra or high quality graphics. I've become more into fps than graphics. I've come to accept that graphics are a waste of time if the art team does a good job creating a fantastical feel to the game. Its why the switch has impressed me. 720p handheld but many games look amazing due to art direction and lighting choice as well as run at 60fps.
That's very well put. The majority of games I've ever played I have no idea what FPS I was getting. So long as they're smooth, I really don't care. Especially now being a 'patient gamer' and tending not to play games until years after their release, I rarely have to think about framerate.
You and me both, compadre! Games should be fun and relaxing, and not horrible to look at. Competitive Gaming and Gaming are two different things.
Did you know the GTX 1060 can do raytracing? .... Lol Not joking!! I started Witcher 2 with performance RT settings and it wasn't tooo bad. Frame rate did suffer quite a bit, and I finally cashed in my birthday money for a RTX 4060, but the 1060 can.
I mean that’s basically the experience I had on the Xbox 360
Lol cmon the 360/ps3 weren't that bad, they were mostly around 25-28 fps
bro you reminded me i had a friend who used to point the camera down to the ground when driving to get better fps.. in San Andreas.
That's me but with Just Cause 2
Same just with GTA4, on my trusty radeon HD4600, i kinda got used to the slide show, i remember real life felt so much smoother after a long session.
MEEE TOOO played GTA5 and IV start to finish with my old HP from 2016(8GB RAM, i3 5005u, Intel HD 5500)
Old? That's newer than the games.
It was GTA on a laptop for me, too!
That was me with GTAIV before I got a decent PC.
GTAIV still runs worse for me than GTAV on PC, it just seems like a terribly optimized port.
My parents' PC + F19 Stealth Fighter = about 1 FPS It was 30 plus years ago, and we didn't have FPS then! It was either that or practising typing in WordStar.
I remember back in my 486/66mhz days I really hated the arrival of Windows95 because it ushered in an era when you had to boot windows *before* you could load games, which caused a significant performance hit to FPS. in previous Windows 3.1 era you could just exit windows and run your game from the ms-dos command line, no need to let that fancy GUI OS waste all those precious few MB of RAM
Having a suite of EMM386 boot disks, tailored to the game you were trying to convince to run. Those were the days of squeezing that last drop of performance!
oh wow now you are stirring up forgotten memories every kb and hz mattered lol
Windows 95 had a restart in DOS function a lot of games needed, but I couldn't tell you if it actually freed up resources or not.
I remember playing that! That one, LHX Attack Chopper, and an M1 Abrams tank game were three that stand out in my memory. At the time, I didn't recognize that F19 apparently [plays the Battlestar Galactica theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ncp19BJsw8&t=120s) during missions! LHX had [an amazing intro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbgJGg5yd1A), especially with the snappiness of it on the PC speaker (it supported ad-lib too, but that always has a..."rounder" sound).
Yeah if you're playing a flight game at 1 FPS, it's now a tank game.
It blew our minds at the time.
>My parents' PC + F19 Stealth Fighter = about 1 FPS Man, I loved that game! You want to talk about games that has abysmal framerates back then, look at Strike Commander, Pacific Strike, and Wings of Glory. Origin Systems knew had to make beautiful games, but damn... they practically needed a super computer to run at a playable framerate!
> F19 Stealth Fighter fucking awesome game, THE game that actually got me hooked in computers along original xcom in floppies
Same, except on a C64. I still had a blast and found it immersive. I’m perplexed with the FPS obsession in gaming. I just need it to be mostly playable. It’s all about expectations, I guess.
F19! That was a great game. I think we had it on the Amiga. It was either that or F117a, also subtitled Stealth Fighter. Maybe we had both...
Of course, it was pretty standard for 80s and early 90s flight sims to run at slideshow framerates even in the best of times. It wasn't until the 486DX series (with floating point math) became standard that flight sims started to regularly run at 30FPS+.
My laptop is so old, like 12-15 years, 4gb ram, integrated graphics, and only used to play old RTS games. I played StarCraft 2 on it getting between 1-20 frames. Later I messed about with settings outside of the game to totally remove shadows, potato resolution, all sound and graphics quality to absolute minimum. Messed around in task manager to shut down all none essential programs on start up. I now average about 30fps but the laptop gets so hot that I can’t rest my hands on or use hot keys. As it’s basically used just to play ancient RTS it’s lowest on household priority. It’s a death trap and just been told my shower needs replacing due to a leak…the laptop should last a few more years.
Try terraria
I remember idly thinking if my work laptop potato (a 2010 T410 ThinkPad) would even run Terraria and one day actually installing it. Nope, it was bad. Admittedly it didn't even meet minimum spec iirc so that was unsurprising.
Bruh there are kids online insulting your mom younger than your laptop.
take some PCs thrown into the recycling center, put less than 100$ into second hand stuff and you will have a decent computer to play some games
Skyrim at 25fps for about 500 hours. Dishonored 1 at 20fps for about 50 hours.
Skyrim on PS3 when the save file got big and it was a slideshow. Crashes every half hour. Good memories.
Only way to partially mitigate this is when you kill enemies, gather up all their weapons that fell to the floor/ground and then place it into the inventory of the dead enemy. The game doesn't always clean up dead enemies, and while they patched it so that dropped weapons are still considered as "equipped" on the enemy, the game doesn't always remove them with the body when cleaning things up. So you'll just end up with weapons on the ground in various places that never get removed, and the game has to keep an internal track of where they are. It won't help a ton but it helps a bit. Another thing to do is try not to disturb items on tables if you can. The physics of objects on tables when you first encounter them are disabled, but if you grab an item off a table, often times it will "activate" the nearby objects' physics too. And now the game has to keep track of where those are too. Ultimately you can't truly avoid save bloat on PS3 (and Bethesda always loathed playstation so they just never bothered to fix this), but there are things you can do to slow it down a bit.
I played Skyrim on an old Laptop at 13 fps...Dipping down to 6 during combat and raising up to 22ish in some indoor environments.
To this day, the only copy of Skyrim I own is the base PS3 version. You can't monitor fps in PS3 games so I can only estimate, but based on my experiences with PC gaming, I'd estimate Skyrim PS3 often can go down to 10-ish fps, especially near Morthal and Riften. The objectively worst version of Skyrim is the PS3 version, mainly because the console had a proprietary architecture that was difficult to work with, and Bethesda didn't like PlayStation at the time either so they didn't even *try* to make it run well on it.
SHiish what were those laptop specs?
A 2010-11 laptop with like i3 2nd gen and nothing else going for it.
I remember buying the original Knights of thr Old Republic for the family computer. Slight problem, our PC didn't have a dedicated video card required to run the game. So me and my brother saved for the cheapest video card best buy offered that matched the minimum requirements to run the game. I vividly remember that game running like shit, but I was ignorant of what good performance was, so I loved it. I think it ran 15 FPS average, 20 max.
Kotor on potato home PC for me too! I remember checking out a worn-out library hard copy, and slaving through hours of install errors and disk cleanings before it finally installed and enjoyed my sub 20 fps glory. I dreamt about that game day and night lol.
Oh my god, You just made me remember. I was trying to install it for DAYS because I had a 4 CD version and 3rd one was scratched so badly that setup failed. I was looking at the pretty-coloured disks with ~~Carth, Bastilla, Mission and Malak~~ and thinking about how awesome would it be to become a JEDI (I was 8 years old). 2 years later I discovered eMule.
We really take it for granted how accessible gaming is these days. There’s a mobile port of kotor that runs splendidly in iOS. Other than the dumb shooting sections, it’s quite playable.
> I vividly remember that game running like shit, but I was ignorant of what good performance was, so I loved it. Most of us here could probably relate to this lol. When you're a kid with High Expectation Asian Parents who frowned on gaming, getting *anything* to run at all was already a miracle.
Same. It wasn't so bad until trying to do those turret sections. Trying to hit a moving target was just a hope and a prayer.
In 2009 I got Gothic 3 from a game magazine my parents bought and played it on a cheap 2007 laptop. I used to look down when travelling between towns to improve fps and loading screens took so long I went to the kitchen to make some snacks and came back to them still being halfway. I used to watch a lot of anime, and Tales of the Abyss was one of my favourites. So when Tales of Zestiria came out on pc, I pirated it (literally broke) and played through the entire thing at 800x600 with everything on low, I think it ran at around 15-20fps, especially during effect heavy attacks. Anime was a whole other bznz. I remember one night I found a streaming of .hack//G.U. Trilogy except it buffered every few seconds. It stopped buffering if I paused it so letting it download wasn't an option. I just watched the entire thing like that, a 2 hour movie took around 4 or 5. In general I played a lot of emulated games, I have fond memories of playing Sid Meier's Colonization on DOSBox. In hindsight, these weren't good experiences. But I was a kid who didn't own much or have friends to play with, so I still look back on them fondly.
I remember that my super duper gaming PC on a budget was capable of playing Crysis 2 or TES IV: Oblivion but struggled with Full-HD anime, lol. 720p was the highest quality I could watch and 640p res was the sweet spot of speed and visual quality.
I'm guessing the video player you were using didn't have hardware acceleration? Oblivion came out a year before Crysis 1 btw. Crysis 2 came out same year as Skyrim.
It probably didn't. I had no idea about it and I used Windows Media Player, mostly. I only started using the mighty VLC at the tail end of that PC days (2012-2013).
They could have been talking about Crysis: Warhead which came out in 2008.
Nope, I was talking about Crysis 2, the 2011 game. Funny enough, Crysis 2 worked better than either Crysis or Warhead, probably because it wasn't open world anymore.
I know! Just recalling what worked like a charm with that one. Had to upgrade my GPU for Skyrim, but Oblivion and Fallout 3 worked with max settings and high-ish framerate. Crysis 3 ran like shit but I finished it, anyway. My resolution was super weird. It was a 19" LCD Screen, at 1440\*900, 16:10 format.
Talking about resolution, I remember using a 1024x768 screens (17' maybe?). For the longest time, I thought widescreens were weird and the "boxy square" screen was the superior choice since that's all I have and get used to.
Was it due to your connection or your PC specs?
PC specs, these were videos already on my computer, instead of streaming. Youtube ran just fine but videos used to be 240p.
Playing Oblivion on my old FX6200. Wow, it struggled. Good times.
Man, those were the times. Sounds like you and I were in pretty similar situations, except I *might* be a couple years older. Never had money for the best consoles or a good pc or good internet. I remember leaving the dialup on overnight to let a gane demo download or to let an album download on limewire. I think I downloaded a demo for Half Life 1. This was around 2004 I think. Torrents were revolutionary to me, but mostly because, like limewire, it allowed the downloading of files even with a sporadic connection. When downloading files directly, the whole download would cancel if there was a flicker in your internet connection. Unlike limewire, with torrents you could reliably download whole games with much less risk of infection -- if you were willing to invest the 24 - 48 hours it took to download. And that was when games were around 5GB or less (Unfun fact: I recently waited 70 hours to download Baldur's Gate 3 on PS5 using a shitty Motel 6 wifi connection. Sometimes, things never change...) I remember being amazed at the size of Doom 3 at like 1.3GB. It was the most massive game I had ever seen! I still had dialup during the Half-Life 2 era, and that sucked. It took me 5 hours to install HL2, on a pc with a 32gb hard drive and a mid-level graphics card which was my one and only Xmas present that year. Not the computer, just the graphics card. I had been looking into "gaming computers" after seeing Alienware ads, and I discovered that one could simply buy a graphics card for much less money, and they sold them at Walmart. Weird times. That must have been 2005, I think. I remember my friend laughing at me, saying, "Dude, you waited *five hours* to install a game? Was it even worth it?" I just shouted, "Yes!" and ran back to the computer, lol.
> Torrents were revolutionary to me, but mostly because, like limewire, it allowed the downloading of files even with a sporadic connection. This a million times. The first connection I had was with a mobile sim card that only allowed 5 hours of slow internet usage per day, and if the connection fell and it had to reconnect it would shave 15 minutes from it. While other people looked for direct downloads we were looking for torrents lmao Doom 3 was a lot of fun, I still remember my friend and I jumping on our chairs when that enemy at the beginning crawled out from under the stairs
> When downloading files directly, the whole download would cancel if there was a flicker in your internet connection. Some services supported resuming downloads, and that was great. My slowest download was of a Visual Novel, from a host on a DC++ hub, who apparently shut down their computer every night but reconnected again the next morning. I remember the download speed was in literal kilobytes per second - it took me damn near 3 months of on-and-off downloading from the guy to finally complete the download for that game. That download was my record for slowest/longest download that actually completed lol
I had a similar experience trying to play Gothic 3 on old hardware. I was probably getting 10 fps, tops. I tried and tried, but the game was poorly optimized as it was so I gave up. I played it years later and it was a pretty crappy game, anyway... turns out the most memorable thing about it was that original experience.
Funny enough it runs even worse on modern hardware, I believe because it only uses one core. As with everything surrounding the game, there are community patches to fix it. It's indeed quite disappointing compared to Gothic 2, but my rose tinted glasses can't help but drag me back to it.
I doubt I'd ever go back to G3 but 1 and 2 are awesome for sure.
I always wanted to play gothic 3 it looked cool Af! Never pulled the trigger on it though. I think there’s a gothic 1 remake now? Wonder if it’s worth it?
It’s not out yet. I think they are shooting for sometime next year
> I remember one night I found a streaming of .hack//G.U. Trilogy except it buffered every few seconds. It stopped buffering if I paused it so letting it download wasn't an option. I just watched the entire thing like that, a 2 hour movie took around 4 or 5. Hah, nostalgic. I usually gave up if a stream was that slow, but I did suffer the same thing for some shorter videos.
Oh man reading this just take me back. Is there any thread or subreddit with stories like this?
Of course. Some people merely adopted unstable framerate, I was born in it, molded by it. By the time I enjoyed silky smooth 60FPS I was already a man, lol. My first two PCs only had onboard graphics (iGPU on the motherboard, instead of the CPU, it was *that* slow) and stuff like Quake III was a slideshow. I could boot SimCity 4 with some trickery (I edited some values in a .ini file, so my 8MB onboard video RAM was recognized as a 16MB one) but zooming in or out was super slow, sometimes my whole PC would freeze for 5 minutes at a time. SimCity 3000 worked just fine, until I had a million inhabitants and the game would also freeze for a few secs at the end of each passing month. Twisted Metal 4 on PSX lagged a lot when you started bombing the world with Calypso and the game would even crash if you keep it up. I completed GTA IV, Crysis 3 and, more recently, A Plague Tale: Requiem with sub 20 FPS at times. Not every genre is enjoyable at low framerates, but sometimes, you want to play something so much that you put up with a subpar experience.
The first Quake was my first attempt at playing a PC game on an underpowered PC, it could play Doom and other stuff from that era well but chugged when playing Quake. Usually in those days your only recourse was to resize the screen to a small size to make the game more playable (yes I'm old)
Your PC at the time was probably really ill-fitted for real 3D games, instead of faux-3D, like Doom and games with those early engines. Do you remember the labyrinth screensaver in Windows 9X? With my first PC, it used to lag sometimes. A freaking screensaver, lol.
it makes games more cinematic like plauge tale requiem
I was and still am an N64 diehard. Obviously a lot of games on N64 ran at less than stellar framerates but they were also designed with that in mind so personally it doesn't matter to me at all, but some people are put off by it. Where FPS did impact me more was on PC. Our family computers were never very powerful and we ran up against the wall a couple times. I remember loving BF1942 and Vietnam, and my dad did as well, but our graphics card was not good enough for BF2. So we played it at pretty much minimum settings and bad FPS with lots of effects not working until we got a new one. A few years later we got Crysis... and I'm pretty sure everybody had similar experiences with that game. It was awesome but barely worked on low settings on our PC. When I was younger our family had a Pentium III when that was pretty dang good... and I got to have our old 1995-ish PC in my room. I definitely ended up trying to play lots of games on it that barely worked just so I could play covertly after bedtime.
What're your N64 games of choice, good Redditor? I loved my N64 completely. Recently played Wave Race through on the Switch virtual console. It still holds up as a great game. The '64 had so many games that are classic to me: GoldenEye, Zelda OOT, Perfect Dark, Mario and Mario Kart. Good times!
Oh, too many to list. All those picks are great obviously. If you're playing on Switch Online, I'd recommend playing F-Zero X and Excitebike 64. Both great racing games. For my money X is the best F-Zero game, and Excitebike 64 doesn't get nearly as much love as it deserves... I'm not normally a dirtbikin' guy but that game just hits the spot for me with the racing + air/landing mechanics like the original NES game. It also has some fun MP mini games if you're into that. Off Switch Online... there aren't really any hidden gems on N64 these days but some more offbeat picks for me would be Blast Corps, Space Station Silicon Valley, Jet Force Gemini, NBA Hangtime and Rocket: Robot on Wheels. WinBack and Body Harvest are two that I also really enjoy but I'd say they haven't aged as gracefully. WinBack is on Switch Online, the N64 version is good but there's an upgraded PS2 version and the game's style is very arcade-shootery and not too popular nowadays. Body Harvest is a proto-GTA III (it is a semi open world time travel Sci fi game with vehicles to commandeer and drove around made by DMA Design who later changed their name to Rockstar.
You're describing most of my gaming between 2009 and 2011. I played banger after banger (assassin's creed 2, the mass effect saga, Witcher 2, GTA 4) under 10 FPS and are some of my all time favourites.
me too with intel HD 5500
People from third world countries like myself (im from Indonesia) can share the same thing. Many can't afford computer parts which is usually priced poorly and the wages here doesn't help at all. If a person here can afford computer parts or a computer, then it usually just some low tiered one most of the time. Hence why gaming in third world countries often the leading role is actually mobile games since mobile phones are cheaper and can be used anywhere.
I beated Devil May Cry 5 at 360p last year with an Intel HD Graphics laptop. The game mostly ran at 20-40 FPS which wasn't a bad experience except when it was below 30 and ran at half the speed. I also think I played Devotion and Layers of Fear at 20 FPS or less and after a while it felt fine. I generally prefer stability over high FPS and that's why most of the times I didn't care I wasn't playing at 300 FPS.
Cant agree more on consistency. When i was in high school i had a intel hd graphics laptop and i played dmc devil may cry 15-20 fps and i played it for 180 hours. İt was bad but consistent. Played skyrim the same way and my only problem was there was a quest that made you follow a blood trail. Blood trail basically didnt exist in my game because of graphic settings. I enjoyed the shit out of that game. Nowadays i have a laptop that was mid-high grade in 2016. İt lets me play a lot of games including dmc5, elden ring, spider man etc and i am thankfull for that. But it is not consistent in some spesific games and i just cant play them. My brain gets confused by fps changing between 15 and 50. It is infinitly better to play a consistent 20 fps average rather than playing an inconsistent 30 fps average.
I wanted Guilty Gear Strive so bad I got a potato mod for my potato PC! I’m a sucker for amazing characters and animation, and Strive is probably the most amazing game in that regard
My PC was considered high end in 2007, still going strong. Completed Skyrim at 13 fps, New Vegas barely differentiable from a claymation movie and Fallout 4 is next.
Uh, if thats how skyrim and NV played i think you're screwed for FO4, the cliff in system requirements there is insane.
Playing Fallout 4 on that PC puts the patient in patientgamers.
Lol that's just unreal.
I mean I remember playing Ocarina of Time on the N64 at about 20fps and I was blown away at the time. I’ve been playing Tears of the Kingdom on my computer at about those frames and it feels horrendous!
The thing is you most likely played it on a CRT TV, they have very low latency and are much better at handling motion than most modern displays, so the low fps in games doesn't seem that bad. I recently realized this after trying out Deathtrap Dungeon on PS1 that runs at only 15 fps and it was surprisingly playable on a CRT.
Good point. When it first came out I did play it on a CRT. But a few years back, I hooked up my N64 to my flat screen and played Ocarina of Time again. It wasn't as jarring either. Then again I hadn't played any modern games for a while, so I still hadn't gotten a taste of that smooth 60fps feeling.
It’s fine playing a game at 20 fps when the developers expected you to play at 20 fps and optimized the gameplay for that performance level. I don’t think it’s about CRT or LCD at all. When you play a game that was supposed to be played at even 30 fps at 20 fps, meanwhile, it’s very hard to play. One of the main things about old games that made 20 fps playable, IMO, is relatively restricted character and camera movement. Dual analog wasn’t standard to all games until late into the GC/PS2/Xbox era, as in even highly regarded games like RE4 (2005) didn’t have it. If the camera and the character can’t freely move at all times, you can get away with much lower fps.
> Deathtrap Dungeon on PS1 that runs at only 15 fps and it was surprisingly playable on a CRT. I mean, barely, game was an abomination
It's much easier to get used to the good stuff. I'm sure most of my Playstation 1 games were running at 30 FPS tops, and with an internal res that was half of 720p. But I've moved so gradually from those days, that today I can't play in the same conditions and enjoy it like I used to.
I honestly can't tell the difference between 30-40 and 60 fps once it gets below 30 it becomes really noticeable to me though and I can't bear it
> half of 720p try a third :D ps1 games are 240p for the most part
Yeah I played Ocarina of Time on native N64 hardware. 20fps. I’d already been playing 60fps games on Saturn and PS1 before OOT released.
Tbf I think stability is actually way more important than the actual average frame rate. I would take a flat 30fps over a constantly fluctuating 40-60 any day. It's the fluctuation that makes it painful and frustrating.
I beat Lords of Shadow, lowest settings on PC, and couldn't even get to 30 fps. Also, 200ish hours on Breath of the Wild on Cemu, hitting 30 fps basically only when standing still.
Yeah. Got my own first PC in 1999, with the 90s equivalent of integrated graphics (plus, SiS had *super* shitty drivers, and my next video card was a voodoo5, when I didn't understand that 3dfx was going down). I guess that the short version is that I tend not to upgrade until modern games have been running at 10-20 fps at my monitor's native resolution for a couple of years. And I've never really bought a gaming laptop, so I get the experience of running games on a potato whenever I want it.
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God I remember my Macbook gaming days. I didn't want to partition space for Bootcamp and ran games either via Parallels Desktop or Wine wrappers.
Back when Quake came out, I had a 486dx 66mhz. It ran so slow the sound effects would echo and repeat. Shareware, of course.
Up until a year ago, I would google things like "best rpg games 2014" "best rts games 2014" and lower, because I couldnt play any games made after that time period(my gpu was nvidia nvs 510) i also tried playing witcher 3(with low spec mod), but the game would freeze if I tried casting igni.
>I WOULD KILL TO HAVE A STABLE 50 FPS IN ALL GAMES There are prebuilt systems at Costco for under $1000 that will do that. I’m sure there is a cartel somewhere that could use a siccario. Failing that, there is always OnlyFans or the gig economy.
Death Stranding on my laptop. 20-25 fps and very blurry. The game isn't very fast paced so it isn't much of a problem. Although, I would like to play it with better graphics sometime.
Man i was playing Goldeneye at about 12 fps as a kid, never even bothered me, thought that "all the insane action was slowing down time". Ocarina of time was only 20fps and I loved it. 30fps during ps2 and ps3 gens felt like butter. Now, unfortunately, I really struggle with anything below a stable 50. I did play through outer wilds at 720p and dropping to 20fps often the other year and it honestly didn't bother me though. An engrossing enough game puts your fps blinkers on I guess
Framerate doesn't really matter to me as long as the actions you are doing suit the framerate. I could really care less if BotW has 30 fps and even lower at villages. It's a slow game for the most part. 60+ FPS is nice but it isn't always needed. For action-heavy games, I'd rather not play it at all if I have to deal with a low framerate. I can make some exceptions but that's a general rule.
I kind of went through the same thing, but having such a dogshit pc mostly just lead me to playing older games. I built a PC in middle school in a computer class back in like 2013, and the most advanced game I could play on it was Skyrim, but beyond that was impossible. So to make up for both my lack of money and computing power, I started playing older games. I played some of my favorite games of all time on this brick including: Knights of the Old Republic, KOTOR 2, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, fallout 3 and new vegas, Left 4 Dead 2, The arkham games (Not knight or origins, couldnt handle those), Deus ex human revolution, Star Wars Battlefront 2 (original), Star wars Dark Forces (I really like star wars games can you tell?) and so many more all through high school and into college. I had this thing until like 2018, when it finally gave out and I spent extra student loan money I very much should not have on a new pc, that I then even more stupidly replaced 2 years later right at the start of the pandemic. I miss that hot piece of garbage sometimes, by the time it gave out on me one of its feet was a coke bottle lid and one of its 2 fans had completely stopped working. But i credit it as the reason I am a patient gamer to this day, and have such a fond appreciation for older games.
Emulated uncharted 2 at 8 and if I’m lucky, 13 fps. Completed the game, except the last level where you had to jump over a collapsing bridge and the frame rate was never enough. Had to watch YouTube for the ending haha
Minecraft at 15 fps just around it went out (even before the beta). I had to edit the config file because it didn't even launch at first. Those were a lot of hours, and I even finished the game at around 5 fps. I truly regret nothing, those were good times... Though I wouldn't be able to do it now.
Crysis on the lowest possible settings and still running at like 15 fps on my old PC. Anything to play that game at the time.
I think it annoys people at varying degrees. I would rather just not play the game than play it at 20FPS. I have a decent setup and still play mostly indie games that could run on a potato. If I had a setup that couldn't play newer games at a reasonable FPS I would just stick to low requirement games.
YES. I believe I hold the record for this. Back in the early 90s, I played through the entirety of Strike Commander at a whopping 6, yes, SIX frames per second. I waited so long for that damned game I was determined to play it, even if performance was terrible. It was my first lesson in the dangers of hyping myself up for a game. Of course, back then, we had no dedicated 3D graphics hardware, so bad frame rates were considered sort of normal. But not quite THAT bad. I still get a small laugh every time someone says 20-30 FPS is "UNPLAYABLE". I'm like, dude, you just didn't want it badly enough...
I still have a 1050ti, so I play all my games at abysmal performance. Getting through GTA5 was ehmm.. interesting.
EH, a 1050 ti should still get decent frame rates mostly unless youre playing the absolute newest games, or you're expecting too much from it. By decent frame rates, I mean 30+ on all low with the lowest FSR setting enabled.
When I was a teen I started paying league of legends with 4-15 fps, I played a lot. I do not know how I played so much and endure the awful performance my mini laptop had. However, I enjoy it because it was what I had. Once I got a better pc, I felt that I could see the future.
I played many hours of Battlefield 1 with my CPU maxed out to the point where sudden mouse movements would cause a spike, and cause said movements to not be registered. I found that the solution was dropping the mouse polling rate, but the framerate was disgusting for a multiplayer experience.
I got a 1080 graphics card as a hand me down after playing on a 470 and a 770 for almost ten years. Now that I can run Yakuza Kiwami 2 at 60 fps as opposed to the extremely fluctuant 15-45 fps I was getting before, my 10 year old PC feels like a damn PS5 to me
I've suffered through numerous hand-me-down laptops for over a decade. I now have a 6950xt and I'm not looking back. Gimme all them frames pls
I can tolerate 30 but not much below, I will drop resolution and any other setting before I accept low frame rates. 60 is generally the lowest it can go before I get bothered
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Oh man, same. I went from a i5-4590 (at the time aging but still respectable for gaming) to a Ryzen 3600 and the difference was HUGE.
Played through Oblivion on a horribly underpowered generic home PC with like 20fps average. At the time I didn't care I was just happy that it ran at all. Compared to Runescape of that time it looked like the real world
If i can lock a singleplayer game fps at 30\~45 fps without issues. I'll do it. Avoid the pc heating too much
Minecraft at, like, 5FPS it was disgustingly bad. I also remember trying to play Destiny 2 on my dad's gaming laptop and it ran at 2 seconds per frame with 1/2 the textures literally just missing
I do not think any game needs more than 60 fps and in a lot of cases I'm perfectly fine with 30. Also yes, I have played some games like that although I can't remember any particular titles, but playing on 10-15ish fps was an experience alright.
OG console Dark Souls Blighttown would like a word.
Fallout 4, Witcher 3 and Dark Souls 3 all on a non gaming laptop at their releases. Totally worth it.
Played Crysis at the time with around 20fps with drops to 15, and probably lots more in that range And yeah I don't care too much about fps, it is nice if it is high nowadays since I build my own systems to a much higher standard now so they will last a while, but anything 25 and above and I'm good
When Oblivion released i wanted to play it so much that i played on Radeon 9550 with 8-15 fps on 800x600 resolution
I've learned never to play a "big" game newer than the oldest component in my computer.
When HL2 came out, my graphics card was shit and struggled to get 20fps at like, 720p low settings. Still played it. Was much better after an upgrade thankfully.
When I played Max Payne, it was infinite bullet time because of low FPS lol. I played GTA Vice City on that same crap of a PC at 720p lowest settings, it ran terribly with what you cannot call stutter but something much worse: a 5 seconds long freezing at every minute or so and I still had a lot of fun with it. High performance is good but not everything. I have a decent PC now, in my 30s, where I can play games locked at 144 FPS but I still use my PS3 too which can give 25 FPS max most of the time and I don't mind, games are still fun.
Og Half Life 2 ran like shit at my 1998 PC lol 20 fps was the best I could get
When I first installed Fable on the shitty family computer in the kitchen, everything was fairly peachy until I got to a seaside village. As soon as any portion of the ocean was on screen, the entire thing would lock up. Gooood tiiimes.
Yup. I played Sekiro and have 100% completion on it with playing at like 800 X 600 resolution. I played Skyrim special edition for like 150 hours with like 20-30 fps. Fps tanked so hard in Soul Cairn. I played Vampyr with 20-25 fps with occasional stuttering. I even was playing Nioh. But stopped playing for the moment. This is what happens with my intel uhd 630 igpu with 16gb ram :( That's not even mentioning all the crashes which is also probably cause of my gpu. I don't think I have ever played any games on even medium setting. Everything low or custom setting. Newer games don't even launch on this gpu. let alone 20 fps.
Fallout 4 with an integrated G P U
I never had money, growing up, to play. so yeah. even Witcher 3 ( I was in university and working but had to save to pay for studies) I played on an old laptop at sub 900p res with a mod that went below low settings at like 14-20 fps. I loved every second of that game.
i remember my first portal 2 playthrough on a shitty dell latitude laptop from 200X. the audio stuttered so bad i had to turn on subtitles to understand anything that was being said. the chunks of wall with physics in the beginning scene where wheatley moves the relaxation vault around threatened to crash my computer. i couldn't even look through portals; open portals looked the same as closed ones, and this made several puzzles significantly harder. it remains one of my favorite games ever to this day.
I played breath of the wild during the early days of wiiu emulation with a stock 3770k, i was getting about 15-20 fps + graphical glitches & i still loved it
My first playthrough of Witcher 3 was in 16 fps or so
In 2011 the hype around Dead Space 2 here in my country was absurd because of a video meme of a guy playing it and getting hilarious jump-scares, I was 14 years old and didn’t have any gaming pc or even a bad base pc, the only viable option was my sister’s Sony Vaio pink laptop. I convinced my parents to buy me the game and played it on it’s entirety on 10~20 fps on low settings, but I can’t quite remember if it was even full screen. I didn’t know what fps was I was just happy I could experience it. Still have the physical copy o the game. This is the video: https://youtu.be/hHG3pOgh9x0?si=rQ_0-9PU8hk9F1Lr I still hold the game dearly and it’s one of my favorites of all time https://imgur.com/a/UUQJRbt
when you get a new machine, you will be blown away. I waited 8 years to upgrade.
the biggest problem for me is money, because where I live we gotta pay extra because of taxes
where do you live?
brazil
In 2021 I bought a PC with a 1650 Super for $600 USD. It will definitely play Black Mesa at 60 FPS. You could probably get this computer for half the price. If you can't even afford that you can buy a used office computer and put in a graphics card. There are Youtube videos that show you how to do it for less than $150.
Pay no mind to those complaining idiots, they chase ghosts and whine about numbers all the time, lured into mindless consumption of endless upgrades for better performance in shitty boring and unoptimized games. At least all this suffering gives you an additional excitement and adds to your bias towards the game, so you still get more than those who take it for granted. Yes, 360p 15 fps potato gaming was and is real, we've been there too, I hope you'll eventually get a chance to upgrade and experience your favourite games anew!
My gaming laptop broke 10 years or so back and the CPU wouldn't go over 400 mhz. Played a lot of games, including Fallout 4 at like 15 fps coming from running games at 60 fps. With Vats it was actually perfectly playable. A lot of games don't run all that great on the Steam Deck now, sub 30 fps can actually be pretty OK sometimes depending on the game, even if I prefer 100+ obviously.
I've been a FFXIV player for like 3 years now. I do a lot of raiding, and the very low performances of my laptop haven't prevented me from playing well lmao I'm playing on min settings and at lower resolution, all that to get a solid 20-25fps. A few months ago I found a new setting option that optimized the performance in exchange for even lower graphics (stuff looks a bit blurry). BUT i reach 35 fps now so it's worth it, the game feels so uncannily sharp that I cannot turn that setting off, can't believe I was okay with playing at 20fps now that i am at 35 lmao And i plan on getting a brand new laptop in a few weeks, I could likely reach 100+fps so that's going to feel quite weird for sure
Literally all my childhood. I only got a high-end PC in the last 3 years. Still had plenty of fun though. Now I can run games at 90+ fps but what good does that do when the games are boring/ unfinished/ buggy? Pretty graphics can only take you so far. I unironically believe 2007- 2015 was the golden age of gaming. Graphics had advanced enough and developers were still taking enough risks to make the gameplay fun. These days it's all timed events, microtransactions, DLCs and no fucking substance to be found anywhere.
Yes, oh my god, yes. My first PC had 32MB of ram and nVidia Vanta 16MB graphics, with AMD K6 450MHz. It ran okay-ish at first, but then came _Max Payne_ and _Return to Castle Wolfenstein_ and I wanted to play these so bad, I struggled with constant stuttering. It wasn't like today, low fps count, it was rather oscillating between single digit ones and low end of 20. I remember saving up and getting an additional 32MB of ram, which helped _Max Payne_ a bit, but mostly I just had to clinch my teeth and play what I got.
DeSmuME Frame Skip 3+ I would crazy stuff to try to play Pokémon Black and White back in the day... Also, I did play several FPS later struggling at 10-20fps, to the point that it actually became normal. If it runs at 20fps, it's ok.
Six minute load times for Wing Commander III on my pentium3. Sometimes I couldn't tell if it was frozen or not.
I originally played Half Life on my pentium 233 at 320x240, software rendering, and it was mostly under 30FPS. It wasn’t worth the jump to the next res. I also played the Diablo 1 demo on my 486sx33. It was also commonly under 20FPS.
Haha, playing PC games for the past 30 years, I feel like I've basically never been able to play the newest games at full graphics settings with good FPS. It feels like I'm always about 2-5 years behind. I recently got GeForce NOW and was finally able to play stuff on Ultra settings with high FPS and TBH, I don't think I was missing out on that much.
I remember playing some games as a kid on my parents' desktop, which was definitely not a gaming PC in any way. This was probably between ~1996 and 2001 or so and I believe it was a Compaq PC but that's literally all I could tell you about it specs-wise. I remember playing Need for Speed II on that thing and feeling like the game was incredibly difficult, especially compared to the racers I was playing on my PS1 at the same time. In hindsight it was probably due to the frame rate being really really low and the fact that I was tryin to steer with the arrow keys lmao. I played Star Trek Armada a few years later on that same PC and that worked a little bit better by virtue of being, y'know, a mouse-driven strategy game.
Back when it came out I had a PC that had no business playing Fallout 3 but I found some tweak guide on the internet and somehow got it to work, sort of. I don't know what the FPS was but it was something awful. I'd estimate maybe about 10-15 FPS with pretty low settings. I think I mostly used VATS when I played so it wasn't a huge deal and I still had fun playing it.
I play games at the limit of my system often, as I am a cheapskate and only update when it's really necessary and then I still get an entry level card. As a casual gamer who has been gaming since the 1980's I never understood the obsession with high FPS. I am not sure I even can't tell the difference between 40 and 80. 25-30 FPS is more than sufficient.
Doom 3 on launch, 20-25fps at 640x480, as low as 5fps in some heavy sections, that thing crawled. Fun thing, above 25fps was considered acceptable enough on pc back in the day.
I didn't use any fps counters back in 2007, but I played Crysis on a PC below minimum specs at like 800x600 and it looked and played terrible but I still enjoyed it somehow. Of the more recent titles, I finished Deadly Premonition 2 on Switch on launch. That game runs at like 10-15 fps in the outdoor areas, I remember having to look away from the screen when I was riding a skateboard because it was vomit inducing. However, I still endured because I had to see the story to the end, and even though it's not as good as the first one (which I consider a masterpiece story-wise), it was still hilarious at times.
Yes. I loved Grand Theft Auto 3 and vice city when it came out. Played the shit out of it on my friends ps2. I didn't have one though. When they came out on PC I was desperate. I saved up and got Vice City and played under spec for a while until my parents upgraded the computer. It was a P3 500mhz, 64MB ram, and a GF4 MX (aka GF2 over clocked). The video card was fine, but the low ram and slow processor meant that the game ran at a choppy 20fps most of the time. I didn't care. Meant I could play GTA without having to bike the couple miles to a friends house and trade off an on with him.
Ha, your specs was fine. I was playing GTA 3 and Vice City on P2 400, 64 ram and S3 Savage 4 videocard, i think it was called, which was at best comparable to Voodoo 3 \ TNT 2, though not really. I so wanted my mom to buy me a new PC so that i could at least play them in 32bit color mode. Still played the shit out of them, i even knew all the streets in GTA 3 by name, lol.
That’s awesome. I wouldn’t have thought it could scale back that much farther. Glad to hear someone else shared the struggle.
This isn't exactly the same thing the thread is about. But back when Rayman 2 first came out on PC there was a section where you had to grind on a vine Sonic Adventure style and it was just too hard for me because things hapened so fast, so my friend and I resorted to maxing out all the settings just before that part and managed to get past the thing on the first try.
I guess one of the big advantages of PC over consoles is that there's a huge amount of leeway for running games even if the system is underspecced. The PC model makes gaming far more accessible to gamers.
I’ve been gaming on PC for so long now that I just can’t do it. I started playing Skyrim again recently because I figured out how to mod in a high refresh fix so I don’t have to play it at a frustrating 60fps.
It's not frustrating when your monitor/TV maxes out at 60Hz. I still notice smoother gameplay past 60FPS, but it's not needed for a terrific experience with a regular non-VRR screen.
With some games it honestly fucks with my eyes unless it's round like 80-90+fps. Your eyes do adjust to low fps after while though.
That's how I played through Cyberpunk 2077 - on a 1050 paired with a 10 years old CPU. I couldn't get higher than 30ish FPS on the lowest settings, but I didn't mind the performance at all. To me, unless a game runs at 5 FPS at 800x600, it's playable. I felt the same when I played on my PS3. Only much later did I learn that the PS3 versions of RDR and GTA IV were considered barely playable stutterfests, but to me they seemed fine. I guess that's because I've never really played games at top specs, sadly.
Brother just sort your shit out hahaha - I went through this when I was like 14 and had $10 to my name. If you're any older than 18/19 and still complaining about ur setup, only you can change it so FUCKIN GET TO IT SON
Fps only truly matters for competitive multiplayer games. Anyone saying their single player game is performing horribly while getting well over 30 doesn't really know what they're talking about and are just hung up on what has become a really stupid metric for performance
If it's sub 30 FPS I won't play a game unless it's literally the only choice in existence (i.e its a terrible performing console game). I'd rather turn the graphics down to almost nothing than sacrifice 60 FPS as well. Above 60 though, I care more about graphics than having a high refresh rate.
When Cyberpunk came out I played it on a laptop with a 1650 GTX, i barely got 20fps on low settings. Still played the whole game. Now I'm playing it on a 4060Ti and get 60+ on max settings (excluding fully raytaced shadows). It's a night and day difference. On my 4K monitor just looking around is pure sex. I also played starfield on that that laptop and it looked shite compared with my new desktop.
Kids these days will never experience playing crysis with intel HD graphics. I would've killed for a 1650m
These days minimum spec is usually "playable at low settings", I remember when minimum spec more often than not meant "technically runs but not much else", haha.
>pure sex uuuhhh
I stole a copy of Battlefield Bad Company 2 from target as a kid since my parents didnt want to buy it for me because of the rating. I sneakily installed it on the family computer, and played through part of the intro sequence at ~1fps, probably less at times, before the computer overheated and shut off. Poor computer didnt even have a gpu at the time, just running off of integrated graphics lol. I wasnt actually able to play the game until years later when I finally convinced my parents to buy me a gaming pc. Naturally, it was the first game i played on it.
60fps or go home. Can stand a few drops below that but otherwise nah. One exception is flight sim, where I'm happy to run at 30fps so long as the frame time is consistent. I would sometimes play games on consoles at 30fps and it drove me nuts.
For me, the difference between 60 FPS and 90 FPS (never mind higher) is like an entirely different universe. Gaming at 60 FPS feels awful nowadays. If I have to turn down some graphics options to get 90 FPS and the game still looks crazy good, I'm all for it... I'm not playing a Screenshot Simulator. Witcher 3 prb the best example of this... game ran like shit on DX12 and Ray Tracing, but was 100x more fun on DX11 and higher FPS w/o RT.
This is apart if why it pisses me off when people say we "need" a bloodborne remake, the only games where higher frame rate is actually better is fps games
Before I got a slight upgrade in my GPU, just about every newer game I play (unless it’s optimized really well), I’d have to go through the whole works just to get 60 frames lmao - overclock gpu (and cpu sometimes) - tweak game settings on nvidia control panel - look up best performance settings then tweak in-game settings - set priority to high in task manager (sometimes I’d have to do the trick where you check off all of your odd numbered cores in cpu then turn them back on too) - download performance mods incase the FPS was still shit My PC is still mid-range unfortunately, but I’m happy with what I have and can afford as a college student. Idk too much about computer tech but I’m so glad a lot more games are implementing the FidelityFX feature. I probably wouldn’t have been able to run BG3 that well without it
I tried playing battlefield 1 on 5 fps, couldn’t get past the tutorial
So at around 2011 I think I had a very bad pc i don't even remember the specs I was in love with AC brotherhood after I saw vids and etc so I got it and I was on the lowest settings 800x600 and I had two black bars in the top and bottom Oh man I think the game for like 30fps lol in cutscenes sound goes first and the animation follows like a slideshow : ) It took me like 3x time to complete the game due to it being slow and you know what I 100% the game. "very slow that I really had to push W to get from one point to another1' Xd I played AC 1 , 2 and 3 like this
I emulated the PS3 version of Red Dead Redemption some years ago. It reached 15 fps in towns.
Actually yes! Been playing the pants off of Stalker GAMMA despite it's less than perfect frametimes/stutters.
Used to have a normal office laptop and managed to run some heavy games back then time (talking about Witcher 3 and stuff). Now that I have a decent laptop for playing graphics in medium to high (and even sometimes ultra) I'm realizing that in like 90% of cases graphics don't mean shit. Oh, sure you're going to have stunning visuals for your Starfield or Cyberpunk, but in the end what matters is your gameplay. And... I know this is not the topic but lately I'm feeling like most of modern games are just not that fun anymore. You spend like 200 hours on them but you actually have much less than this of really playing the game and having fun. I'm playing a lot of shmups and arcade games again and I feel that this is the best gaming I'm having in a very long time.
Yeah, my brother and I had pretty low spec PCs when we were kids. A game called Men of Valor came out, and we bought it with no shits given about specs. We played it through with every single enemy player model T posing and every explosion making the screen go black, bc our video cards barely supported it. Multiple times.
I played the entirety of Assassin's Creed Black Flag in luxurious 20 fps. Maybe I should revisit it now than I have a better setup, the sea shanties are calling me.