Go.”Įditor's note: since writing this article, Dave has had a relapse and upgraded to a GTX 1080 Ti to achieve his 4K, 90 fps Witcher 3 dreams. So take the advice of Brad Pitt and his stupidly chiseled abs: “Just. Hell, the old me would have bought a GTX 1080 TI trying to claw back those extra six frames in Novigrad, but not now. I may suffer the odd relapse, but my framerate fixation is nothing like what it once was. If you’ve suffered with this obsession, take my advice: switch off your framerate counter, forget minor fps fluctuation, and simply enjoy your game running perfectly well a mere 95 percent of the time. Yet when the act of overclocking and frame-counting starts to dominate your PC gaming experience, unless you genuinely find that more fun than the games themselves, it’s time to step back. Can squeezing an extra few frames out of that new shooter be a rewarding meta-game in itself? Occasionally. Some games have tiny optimisation issues that are never fixed, while others will always stutter no matter how much GPU grunt you throw at them. No matter what level of hardware you own, you’ll never achieve perfection. I don’t care if enabling Geralt’s HairWorks costs me 7 frames per second let those dreamy locks flow! Oh, Prey is suffering tiny stutters every so often, is it? Pffh, I’m just going to enjoy turning those skittery Mimics into gloopy piles of sadness. Not only did I recoup a tidy sum on my horribly underutilised second GPU, but at last I can throw that frame-checking monkey off my back, and make my peace with tiny technical blemishes. It’s been such (an admittedly light) weight off my shoulders. What I do endorse is ending an obsession with trying to achieve that fabled ‘ultimate’ high-end performance, and just enjoying games based on their own creative merits. Now, I’m not endorsing setting up underground fisticuffs networks, or letting your hatchback careen into oncoming traffic. Go.” Actually, it’s my second favourite scene-nothing tops that epic Pixies-fuelled finale. My favourite scene in David Fincher’s Fight Club is when Tyler Durden nihilistically talks Edward Norton’s Narrator into crashing a car so his neurotic chum will, “Just. Taking a breath and finally abandoning your obsessions can be deeply cathartic. Why obsess over squeezing out that extra 1-3 percent performance through haphazard overclocking and Nvidia Control panel fiddling when I could simply tune out all that noise and give, y’know, the actual games a chance to shine.Īrgggghh! It may not look like much, but The Hunter is super demanding to run. The sheer lunacy of anxiously watching two little numbers occasionally dip on the top left of my screen finally broke me. GPU-Z? I like that kid’s hustle… still, CUT. Actually, I purged any program on my PC that went towards monitoring my graphics cards’ performance. Something had to give.Īnd then it happened. Battlefield 1 would frequently drop to 57 fps, Rise Of The Tomb Raider’s taxing Geothermal Valley hub area refused to run at a locked 60 frames regardless of which settings I lowered, while no amount of graphics card tag teaming could prevent fugly, niche deer-stalking sim The Hunter: Call of the Wild from moments where it dipped into the high 40s. Because SLI scaling is such an afterthought in so many games, that second $500 card barely registered most of the time. This deep-seated fretting over a Fraps counter spread to many games. That’s right: I stopped playing one of the best PC games of the last decade because my crippling fps anxiety couldn’t tolerate the occasional six measly dropped frames. Why? Because every time I crossed the busy city squares of Novigrad, my framerate would ‘plummet’ from a locked 60 fps to sporadic moments of 54 fps. One of the greatest games of all time, right? The razor-sharp, pithy dialogue those vistas the seamless sense of time and place realtime beard growth! Despite these amazing production values, I just couldn’t fully immerse myself in Geralt’s sweeping adventure. Sure, my beefy rig could handle most games at that ludicrously lofty resolution/framerate combo, but it was the few games that fell agonisingly short which fuelled my obsession, ruining my enjoyment in the process. The wrong-headed anxiety that went into chasing the 4K/60fps dream just wasn’t worth it. Even with a GTX 1080, I can’t quite constantly hit 4K/60 fps on The Witcher 3.Īnd you know what? I could care less.
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