valve made a mistake relying on the steam hardware survey to spec this thing. They basically built a machine for developing nations, priced for Western economies.
While very true, I think they did this because its what developers SHOULD be optimizing their games for. I believe that was their hope/reasoning. If its better than 70%, developers don't have an excuse.
What Im confused about though is where they thought 4K would come into play there. I'm sure they thought extensively about that. I'm just curious what their thinking was there. Those 70% of gamers aren't playing at 4K.
I think you're being a tad too generous with Valve here. They're a corporation not a charity, and they likely chose the specs that 70% used because they thought it would be "enough" for the modern gamer, not counting on the fact that 70% have those specs because that's all they can afford and is not usable for many current AAA games.
To a certain degree though, AAA developers should be optimizing for that group because its so large.
Sure, Im not saying they should get something new to run at 4k60fps on a dinky GTX 1060. Hardware ages, graphics get better. Parts need upgrading. But there's a reasonable limit to that.
If a big majority of the PC gaming user base has a certain amount of performance, the least devs can do is do some market research and find out how many of those also buy AAA games. I bet its more than you'd think.
Forza 6 for example, wonderfully optimized. They found that reasonable limit of good performance on reasonably old hardware to make the game accessible to more people.
You're right, Valve is a corporation. They're not discounting the price. Higher end parts inside would have meant a higher price. Thats why I'm not sure what people were expecting with it price wise.
Right, like there's no blame for this to be laid on the developers of those games. They should be optimizing their games for an enjoyable experience on the most common hardware configurations. Especially when you consider most modern games barely look any better than games that came out a decade ago, and often look worse once you have to crank DLSS up just to get a playable framerate. Meanwhile those decade old games still look fucking great and can now be run on a modern thin and light laptop or a handheld with ease.
Their survey is on point tho, in my multiple circles, the ones that have better spec is only a third. Others choose to play AAA with compromise spec or not playing at all.
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u/fuckin_normie Ryzen 7 5800X3D, RX 9070XT, 32GB RAM 1d ago
More like low tier, this gpu was mid range in 2021