I remember playing a game, I think it was either Spiderman or Control with Ray Tracing on and I was like "wow, these are amazing!" Then I realized I didn't actually turn it on. My dumb ass can't tell the difference.

Exactly. One of the benefits of patient gaming (shoutout to !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works) is I don’t need top of the line hardware to enjoy my hobby. I’m sure the GabeCube will run multi-year old games very well.

Between working >40 hours a week and raising a kid I only really care if the game I spent 2 hours a week on is going to run and look good enough. If I have to play on high instead of ultra I’m not gonna have a meltdown.

People in this thread may be hardcore and spend a lot on their game consoles, but Valve's statement is probably accurate, they've got the most data on computer hardware usage.

I’m still chugging along with a 1070 Ti. Then again, I don’t play many top-of-the-line AAA titles these days. For example, I know Doom Eternal and Dark Ages won’t run on this card unless I mess around with tweaking ini files or something, but I wouldn’t bother.

When I was a child and first saw a 3d game, I imagined the lighting to be done by ray-tracing (without the actual name of it, of course).
Until then, I only knew 2d games with no lighting mechanics and just a bunch of pixels for sprites.

not to mention the joy of emulation, which older hardware does very well these days

Do you blame them? So many games these days force ray tracing. If your card can’t do that very well, then that game runs like crap.

Some modern games look like absolute dirty brown water trash when you lower the settings a ton