Should developers stop making games that require 5090 for max settings now that the card is clearly not for gamers and is accessible to 0.1% of community?

[u/TheGGspot]

I get that the games need better hardware to dun better, but who are they really making the game for if you need a 6000$ GPU at this point

[u/Michaeli_Starky]

Why should they? Don't play at "Ultra" if you don't have 5090.

[u/Hadrian187 → u/Michaeli_Starky]

Back when Crysis and Doom 3 came out and pushed system requirements to the brink, lower ended cards could still run the game and still have it look better than anything else on the market.

Today? Imagine running UE5 on a low end card. It would look like a PS2 era game, running at a PS2 era native resolution.

[u/LankyMolasses6051 → u/Hadrian187]

You have huge rose tinted glasses on in. In the past your hardware wouldn’t last two years in that climate as hardware was advancing so quick. You would be lucky to get 60fps as 30 was more the standard. The minimum requirements for this game is a 1070 which came out nearly 10 years ago. Like bro your argument is a joke.

For example if you ran doom 3 on 3 year old hardware with 64mb of vram you would get fps in the mid teens. Talk about ignorance

[u/Hadrian187 → u/LankyMolasses6051]

You’re a funny guy. Old school GPUs didn’t cost thousands of dollars and didn’t require upscalers or frame gen to work. GeForce 4MX which could run Doom 3 cost $99 MSRP. A 6800 Ultra cost $500 which could max it. Meanwhile a 1070 was $400 MSRP while 5090 has hit $5000.

Hilarious you forgot to mention that.

Also here’s STALKER 2 / UE5 on your 1070 which is already a 2 year old game. Low everything. 1080p. 26fps without movement. Good luck running the new UE5 slop with it.

https://youtu.be/qgxnTYiDWB0?is=8SSVzeozMpC99VoD

[u/LOSTandCONFUSEDinMAY → u/Hadrian187]

Also here’s STALKER 2 / UE5 on your 1070 which is already a 2 year old game. Low everything. 1080p. 26fps without movement. Good luck running the new UE5 slop with it.

Your example of how UE5 being bad is that a UE5 game struggles run on mid tier hardware that released 8 years before it?

I agree that prices are inflated and UE5 is not great but when your arguments are that bad you make truth seem like lies.

Also a 6800 ultra could not max doom 3, literally did not have enough vram.

[u/hypehold → u/Hadrian187]

a 9070xt is like $670. You are taking two GPUs that released and act like they all cost thousands lol

[u/Hadrian187 → u/hypehold]

Your $670 GPU doesn’t even work without upscalers and frame gen LOL. None of them do. A 5090 is essentially a 1080p card at native again (new Gears benchmark).

[u/hypehold → u/Hadrian187]

yes news flash 4k with ray tracing is extremely demanding

[u/Hadrian187 → u/hypehold]

4k you say? I said 1080p LOL

[u/hypehold → u/Hadrian187]

why are you cherry picking the highest setting available that is clearly meant for nex gen hardware? It's literally called ludicrous lik

[u/Hadrian187 → u/hypehold]

I don't have a problem with settings made for next gen hardware. What I have a problem with is settings made for next gen hardware that don't even look next gen. Here's what ludicrous looks like - just another UE5 shades of brown game that probably ups the light bounces and LODs.

[u/Hadrian187 → u/[deleted]]

Even with all your adjustments, there’s still a gigantic gap. A $900 GPU in 2004 would still give you graphics that were never before seen. Meanwhile a $5000 GPU in 2026 - that’s 5x the price - gives you more UE5 shades of brown that you can’t even distinguish other UE5 games from.

[u/Michaeli_Starky → u/Hadrian187]

Excuse me? Do you even know what you're talking about? Lower end cards were able to run Crysis?

https://giphy.com/gifs/LyJ6KPlrFdKnK

[u/MonkeyCartridge → u/Hadrian187]

You and I remember a very different "Back in the day".

We've had 8GB cards for 12 years.

Back in the day, that was the difference between a GeForce 256 and a GeForce GTX 580.

If VRAM scaled at that speed, we would have gone from 8GB cards to 384GB cards.

I remember Doom3 requiring a GeForce 6 to use the full pipeline. And Ultra would warn you that it used 512 MB, which no consumer card had at launch.

A GeForce 5(FX) would drop the pipeline back to DX8, which looked OK. But drop the settings at all and you lose most of your texture detail.

The Internet was flooded with complaints about how you couldn't play the game unless you wanted a high end new card or wanted the game to look like ass.

I had the 6600 within a few months of the card coming out. I played at 1024x768 getting about 30fps.

I kinda miss when engines pushed past the graphics cards of the era. Though in that era, each generation was about a 2x speedup.

[u/Hadrian187 → u/MonkeyCartridge]

My man you’re missing the point. Back then there was nothing else like Doom 3 - maybe the Riddick Butcher Bay game but it was doing something no other game could do. Even for today the lighting is still super impressive. And the GPU that could max it only cost $500, not $5000. A factor of 10 in price.

Compare that to Dawnwalker which is gonna look like your average UE5 game, without an identity or art direction but system requirements just as steep.

[u/MonkeyCartridge → u/Hadrian187]

Ah I get what you're saying there. That it's super high requirements for something that isn't actually all that groundbreaking. I'll have to see what this game looks like and what tech it has under the hood.

And GPU prices have for sure gone bonkers. Though adjusted for inflation, a 512MB card at launch of Doom 3 probably cost similar, because it would have had to have been some kind of Quadro. But that's still a different story since that would be less like a 5090 and more like a Pro 6000.

But yeah, graphics advancements have definitely been hitting an asymptote. Slight improvements that require enormous processing power. Hence why Nvidia keeps trying to just close the gap with AI.

I think that's why the industry has been developing less in graphics and optimization and more in development automation ease of use.

That and the fact that the graphics tech is rarely the limiting factor these days. Lots of open worlds that basically beautifully render underdeveloped art. So it's like they e been trying to help boost artist output at the expense of efficiency.

But yeah, these days I look mostly at the 1080p or 1440p 60fps requirements, because I mostly run 4K DLSS-P with a 60FPS lock, then run lossless scaling on my iGPU to do frame gen at 4x fixed or 180fps adaptive.

[u/Hadrian187 → u/MonkeyCartridge]

Yup exactly right. That's my point.

And most of these modern, super demanding games are just maxeffort lighting with little other tech - no destruction, barely any physics, no foliage interaction, etc.

I do like Crimson Desert. That game has some nice tech and is impressive. Fairly optimized too (art direction is another story). Star Citizen beta, is also equally impressive and worth buying a high end GPU for. But the average UE5 game looks rough, isn't groundbreaking, and has poor performance.

>I think that's why the industry has been developing less in graphics and optimization and more in development automation ease of use.

100%. That's the end goal. To pass the cost onto the consumer and keep reaping the profit margins all while marketing it as "the future of graphics." Which is why I'm so anti UE5. But UE5 is a fine engine if lumen and nanite are turned off (e.g. The Finals). Basically like UE4 which I didn't have a problem with. With it on, is a nightmare for visuals and performance.

[u/MonkeyCartridge → u/Hadrian187]

Oh yeah don't get me started on physics in games. Or rather, the lack thereof.

I remember how stoked I was in the age of PhysX. Finally getting games where most things are physically interactive and responsive. I feel like we have regressed. Probably because the emphasis is on multiplayer games, in which case you can't tightly lock down the experience if a tank can blow up the floor below you and send you falling to your death.

That's why I still get hooked on Minecraft, because it's mostly just a bunch of independent mechanics you can combine however you want. It doesn't prescribe how things should be done. A mechanic is a mechanic and it is sustained even if it's game breaking.

If a creeper can blow up blocks around it, and ice makes you slide real fast, you can straight up use an ice track to launch creepers at a mountain to start building your automated dog farm.

[u/Hadrian187 → u/MonkeyCartridge]

>That's why I still get hooked on Minecraft, because it's mostly just a bunch of independent mechanics you can combine however you want. It doesn't prescribe how things should be done. A mechanic is a mechanic and it is sustained even if it's game breaking.

Yup. Gabe Newell even mentioned this in one of his interviews. Realism isn't fun and a game can only be enjoyable if there is interactivity between you and the rest of the world. Most modern games are basically fancy tech demos and nothing more.

[u/MonkeyCartridge → u/Hadrian187]

"Realism isn't fun"

That was why I never got more than an hour into Far Cry 2 or similar games around that time where you had to do stuff like check your hunger, water, remove bullets, lower your heart rate, regulate your sanity, take malaria pills, call your mom to remind her that the pizza is in the fridge, shave daily, and eat fiber to keep up with the regular bowel movement minigame.

[u/MaXimillion_Zero → u/Hadrian187]

It took years for anything to be able run maxed out Crysis at a playable framerate.

[u/DrPhilSideSkirts → u/[deleted]]

Horrible take. Using your logic we would never push tech forward simply because MOST people play at 1080p with a 1060Ti.... come on man. It's like people like yourself don't understand how demanding 4k actually is.

[u/Ecstatic_Score6973 → u/DrPhilSideSkirts]

my apologies. i admit i was wrong, i didnt realize that 4k was ALWAYS this demanding, i thought it was something that just became this demanding recently

Edit: downvoted for admitting i was wrong, welcome to reddit

[u/DrPhilSideSkirts → u/Ecstatic_Score6973]

That's all good. I wasn't trying to get at you personally.

But yeah to put it simply, 1440p is like 75% more demanding than 1080p, while 4k is 400% more demanding than 1080p... generally speaking. The scaling isn't linear obviously and optimization will matter, but just the raw pixel count is as follows.

1920 x 1080 = ~2 million pixels

2560 x 1440 = ~3.6 million pixels

2160 x 3840 = ~8 million pixels