Turning The Settings Up Too High
PC Gamer|January 2020
Why do we game on PC if not to break stuff?
Ian Evenden
Turning The Settings Up Too High

For almost as long as I can remember I’ve tried to push games past the limits of my PC. These days that means trying to run them at 4K on a graphics card that’s not up to it. It means bringing framerates to a stumbling halt whenever anything interesting happens, never lowering detail levels beyond ‘medium’.

It’s a compulsion that goes back a long way. I was one of the lucky kids who got to use the PC their mum bought for word processing and ‘homework’ to play games on, a 286 with 1MB RAM, later upgraded to a 386 with 4MB, a CD-ROM drive and a Soundblaster 16 sound card.

On this latter machine I attempted to run Doom, a game that really wanted a 486. Graphics cards hadn’t been invented yet, but neither had proper detail levels. Doom ran in hi-res and lo-res modes, and if you wanted to reduce the strain on that passively-cooled CPU any more you could reduce the size of the viewable area by literally walling it in, grey-green bricks filling the space between the game and the edges of the screen. This had the desired effect, but on a 14-inch monitor was a dismal experience.

Diese Geschichte stammt aus der January 2020-Ausgabe von PC Gamer.

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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der January 2020-Ausgabe von PC Gamer.

Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.