Spec Bullshittery

PC specs have been getting more and more demanding every damn year. It almost seems like every time Nvidia releases their new bullshit graphics card, suddenly every single game has that as the recommended spec and last year’s cards are the minimum. Is it really worth spending hundreds of dollars on the brand new epic gamer hardware every single time a new one gets released? The answer is obviously fucking no but I mean you knew that already.

It used to be back in the day that PC users would shit on consoletards for their incredibly low quality products. This came at a time when consoles were undergoing the pretty rough transition to the “HD era” we all know and love today, where consoles could put out truly amazing graphics at a 16:9 ratio but it was really hard to get down because the architecture, especially for the PS3, was weird and all new kinds of strange skills were starting to be demanded.

So you could really just build PCs for well under the cost of a brand new console that could outperform the bastards in exchange for PC gaming being mostly abandoned until a little bit into the 2010s since Microsoft were busy trying to shove their shitty little boxes into the living room. The venture wasn’t worth it at all.

Nowadays the PS5 outperforms the overwhelming majority of people’s PCs. This is the natural state of things, Sony can get much better deals buying parts in bulk than individual consumers can buying scalped parts after Nvidia lets bots immediately take every last order of a new card again, on top of this the PS5 is already sold at a loss with typical console affair being to make up the lost profit on online subscriptions and digital store fees.

I dunno about the Xbox. I don’t think anybody thinks about the Xbox unless they’re part of the FIFA audience.

Despite this, it really doesn’t feel like there’s any victory on the PS5’s part. It comes across more like a quaint little funfact than an actual bragging point. You know, you can get all the power in the world by trading in all the money in the world, but at some point it becomes pertinent to ask what exactly we’re using all this power for.

Well, most indie games don’t need it. Either an indie game is a smaller, well optimized experience rarely utilizing advanced tech, or it’s a pile of poorly coded garbage filled with memory leakage that wouldn’t run well on a supercomputer let alone a personal one. I’ve rarely, if ever, heard about anyone having to buy a brand new PC to play the latest indie game.

AA games, the awkward inbetweener of indie and blockbusters, also generally don’t need it. They may make more demands, but these demands can easily be made with cards of generations past. So, no real need to beat the PS5 at all here.

Then you have AAA games. For these you really do want to go all out, typically AAA games will be utilizing the latest features available to game developers, and without the proper hardware you’d struggle to run these games at all. I’ve never seen a AAA game with modest specs for the time, they’re ALWAYS trying to push the bar when it comes to graphics fidelity.

But you know, that begs another question, are those AAA games any fun? The answer is fuck no.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve played a AAA game I’ve actually enjoyed. Many of them are straight rehashes of what their series has been doing for the past decade and a half at this point, except every reiteration they’ll get more and more pointless bloat taking more and more away from whatever fun there might’ve been, if there was any to begin with.

Many of these games are the same game with different skins, like playing variations of chess. Oh look, it’s the Star Wars version with Luke and the Emperor as the kings! Oh look, the Spiderman version that has Spiderman and (insert main spiderman villian here) as the kings!

Batman: Arkham Asylum regrettably created a combat system that every single nitwit developer has been copying since, because it’s incredibly easy to understand mechanically. Mash X then tilt your control stick in another direction to mash X some more. People mock JRPGs for simplistic inputs and time wasting encounters but there the quality resides on how the developers handle the mechanics of fighting, while here there’s 0 thought involved and 0 way for the idea to evolve.

It’s all lock and key. Are you being attacked? Counter. Being attacked by someone with a shield? Use the shield repellent. Being attacked by a big guy with extra muscles? Dodge. There’s no extra thought to be put into it, and while I have no qualms with lock and key design by itself, it gets boring when for the entirety of the game that is the ONLY FUCKING THING THAT’S THERE.

And outside of combat you’re just going through a bunch of hoops. All these games have open worlds because the openier your world is the moreer content there is. It’s an incredibly shitty way of designing something for looks first and gameplay never. I fucking hate open worlds. I hate trudging through miles of useless bullshit to get to the glowing marker, or to grab another meaningless collectible to check it off of my chores list.

There’s no challenge to these collectibles, there’s no skills to be tested. You’re meant to go to an area and a number ticks up as a response to you going to that area. That is it.

And if not for that, you’re going to a mission marker so that you can then later go to the area where the mission actually takes place. What genius. Why the hell doesn’t the mission marker just start me off at the mission then? This may seem trivial, but after 20-40 long, padded hours mostly comprised of contrivance and point-a-point-b-isms, it starts to grate on the fucking nerves.

If it’s not an open world game, it’s a boring series of hallways with the same generic mook to shoot that may vaguely be fun if you’ve never played a proper FPS game before.

AAA games are not worth buying hardware for. The kind of people who’ll buy top of the line hardware just to play this shit must be some of the most boring people in existence, having more in common with the drywall than a human being.

This isn’t even getting into the fact that most of these games could, theoretically, run perfectly fine on worse hardware, but don’t because optimization was the last thing considered. It’s even worse when in spite of all of that their goal for “excellent” is something like 30FPS since that’s how consoles run.

So there’s your reasons why PC specs have largely stagnated. It’s too expensive, and there’s nothing worth playing with the big boy hardware.

You know, there was a time when getting all the top of the line stuff must’ve felt like a very hackery thing to do. Getting to play with all the cool new toys, etc. At least that’s the impression I get looking back on hacker culture, they always seemed giddy to try and brag about the newest things.

Nowadays it feels like hackers are defined by the exact opposite scenario. Instead of having top of the line stuff, they have old stuff that ‘just works’ and never needs to be replaced. It’s become something of a stereotype for some unfashionable socks and sandals fatty to work his tech guru knowledge by using a Thinkpad that’s older than the overwhelming majority of Nekoweb’s userbase.

Inversely the kinds of people who buy the “top of the line” shit like Mac computers or even the latest smartphones are seen as obnoxious trendy hipsters, even if what they’re buying is technically impressive on just a hardware scale and would’ve made the nerds of old collectively paint the town white.

Maybe it’s because there’s a certain wisdom required to understand what’s most important out of your computing. The Thinkpad may have far worse specs at a glance than the McMonster machines you can build today, but it’s charming, simple, and nondistracting. It’s used to program, it’s used to get work done, and by God can it get that work done.

On the other hand is the consumer who got the latest smartphone or Windows 11 computer and is bombarded with shitty advertisements and a slow, meandering experience through poorly maintained legacy shit that’s been stuck there since XP. It doesn’t do what it needs to, it actively tries to do what it shouldn’t. Then you end up having to ask yourself “what did I need all this for?”

Buying these new computers might’ve not been so bad if the direction they took was good. They don’t have to be bad. AAA games don’t have to be bad either. But they are, and that makes it very difficult to always say that purchasing this sort of shit is a ‘wise’ decision, or even that you should be giddy at the thought of it.

In fact, doing stuff like this is getting more and more exhausting for more and more people. They just find “what works” and stick to it. They find the spec that plays all their games, or the computer that can get all their work done, and don’t bother moving around unless they have to.

And I don’t know, everyone outside of that paradigm is probably the sort of person who buys consoles at launch and swears by the infallible quality of Apple products, but I doubt someone like that actually knows how to work compooter good ’nuff to actually find this sort of blog post.