Are my games "normal"?
Are my games "normal"?
Hello!
So a quick little backstory.
So i'm the type of person who plays game "ultra or nothing". For 3-4 years, i have been buying games on steam and such, but not playing them simply for the reason i can't run them at 1080p ultra settings at 60+ fps (i know ultra hardly makes a difference a lot of times but its just a long personal problem).
I have been playing fps like csgo, rainbow 6, overwatch etc all these years and some old titles, until recently i got a rtx 2080.
Here are the complete specs
Cpu
: i5-4690K (4.5)
Gpu
: MSI Gaming X Trio RTX 2080
Ram
: Corsair Vengeance 8x2 DDR3
Mobo
: Asus Rog Maximus VII Ranger
SSD
: Samsung 860 EVO 250GB
HDD
: Western Digital Black 1 TB, Blue 2 TB
PSU
: Corsair Rm1000x
Cooler
Noctua NH-U9s
So the day i got the gpu the first thing i did was install Forza Horizon 4 Demo. It's a game i really loved on my old gtx 960, and after hearing so much about it i wanted to see how beautiful it is. After the setup is complete i crank everything to ultra and start, but to my disappointment i was facing some cpu bottleneck. Now i knew the cpu was gonna bottleneck my gpu but i expected it to limit my max framerates (which didn't bother me cause i'll be using a 1080p 60hz monitor till i save for a 1440p 144hz one) but instead i got 100% cpu usage and 40-50% gpu usage with stuttering.
Well no problem, i guess i'll turn on vsync? And it did work, the game wasn't stuttering anymore!
Yay? Not really.
The game still felt really meh. At times i even felt it looked better on my 960.
I got really frustrated and felt i wasted my money and thought to myself "Wow people think this game is beautiful? It look so bad!" and then later "maybe since i haven't played games for so long and with all this technological advancements i imagine games to be more realistic than they actually are?" Am i being ridiculous?
That's when i noticed, the terrain around me. It looks... ugly? The car itself looks fine and such but the terrain looked like a image from a dot matrix printer? I was surprised. I reinstalled the game, drivers, windows everything. It still looks bad? Is this how its supposed to look like? I just deleted the game out of frustration.
Today i started playing Just cause 3. And i noticed this thing again.
Is this normal? Am i having unreal expectations from the modern games? Or is there something wrong? Please help me.
The grass looks fine to me but the shrubs on the right and the trees on the right and far. Are they supposed to be this blurry/dotty/undetailed?
The black sploches on the right, the EXTREMELY dotted shrubs on the left and the trees in front.
The flowers and vegetations.
The tree on the left side of the road in the middle has literally half its trunk as black.
Is this normal? Am i being too nitpicky and delusional? I still remember playing the og halo and thinking to this day how realistic that thing was but seeing youtube videos now i find it having quite bad graphics (not for its time but for this point of time).
Please help me
Thank you
It might be related to the CPU, possibly needing an upgrade soon. What adjustments are there in the game settings?
As per my story, EVERYTHING is at its maximum/ultra setting. That's why it bothers me a lot. I've already spent a lot on my current upgrades (parts are really overpriced in my country), and I don't want to spend more until I understand the real issue. What exactly needs fixing? My CPU? RAM? Monitor?
Lower LOD detail in games serves as a method to boost performance, sacrificing the realism of faraway objects. It's simpler than fully optimizing a game and engine so that all details remain visible at greater distances. Most games don't achieve their full potential, as it becomes too resource-heavy. The focus is currently on quantity rather than quality.
They really seem that poor quality by intention. This is something I also have to face, which is why I haven’t upgraded to a 1060 with 6GB for 1080p gaming. The games allow you to download 40 gigabytes of files, yet it still feels like an older version with only about 4GB. It’s completely confusing why the graphics remain so low quality. Also, boosting the resolution helps a little, but it’s still not great. It feels like the developers are stuck and can’t improve the textures beyond what they had in 2009.
How much memory? 16GB or higher seems ideal, the monitor shouldn't impact performance, and your CPU is at full capacity, which is my estimate. Maybe hold off until AMD introduces their 7nm chips, then consider upgrading to something like a 6c12t for around $120-150.
It's an old CPU with a bottleneck, consuming all available CPU power and preventing any GPU usage. Upgrading to a 7th generation i7 would significantly improve FPS, while your current i5 model has fewer threads which can cause stuttering in demanding games. Your PC and games are fine, but the upgrade would yield better performance.
Thank you for the response. It seems this applies to distant objects too. As shown in the first image, the trees on the hills—being the farthest away—can appear as if they’re made of potatoes, which is understandable. The trees and bushes in the middle area are also problematic; I’m not sure if I’m being too critical, but considering the distance, they should have been displayed more clearly given my current CPU and GPU performance. However, the bushes right next to me look even worse. I can’t compare them well because YouTube compresses the footage significantly, making it hard to judge quality accurately. For the last picture, I noticed the tree was completely brown on YouTube, while mine looks mostly black with just a few pixels of brown.
The frame rate isn't the main problem, I'm okay with anything above 60+ while running at ultra. V sync was enabled in Forza Horizon 4 after unlocking, which gave me 120 frames but caused 100% CPU usage and made me think it was affecting rendering. Even without V sync, I'm getting around 100+ FPS but the game still looks poor. Lowering V sync should reduce CPU to 50-60%, but I doubt it will solve the rendering issues (it seemed like it did in Horizon 4).