How I Stopped Worrying About Hardware Specs and Learned to Love the Game

Summary
- Frustration over graphics settings led to me abandoning PC gaming for consoles due to performance issues.
- Graphics modes on new consoles required adjustments in how I thought about how I experienced games.
- The return to PC gaming with budget hardware helped cement the idea that a great game surpasses hardware limitations.
The fun of games is playing them, not tweaking graphical settings. This is why I dropped PC gaming for nearly a decade to go exclusive with consoles. Yet, with graphics modes now the norm for console gaming, I’ve had to face this frustration once again.
Settings Make Me Notice Performance Issues
Thanks to a lack of tech literacy in my younger years, I never thought much of performance issues or graphical prowess (at least beyond the beauty of classic pixel art).
It was a blissful ignorance that allowed me to love games riddled with issues. I even reveled in some of these, like the fear I felt when a neighbor summoned MissingNo. into my copy of Pokémon Yellow. Put otherwise, glitches, choppy frame rates, and questionable fidelity fostered mystique rather than frustration because I had no comparison point to understand why these things happened.
This all changed in 2011 when I built my first gaming PC. I was a college kid with a budget of under $1000 and a mindset that all I needed was a machine that’d run World of Warcraft better than my MacBook Pro could. The resulting rig technically achieved this, but one thing stood in the way of it fulfilling its true potential: me.
Call it a personality flaw, but when I was confronted with a wall of sliders, my inclination was to max them all out. In doing so, I stubbornly opted to run the game at a constantly fluctuating frame rate rather than a stable one.
I was constantly bugged by this flimsy performance. The only ground I gave toward improving it was lowering shadow quality (unless I was running content that truly required 60 FPS, in which case I’d temporarily give a little more). These constant trips to the settings menu butchered my immersion every time.
If I lowered settings for better performance, I couldn’t help but think of the visuals I wasn’t seeing. If I maxed them out, frame rate dips became something I directly attributed to budget restraints and that felt bad in its own way. This mentality transferred to every game I went on to play using that PC until I straight-up stopped.
A few years later I’d buy a new graphics card and more RAM, which gave me a definite bump to coincide with the new console generation, but the problem never truly went away. I was simply too aware that the power level of my wallet couldn’t keep up with the ever-increasing demands of games, which meant I was increasingly skipping games I’d likely have loved.
“Perhaps PC gaming isn’t a fit for me after all,” I begrudgingly accepted.
So, I Made the Transition Back to Consoles
My return to consoles (not made by Nintendo) was pretty swift after multiple years of settings fatigue hindering my love of gaming. I bought a PlayStation 4 and only returned to my PC for a handful of less demanding titles until that rig eventually burned out.
This change turned out to be a breath of fresh air. While I was playing games with lower fidelity and frame rates than high-end gaming rigs were pumping out, there was comfort in a uniform experience decided on by the developers. I also sat far enough away from my 1080p TV that it masked many flaws I’d notice with my face pressed against a computer monitor (I call it real-life anti-aliasing). Plus, there was also the added perk of being able to lounge on my couch instead of being perched over my desk.
However, the best part of the console experience was that I no longer felt the self-imposed urge to avoid games that would require settings compromises on my hardware. This was most observable in exclusives, as I knew there was no better way of playing them, emulators aside.
Sure, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild may have already been pushing my Switch to its limits on launch day, but that’s what everyone else was simultaneously experiencing. By removing any sense of having an inferior experience, my mind was freed to focus on Nintendo’s brilliant translation of Hyrule into an open world. It was at this time that I afforded myself the opportunity to think more critically about game design rather than any hardware specs that could overshadow it.
At the same time, I was becoming ever more literate about the technical shortcomings of games due to a proliferation of online media mixed with self-discovery. My experience with PC gaming had—for better or worse—opened my eyes to what good and bad performance looked like, and that could only ever be built upon, never shaken.
It took all my willpower to overlook the 30 FPS combat and door.jpeg in Final Fantasy VII Remake. Meanwhile, this manifested positively when I marveled at the buttery smoothness of Super Mario Odyssey, though the shortcomings of the Switch’s hardware were all too evident in most other areas.
Despite all this, I would say this console generation was a massive boon for my now-adult self to reaffirm my love for gaming. Unfortunately, this was immediately complicated when the current generation entered the lobby.
New Generation, Old Woes
When I first got my PlayStation 5, I was unnerved to discover the new trend of including both 60 FPS performance and 30 FPS fidelity modes for most games. Having to pick my poison brought back the same mental ticks that caused me to abandon ship with my PC. I’d have to adjust to this new reality if I wanted to keep gaming.
Alas, I booted up Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered and immediately leaped for its fidelity mode. This was due to my former settings-maxing habits, wanting to see the ray-tracing my new gaming box was capable of, and needing a showcase for my newly bought LG CX OLED TV. I adjusted to 30 FPS well enough that I enjoyed my playthrough, but when trying out the 60 FPS performance mode after completion, I realized how my values had shifted to lie with better gameplay in most instances (especially one based on quick reactions and nimble traversal).
For most future games, I’d end up picking performance modes, even though I had to contend with the nagging bugbear of what eye candy I was missing out on. There was also an extra layer of research required to understand which mode served each game best, as they were rarely created equal, but to cut to the chase, I ultimately made the best of this new norm. When I could, I split the difference using 40 FPS modes and, in a few instances, stabilized frame rates with VRR.
Learning to Love the Game
In a world where “either/or” was the M.O. for performance unless you could shell out for top-shelf hardware, I came to terms with the limitations and overlooked quite a few technical issues in order to play the games I wanted to. However, what I didn’t expect was for my return to PC gaming to be the cherry on top of this maturation.
When I bought an entry-level prebuilt PC for a deep discount, I had my expectations in check. An RTX 4060 graphics card with a Ryzen 7 5700 processor and 16 GB of RAM would get me in the door for many modern games, but isn’t enough to max out graphics settings. I was content knowing that I could play games like Final Fantasy XIV the way I wanted, get a nostalgia boost for “the old days” in the process, and have a gaming PC for work purposes. If anything, I could look forward to games that run poorly now blowing me away when I eventually upgrade my hardware.
Most indicative that my perspective had changed was turning down the PlayStation 5 Pro. Sony’s $700 mid-generation upgrade shoots for the best-of-both-worlds experience I thrived on before, yet I realized that it wasn’t going to fundamentally change my appreciation for the art of the games I played. It was an easy choice to instead invest in PC upgrades and continue accepting trade-offs as it opened up more opportunities than a closed ecosystem.
A great game will break through any hardware barriers. While visuals are important, where games truly thrive is in how they use design and interactivity to tell stories or offer experiences you can’t get anywhere else. At their best, they even have the power to teach us poignant life lessons.
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