RazorDragon said:
My rig has tech from 2008, it's a Phenom X3 8650 2.3GHz and has 2GB RAM DDR2. I have a GTS 450 on my PC and almost every new game I buy I can play on high settings at 768p and >40FPS. Altough sometime you will need to upgrade your entire PC, after 5 years I can still play games on high changing only my GPU. If you bought a mid-range PC back in the day, you could still upgrade your processor(to a Phenom II or Core 2 Quad) and RAM without needing to change the motherboard(and thus the whole PC) if extra performance is needed to run new games. If you buy console games for 5 years, the extra money you spent on them would probably be enough to upgrade your PC thanks to the price difference. I agree with the part that most games cannot be enjoyed on low settings, but thanks to how long this gen has dragged on, you'll only have problems running games on high/medium settings if your PC is too old, has an Atom processor or both. Also, Minecraft and Diablo 3 are quite taxing on the PC, you won't run those easily with a old PC. |
It depends what type of games you are talking about. You may be able to get away with simply upgrading your graphics card for some FPS games which tend to be more GPU intensive. If however you want to play modern RTS games or others that are more CPU intensive then it's time for a new PC.
From my own experience I bought a gaming rig in 2008. The specs were - Intel Core 2 Duo 3ghz, 2x 8800GT in SLI and 4GB of DDR2 ram. I was fine until I tried playing Shogun 2 Total war. Needless to say as soon as there were more than 1000 troops per side the game became unplayable. On the other hand I could play both Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 on max settings with no issues so yeah it does depend on your needs.







