Well, I think I have settled on the specs for my PC upgrade now. Don't have a huge budget, but I think I can manage to pull off:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 4500
RAM: 16 GB DDR4 3600
SSD: 1 TB PCIe Gen 3
GPU: Intel Arc A580
Such a system would be roughly capable of PS5 tier performance (in all areas except for load times), while costing me around $400 since I will be reusing my case and power supply and windows install from my old build. The riskiest part by far is that Intel GPU, Intel is new to the GPU game and have struggled with drivers, struggled with performance on older DirectX 9 games, and struggled with convincing developers to use their DLSS/FSR competitor XeSS, but Intel has been putting in alot of work to fix their driver and DX 9 issues over the last year since they entered the GPU market, and they have the money to be able to afford to drive higher marketshare, which in turn will improve XeSS support for future games. I think going with Intel for my GPU may be worth the risk since the A580, when properly utilized, outperforms every other sub-$200 GPU by quite some considerable margin, the similarly priced Nvidia GeForce 1660 S, 1660ti, 3050 and AMD RX 5600 XT don't even come close to touching it's performance in games where it is properly utilized, you need to pay about $50 more for a RX 6600 to match it while Nvidia's cheapest card that matches or exceeds it is like $90 (Nvidia badly needs to get the 4050 out asap and price it lower than $200). AMD and Nvidia both have really dropped the ball when it comes to low end GPU's in recent generations, just about every GPU both have released in the last 3 years or so has been a $200+ part, they left the sub-$200 market largely uncovered for Intel to swoop in with better performing GPU's than their older generation sub-$200 offerings.
Looking forward to joining the ranks of the PC master race, where multiplayer is free, Steam sales are often and have big discounts, modding is fairly easy, and we get ports of just about every game in existence.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 09 January 2024
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