What was your first videogame that made you say "Ok, I need to play this game properly: I need to upgrade my specs"?
Going back to your beginnings in PC gaming: the first game you played and loved, but the frame rate and resolution weren’t ideal. Your first “I need/want to upgrade my specs” basically.
I can’t recall exactly which one of the two it was but it was either Quake 4 or Doom 3. I remember I managed to squeeze out like 14 fps using RivaTuner on the family computer. I got my first job not long after that and put together my first PC.
Doom 3 for me by far, I remember reading the pcgamer article and it was the game that they were predicting would cause millions of upgrades. IdTech at the time was incredible with what it was trying to do, and they weren’t kidding. Kind of funny that it’s so accessible these days.
World of Warcraft. I was on Windows XP with 512mb of RAM and who knows what graphics card but I was lagging so bad when WotLK came out.
With all the people standing at the entrance to Naxx I had to basically aim myself for the portal and lag my way in without being able to see where my character was walking due to the lag.
My parents needed a new family PC right before it first launched, and I convinced them to get a slightly better version just so I could spend the next decade of my life raiding with the homies
I had to run a boot disk because we couldn't run Windows 3.1 and Doom 2 at the same time. Good times.
My brother had a friend who knew how to upgrade computers, but we never got permission to do so. And then some years later my brother's friend was taken by the state because his parents believed some of that early Sovereign Citizen bullshit and stopped paying taxes. I think there were also some drug charges. It was just personal amounts of pot, but it was the early 90s, so they were fucked.
Skyrim. I had that running in integrated graphics on an old gateway I got. Once I started Playing pc games I new I had to have the best. 15 years later my younger self would be jealous of the rig I have today.
Quake 4. I remember running it on a very cheap GPU and following tweakguides to get it running properly. The game that actually got me to pull the trigger on new hardware was Battlefield 2142.
Not sure if this really counts, but I was given a copy of ‘The Movies’ when I was younger. Turns out it needed a DVD player to read it, but at the time I only had a CD player, so had to go out and buy an external DVD player to use it. Besides a few very lightweight PC games, I played on console most of the time and never got a true understanding of ‘specs’ until later in life.
I’ve been playing PC games since 1986. Started off with Kings Quest, and Heroes Quest. I can honestly say that no game has caused me to upgrade my PC until last year when I bought Cyberpunk 2077 because it was on sale. At the time I was running a 1080Ti, which is still a capable card, but I’m a whore for fancy graphics and visuals, and when I saw what CDPR was doing with Raytracing in that game I needed to have that. Pulled the trigger on a 4090 in January and haven’t regretted it for one minute. My 1080Ti lasted me 5 years, I’m anticipating my 4090 will do the same.
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