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Why is PC gaming still considered difficult with too much tinkering?

Filben

Member
Installing and uninstalling games on Steam is literally an one-button process. Does Paladins require additional steps?
I guess pure console players aren't familiar with context menus that you need for uinstalling things on Steam. But then again they play WoW which can be relatively complex at times.
 

joe2187

Banned
My PC starts whirring like a jet engine everytime I watch Twitch or Netflix,

playing a game on it might as well start a nuclear reactor.




I dont know anything about computer hardware...or software...and I dont want to learn.

I want something simple....and physical media to insert into it.


that's all.

although I wish my PC would stop being the louder than my AC.
 
I guess pure console players aren't familiar with context menus that you need for uinstalling things on Steam. But then again they play WoW which can be relatively complex at times.

In Big Picture Mode it's even easier, the uninstall option is under the "Manage Game" menu which is at the main page of each game.

My PC starts whirring like a jet engine everytime I watch Twitch or Netflix,

playing a game on it might as well start a nuclear reactor.

Have you tried asking a tech guy to take a look at it? I'm sure he can do something about it without you having to get your hands dirty.
 

Fredrik

Member
@Fredrik

This is not so much about PC gaming and more PC in general. Unfortuantely it's the 'general' that IMO reinforces the stigma to PC gaming. So I have been lurking around this thread for a while, reading your comments/rebuttals and honestly you just seem to be a reasonably technically adept person and PC seems to work well with you. Chances are you have run into minor issues and never batted an eye. Resolved and moved on so fast that it seems like nothing. And or you have reasonable control when it comes to installing new programs and tools and minimized your risk of compatibility issues. I didnt catch your possible work experience, personally, if you had worked any sort of IT or software support I wouldnt think you would have started this thread. But who knows, maybe it's just your faith in humanity isn't dead, lol. Thinking back to the support I used to do and some of what I still do, it is soul crushing how inept people and so called gamers can be when it comes to devices that require more thought than 'Hit start to play/continue'. To say nothing of those that refuse to do even the most basic of debug research. PC can be great. Can be fairly easy, but on the flip side, it is very easy to unbalance and break everything. 99% of the time, the issues are self inflicted. They can buy a perfectly running, pre-configured machine that is about as close to console as you can get and with very little care or thought they will click on some link or install some shinny piece of software they've seen or heard about and it cascades out of control and into a paper weight. A good majority of these "gamers" will throw up their hands, stick their fingers in their ears and just start screaming it's broke. All while maintaining they did nothing even after they got their umptenth warning message they just clicked through to clear the window and blue screened. Consoles by nature remove all that. Being a closed box, walled garden with a very narrow path, limiting apps and installs to stuff guaranteed to just work 99% of the time with no fuss. Just turn on and go. Until PCs hit that type of 'Easy', which at that point they would be a console, they will continue to be viewed as difficult.
Thanks for stepping out of the dark ;)
I don't know, you might be right I guess, I definitely have some technical knowledge, I've been tinkering with Raspberry Pi and built an arcade machine and at work I build and repair industrial computers on a component level. And I can handle Windows relatively well. But still, my knowledge of modern PCs for gaming were pretty much zero when I bought this. I can't remember doing anything that could go under the label tinkering on this computer. It has been super stable.

I don't download third party programs or other stuff on it though. And I've never done any overclocking etc. What do I know, maybe that helps to keep it more stable?
Steam, GOG, Origin, Uplay, Adaware, iTunes are pretty much the programs I use.

iTunes is definitely not hassle-free though... And way back in the days I used to record music on PC but swapped to porta studios instead because of all the issues... So I definitely know that computers can have issues. No doubt about that. But I'm just talking about using a PC for gaming here, and for me the last 4 years has been fantastic.

In the end I absolutely understand that some of these issues people are talking about are real and might scare people away.
However, I still believe that some issues and how often they appear are highly exaggerated, like the issues about installing drivers or patching. And talking about how problematic old games are are is a bit strange since only one console (the least popular one) have working BC today. Considering how popular DF threads are and how heated every discussion gets regarding 30/60fps I think many peopole around this place are doing themselves a huge disservice by ignoring the PC as a gaming platform.
 

oSoLucky

Member
Before Windows 10 and GeForce Experience, my PC required about as much maintenance as a console(none). These days, I have to cross my fingers that my wife didn't update W10 while I was at work and that Nvidia drivers actually install properly. Besides that, consoles and PCs are great for their respective strengths and equally worthy of gaming on. If you have to tinker around with PC settings/hardware too much the you've done something wrong. Hell these days most games even come with an optimizer that gives you recommended settings so you can just click "Ok" and go.
 

molnizzle

Member
Before Windows 10 and GeForce Experience, my PC required about as much maintenance as a console(none). These days, I have to cross my fingers that my wife didn't update W10 while I was at work and that Nvidia drivers actually install properly. Besides that, consoles and PCs are great for their respective strengths and equally worthy of gaming on. If you have to tinker around with PC settings/hardware too much the you've done something wrong. Hell these days most games even come with an optimizer that gives you recommended settings so you can just click "Ok" and go.

This is kind of the point though—it's possible to do something wrong.
 

Fredrik

Member
Before Windows 10 and GeForce Experience, my PC required about as much maintenance as a console(none). These days, I have to cross my fingers that my wife didn't update W10 while I was at work and that Nvidia drivers actually install properly. Besides that, consoles and PCs are great for their respective strengths and equally worthy of gaming on. If you have to tinker around with PC settings/hardware too much the you've done something wrong. Hell these days most games even come with an optimizer that gives you recommended settings so you can just click "Ok" and go.
Now you're scaring me, I literally just upgraded to Windows 10 and installed new nvidia drivers 2 days ago :S

And I actually had one incident just now that I feel like I need to share here. So I was driving at a gazillion kmph in Forza Horizon 3 through some field and was having a jolly good time as usual, then I found myself just staring at the desktop all of a sudden, and there wasn't even an error message or anything explaining what just happened, it was just game-(swap)-desktop. Huh?

So yeah, we'll see how this goes, maybe Windows 10 will cause this thread to have a Shyamalan type twist by the end ;P
 

dock

Member
I know people rag on it, but I honestly feel like I had fewer headaches with DOS gaming than modern PC gaming. A few boot disks and pkzip and driver fiddles were prettt basic in comparison.
 

TJP

Member
I've been a PC gamer for 20 years and a console game for 25 years and I've had had two seperate issues on PC when motherboards died. A hassle certainly but nothing too hard to fix.

Fettling with a games setting is what PC gaming is all about; perhaps for some it's a little overwhelming at first. I guess my only bit of advice for a new person is do your homework on parts (there are so many YT channels and websites for advice and suggested builds) and don't crank every setting to maximum the second the game has installed. Read reviews on the quality of a port should the game be mutliplatform and never pre-order anything.

I prefer the freedom PC gaming offers along with the huge back cataloge of games. Consoles are great for exclusives and when game publishers can't be arsed assigning the resouces to make a decent PC port.

Consoles to me are like an iPod, quality headphones and iTunes; PC gaming is like owning a powerful amp, a pair of good quality loud speakers and a quality CD player or streamer. Both offer the end user the ability to enjoy music in different ways.
 

oSoLucky

Member
Now you're scaring me, I literally just upgraded to Windows 10 and installed new nvidia drivers 2 days ago :S

And I actually had one incident just now that I feel like I need to share here. So I was driving at a gazillion kmph in Forza Horizon 3 through some field and was having a jolly good time as usual, then I found myself just staring at the desktop all of a sudden, and there wasn't even an error message or anything explaining what just happened, it was just game-(swap)-desktop. Huh?

So yeah, we'll see how this goes, maybe Windows 10 will cause this thread to have a Shyamalan type twist by the end ;P


I have heard of others having problems with Nvidia drivers, and a TON of people pissed at certain W10 updates, though you can always rollback if need be. The problem with Nvidia has been going on for the better part of 2 years for me. It started when I was still on W7. Then I used my W7 upgrade and did a clean install of OEM W10 when I got my 6800k and new mobo. I kept the same card(780Ti, probably upgrade next year) throughout it all, and I have to fight every single time to get a new driver installed. It can go weeks with failed installs until I finally seek out and manually install(which fails about 2/2 of the time still for me). I have eventually gotten every update installed except for the very last one. I also got a new laptop with a 940M installed, and, guess what? Nvidia driver install problems. I have never had so many problems with 1 piece of software before. Especially one that the vendor pushes on you so heavily. My issues can't be that widespread or I feel there would be major backlash. It's infuriating.
 

Aiustis

Member
I still think this aspect of PC gaming gets ignored in these discussions. It's always about the high-end AAA games that might have trouble running on some low/mid-range hardware. Honestly, if you only care about AAA games I'm not sure PC gaming is right for you.

I've spent a big chunk of my PC gaming time on very low-end games that pretty much just install and instantly play without issue on pretty much any modern system, and these are often some of the best PC games that can't be found on consoles. It's basically the "graphics don't make the game" argument you might hear from Nintendo fans or something, but coming from people who actually do have access to better hardware.

This so much. Other than handheld I love PC gaming because I can take or leave most AAA games and really don't care about graphics.
 

Lister

Banned
Guess OP never bought Arkham Knight or Rage at release

Rage had worse issues on console than PC at release. Pc had the texture swap issue which was bad, but the consoles had that on top of poor performance.

And Arkham Knight run fine at medium settings, it was high and higher than posed serious issues. (stuttering). It was fixed and now it's BY FAR the best version of the game to play.

As mentioned, these are developer issues, not platform issues. I could point to the MCC as a counter to Batman or Alien Isolation on release. Weren't there parts where it would run at lik 5 FPS on release? It was fixed later on, but was that a developer issues or a console issue? Or is it a console or devleoper issue thana 750ti still runs that game better thana base Ps4?
 

Finaika

Member
My PC starts whirring like a jet engine everytime I watch Twitch or Netflix,

playing a game on it might as well start a nuclear reactor.




I dont know anything about computer hardware...or software...and I dont want to learn.

I want something simple....and physical media to insert into it.


that's all.

although I wish my PC would stop being the louder than my AC.

Clean your PC.
 
Sure, but they worked fine on Consoles...

And other games perform poorly on consoles but run great on PC. Does that mean that the platform itself is to blame? Is it fair to say that because Fallout 4 or Just Cause 3 or the Witcher 3 or No Man's Sky or many others launched in an unoptimized state on the PS4 that it's a serious issue of console gaming?
 
I really can't agree here. I got back into PC gaming 1.5 years ago and had my fair share of problems. While there where small for me, almost everyone else of my gaming friends would have surrendered. Just two of them, both IT and IT Sec students are into PC gaming, too.

I don't want to get into the whole build and setup process, as this is something that could be skipped by someone less skilled. These are the problems I've encountered with the games I played in the last 1.5 years with a slightly OC'd 6700K, R9 390 and 16GB RAM and an Xbox One controller:


  • Alan Wake
    Crashed during first cut scene, had to install old GPU driver version.

  • American Truck Simulator / Euro Truck Simulator
    Controller support is a pain in the ass. I had to map every button myself and the controller needs to be connected before you start the game, otherwise it just acts weird.

  • Banished
    Random crashes all over the place. Haven't found a solution and thus stopped playing.

  • BioShock Remastered
    Bad performance, crashes all over the place. I was playing this with my girlfriend and after 2 hours she asked me if we just could hook up the PS3 again and play it there.

  • Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition
    Keyboard/Mouse support disastrous, button prompts for controller missing or something, I don't really remember it but I just know that I've stopped after 2 hours and people told me that I needed to mod the game.

  • Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
    Bad performance, weird mouse acceleration, lots of crashes and one reproducible crash during the last fight which prevented my to finish the game. Three patches later the game wouldn't even start anymore.

  • DOOM Demo
    Crash after starting the game. After I couldn't find a solution online I digged trough the files and found some .ini or something which said that it starts with Vulkan enabled. Set it to DirectX and it went just fine.

  • Dying Light
    My GPU makes a really highpitched noise in the menu and my PC crashes after about 20 seconds. If I make it into the game in time it's all fine though. Due to a bad V-Sync implementation it also locked to 30 FPS when it dropped below 60, I tried every trick there is until a friendly Neogaf user helped me with this: Alt-tab out of the game so that the Windows build-in V-Sync can take over, enjoy 3x buffering from here on with smooth frame rates.

  • Live is Strange
    Crashes. Everywhere.

  • No Man's Sky
    Crash during title screen. Refund.

  • Project Cars
    Really bad performance with 4 karts in bland looking tracks, like FPS in the low 40s but locked 60 with lots of cars in the rain on the Grüne Hölle. Couldn't make it through the first kart races due to bad performance and stopped playing the game.

And that's just me looking at my steam catalogue. I've probably missed some. I'm not complaining though, I chose to game on a PC and knew about the problems it comes with. But I would never ever recommend PC gaming to my less tech-savvy friends, because it doesn't just work. Yes, everyone could learn about the basics of hardware and simple OS administration. It's the same with learning a new language or know how to fix your car - everyone could do it. I speak 3 languages fluently but can barely manage to change my car lights or battery. For everything else I just have friends, whose Windows laptops I fix in exchange. I'm sure I could learn more about my car but but I don't really see the benefits other than saving some money in exchange for my free time.

My two car-friends and I play all on consoles together. I would never recommend them to start PC gaming, as they would never recommend me to buy a project car.
 

teh_pwn

"Saturated fat causes heart disease as much as Brawndo is what plants crave."
At this point it's mostly a lack of general familiarity with Windows and Googling to resolve infrequent issues. There still are a lot of issues in say 1 releases to be fair.
 
I really can't agree here. I got back into PC gaming 1.5 years ago and had my fair share of problems. While there where small for me, almost everyone else of my gaming friends would have surrendered. Just two of them, both IT and IT Sec students are into PC gaming, too.

I don't want to get into the whole build and setup process, as this is something that could be skipped by someone less skilled. These are the problems I've encountered with the games I played in the last 1.5 years with a slightly OC’d 6700K, R9 390 and 16GB RAM and an Xbox One controller:


  • Alan Wake
    Crashed during first cut scene, had to install old GPU driver version.

  • American Truck Simulator / Euro Truck Simulator
    Controller support is a pain in the ass. I had to map every button myself and the controller needs to be connected before you start the game, otherwise it just acts weird.

  • Banished
    Random crashes all over the place. Haven’t found a solution and thus stopped playing.

  • BioShock Remastered
    Bad performance, crashes all over the place. I was playing this with my girlfriend and after 2 hours she asked me if we just could hook up the PS3 again and play it there.

  • Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition
    Keyboard/Mouse support disastrous, button prompts for controller missing or something, I don’t really remember it but I just know that I’ve stopped after 2 hours and people told me that I needed to mod the game.

  • Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
    Bad performance, weird mouse acceleration, lots of crashes and one reproducible crash during the last fight which prevented my to finish the game. Three patches later the game wouldn’t even start anymore.

  • DOOM Demo
    Crash after starting the game. After I couldn’t find a solution online I digged trough the files and found some .ini or something which said that it starts with Vulkan enabled. Set it to DirectX and it went just fine.

  • Dying Light
    My GPU makes a really highpitched noise in the menu and my PC crashes after about 20 seconds. If I make it into the game in time it’s all fine though. Due to a bad V-Sync implementation it also locked to 30 FPS when it dropped below 60, I tried every trick there is until a friendly Neogaf user helped me with this: Alt-tab out of the game so that the Windows build-in V-Sync can take over, enjoy 3x buffering from here on with smooth frame rates.

  • Live is Strange
    Crashes. Everywhere.

  • No Man’s Sky
    Crash during title screen. Refund.

  • Project Cars
    Really bad performance with 4 karts in bland looking tracks, like FPS in the low 40s but locked 60 with lots of cars in the rain on the Grüne Hölle. Couldn’t make it through the first kart races due to bad performance and stopped playing the game.

And that’s just me looking at my steam catalogue. I’ve probably missed some. I’m not complaining though, I chose to game on a PC and knew about the problems it comes with. But I would never ever recommend PC gaming to my less tech-savvy friends, because it doesn’t just work. Yes, everyone could learn about the basics of hardware and simple OS administration. It’s the same with learning a new language or know how to fix your car - everyone could do it. I speak 3 languages fluently but can barely manage to change my car lights or battery. For everything else I just have friends, whose Windows laptops I fix in exchange. I'm sure I could learn more about my car but but I don't really see the benefits other than saving some money in exchange for my free time.

My two car-friends and I play all on consoles together. I would never recommend them to start PC gaming, as they would never recommend me to buy a project car.

You got a bad GPU or something. Have you looked into updating the firmware? I had a 7870XT and it played alot of what you mentioned just fine. In fact I had less crashes with it than my 1070. PC gaming isn't as easy as console gaming, but if you can use Google, download a file and put it in a folder you're golden. The mod for Darksouls is literally that easy to use.
 

NervousXtian

Thought Emoji Movie was good. Take that as you will.
You got a bad GPU or something. Have you looked into updating the firmware? I had a 7870XT and it played alot of what you mentioned just fine. In fact I had less crashes with it than my 1070. PC gaming isn't as easy as console gaming, but if you can use Google, download a file and put it in a folder you're golden. The mod for Darksouls is literally that easy to use.

That misses the point though. He also only listed shit with issues.

I shudder everytime my son wants an older game off Steam to play, as I know I'm going to probably jump through hoops to get it to run.

It usually isn't more than a 5 min fix, but sometimes it's hours of trying to figure it out.
 

Ostinatto

Member
Bought a new pc a few days ago, bought Nier Automata, and im getting random crashes on the map.

I totally get why people will choose the simplicity of a console.
 
Turned on my PC this morning only to find that all Lego games have stopped recognising controller button presses.

-All non-Lego games work as normal
-All other inputs (thumbsticks, triggers) in Lego games are fine

I've tried reinstalling controller drivers, verifying the games on Steam, reinstalling the games and of course rebooting etc, but to no avail.

Luckily for me, I can't stand Lego games, but my son cried for an hour. He's going to have to play with the keyboard from now on!
 

Bulk_Rate

Member
Installing and uninstalling games on Steam is literally an one-button process. Does Paladins require additional steps?

My point was software reliability in general....worse case with the PS4, they have to power cycle it. Believe me I'm living the experiment right now --- John Q Public isn't prepared for the odd but myriad software glitches which crop up on PC.

ie "Undertale is already running" that one gets my daughter all the time.
 

RedSwirl

Junior Member
I wonder what the relationship is between people who do or don't deal with PC gaming, and people who hack consoles or play ROMs.

When you hack a console you're basically turning it into an open platform not unlike PC. The only difference is there's only one set hardware configuration which makes things somewhat easier than PC. It's sort of like a middle ground, which is why I've always been interested in the idea of a big company actually making a console with closed hardware but open software. I guess the closest thing to imagine would be if Microsoft turned Xbox into a Windows console and a plurality of developers just optimized PC games around the Xbox. Microsoft would be in effect establishing a popular "minimum hardware spec" for PC gaming, which is what some have wanted to see for a long time.

Conversely, when playing ROMs or better yet hacking ROMs you're turning console games into PC games. You're bringing them into an open platform and applying to them all the advantages of an open platform.
 
I really can't agree here. I got back into PC gaming 1.5 years ago and had my fair share of problems. While there where small for me, almost everyone else of my gaming friends would have surrendered. Just two of them, both IT and IT Sec students are into PC gaming, too.


Your experience is not at all typical of what it's like to game on PC. If you're experiencing crashes across the board and bad performance then you need to get the PC checked by an expert. It sounds like PSU or GPU issues.

That misses the point though. He also only listed shit with issues.

I shudder everytime my son wants an older game off Steam to play, as I know I'm going to probably jump through hoops to get it to run.

It usually isn't more than a 5 min fix, but sometimes it's hours of trying to figure it out.

It might be a pain sometimes to run old games but your son wouldn't be able to play an old game on any other platform. I think that it's worth the fiddling in this case.
 

Paragon

Member
I won't try and convince anyone here that PC gaming is as simple as console gaming.
I don't think it's nearly as complex or problematic as some people make it out to be though - some of the posts here read like parody.
If PC gaming was half as bad as many people here have said, I would have abandoned it years ago.

But having more options obviously does make things more complex than none at all.
If having those options there makes the experience worse for you, stick to console gaming. That's what it's for.
PC gaming lets me choose the kind of experience that I want, but it doesn't mean that I think any less of people that don't want to consider any of that and just want to play a game.
It's generally no more than a couple of minutes to set things up when I first install a game and then I never have to touch the options again, but that's still more involved than playing a console game.

Crashed
Random crashes
crashes all over
lots of crashes
Crash after starting
crashes after about 20 seconds
Crashes. Everywhere.
Crash during title screen.
If you bought a console and every game you tried kept crashing, would you say that console gaming is terrible, or consider that maybe you have faulty hardware? Because that is not typical for PC gaming.
And if you have so many problems with things crashing, the very first thing I would suggest is to disable your "slight overclock".

So many of the problems I see are caused by people who don't know what they're doing overclocking hardware without following proper testing procedures.
id Tech 5 games have a reputation of being very crash-prone on PC, and that is almost entirely caused by overclocked GPUs that have been pushed too far.
Drop the overclock and the crashing stops. But people insist it's the game.

imo the main problem is Microsoft. Windows is a piece of shit, always has been. recently i went through several USB wifi adapters because Windows 7 would not recognize them. i struggled with this for weeks and ultimately gave up and bought a long ethernet chord. after installing and uninstalling drivers and spending late nights reading technical forums the only answers i could find was to delete Windows and re-install it from scratch. this is 2017, give me a break.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with trying to get new hardware working on a version of Windows that is almost eight years old, which is multiple versions out of date, and was discontinued years ago. It must be Microsoft's fault.
 
I've worked in IT for like 17-18 years now. I'm an IT security worker now. I've been building PCs since the late 90s. And doing DOS gaming (think boot disks and soundblaster settings) since I was like 12.

These days I moved mostly to console gaming. No remote-auth DRM (which I hate) and almost no fiddling with settings.

My PC gaming is on a laptop and mostly down to Indies (addicted to FTL right now), old games (Baldur's gate, DOS games), and a little emulation.

I use my PC more for flashing routers and hacking consoles and stuff than gaming.

I got around to playing Dark Souls on PC. Need Durante's mod (thanks Durante, saw you posting here!) And a widescreen mod with specific version/settings, etc. Took me like 2-3 hrs to get Dark Souls working right at 2560x1080. Ugh. Looked awesome when I was done though.

Having worked heldesk, I can tell you, most people's eyes glaze over the minute any sort of manual action is needed. Replacing a .dll, installing a mod/bugfix, etc is super hard for most people.

Yes, well supported modern games are easy.

Hell my wife bought the Sims 4 for her MacBook Pro (what is more standardized than that??) a couple of years ago and it wouldn't work. EA support was useless, I did a bunch of stuff (not a huge Mac guy but I can Google). She ended up getting a refund. I warned her about buying games from EA Origin! She ended up buying it again a year later and it worked that time.

Yes you have flexibility to play/customize how you want, but it comes at a cost. It is nowhere near as easy as console gaming, even for a IT veteran...for normal people it is even harder.
 

Filben

Member
Im' trying to remember when was the last time my console crashed, i can't.

the quality of ports in consoles are way better overall than PC ports , thats my point.
I think given the far greater amount of time I'm playing on PC it's actually quite good. The Witcher 3 on my PC crashed two times within 355 hours of real game time. PS4 version froze three times within 120 hours of game time.

Rocket League sometimes freezes on startup (you will only see the startup image of it). Happened three times in year with an almost exact weekly play on Fridays (that is like 50 Fridays with two hours of gameplay). Happened with Diablo III as well.

Seriously, I cannot agree on 'he ol' sayin' that PC games tend to crash more often. Hell, even Batman Arkham Knight didn't crash on my PC. It ran like shit but it did not crash once. I could count dozens of games that didn't even crash once. I know it's frustrating and there are really legit problems (Dragon Age: Inquistion had massive DirectX error problems, there was a +40 pages thread about that within first week after release over at the official forums), but I wouldn't want to go that far, that console ports are better in general. Whenever a PC port is called 'bad' is basically not worse than on console, but in terms of what is expected from a PC port, see Dishonored 2, Batman: AK and the like.
 
Relatively

Arkham Knight worked fine on PC too.. if you wanted 30 FPS

Which is kind of the issue with some PC gamers. If it's not running 60+ fps, it's a garbage port. You could have a game come out they've been asking to get ported for years, but it's often, "60fps or no buy." I used to get into that obsession of having a frame counter running while I was playing games, but it was actually hampering my enjoyment of games at some points. Of course Arkham Knight was a garbage port, but not because of the frame rate.
 
You got a bad GPU or something. Have you looked into updating the firmware? I had a 7870XT and it played alot of what you mentioned just fine. In fact I had less crashes with it than my 1070. PC gaming isn't as easy as console gaming, but if you can use Google, download a file and put it in a folder you're golden. The mod for Darksouls is literally that easy to use.

Almost all of the crashing games I've listed have known problems with crashing. Steam reviews also show this. I've updated and downgraded my GPU drivers often enough to get some games to run, one of my friends with a 1080 has even more problems with recent drivers - thats probably karma though, after laughing at me for buying an AMD card with "crappy drivers that crash every thing." ;-)

Your experience is not at all typical of what it's like to game on PC. If you're experiencing crashes across the board and bad performance then you need to get the PC checked by an expert. It sounds like PSU or GPU issues.

I don't need no "expert" checking my PC, it's fine, passes every stresstest and benchmark and does some heavy rendering jobs now and then. Again, almost all of my listet games are known for having bad performance. Things like Alan Wake might've been a faulty driver but that's my bloody point.

If you bought a console and every game you tried kept crashing, would you say that console gaming is terrible, or consider that maybe you have faulty hardware? Because that is not typical for PC gaming.
And if you have so many problems with things crashing, the very first thing I would suggest is to disable your "slight overclock".

Holy shit guys, alright:







That's a different reason and a different cause for the problem almost every time. From bad driver versions to simply bad code to "Unplug Xbox One Controller" for prevent a crash in a Life is Strange cut scene. It's not my hardware. It's perfectly fine. And even if it would: Doesn't it add another layer to my point of view? I did indeed contact Saphire about the highpitched noise in Dying Light and they told me it's not the hardware. If they lied, what should a less tech savvy customer do in the next step? Just throw a - at that time 1200€ - build out of the window because some part might be faulty?

Edit: Also, as I said, it's not "every game" that's crashing, I've just listed the ones that do. It's probably in the ballpark of 1:2 against fully perfect console-like experiences for me though, not counting early access and modded titles.
 

ss_lemonade

Member
I'm sure it has nothing to do with trying to get new hardware working on a version of Windows that is almost eight years old, which is multiple versions out of date, and was discontinued years ago. It must be Microsoft's fault.
Not exactly gaming related but Windows 10 has its share of driver problems too. A few weeks ago, I was trying to get internet to my desktop by using my phone's wifi connection and USB tethering. Once I enabled the USB tether option on my phone though, all sorts of oddities would start to happen (network connection screen won't open, other settings pages won't open, explorer becomes nearly unusable, sluggish internet connection, etc). After a lot of research, I found out that the stock driver for such functionality is broken or outdated in Windows 10, and that Windows update or auto Windows driver installs would do nothing about it and always install the broken driver. You would have to manually install the driver yourself and make sure to pick the correct one from the list that Windows gives you.
 

Not Spaceghost

Spaceghost
PC gaming is about work arounds and things going wrong all the time lmao.

A few months ago my 1060 flat out wouldn't get detected by new drivers. It was giving me a no nvidia device detected on this system error. The fix for this was going deep into the driver files and editing the device id in some random ass files. I did that and it didn't work lol.

Then randomly last week everything somehow just fixed itself and drivers updated like normal.
 

quesalupa

Member
I love PC gaming and it is indeed more complicated. It feels like I have to do something to fix 1 in 4 games. Granted I do like to play some older titles.
 

Paragon

Member
Not exactly gaming related but Windows 10 has its share of driver problems too. A few weeks ago, I was trying to get internet to my desktop by using my phone's wifi connection and USB tethering. Once I enabled the USB tether option on my phone though, all sorts of oddities would start to happen (network connection screen won't open, other settings pages won't open, explorer becomes nearly unusable, sluggish internet connection, etc). After a lot of research, I found out that the stock driver for such functionality is broken or outdated in Windows 10, and that Windows update or auto Windows driver installs would do nothing about it and always install the broken driver. You would have to manually install the driver yourself and make sure to pick the correct one from the list that Windows gives you.
I'm not trying to say that Windows is perfect.
But I don't think someone has the right to complain that it's 2017 and things should "just work", when they are running an OS that was released in 2009, has been superseded twice, and support for it ended years ago - especially not when Microsoft had a whole year that you could claim a free copy of Windows 10 if you were running Windows 7 or 8.

Almost all of the crashing games I've listed have known problems with crashing.
Well I guess some people just get unlucky and manage to hit every crash bug there is, because I played and completed most of those games without a single crash.
In fact I cannot remember the last time I did have a game just randomly crash for no reason on PC.
As I said in my post, if that's what PC gaming was like for me, I would have abandoned it years ago.
I won't claim that it's a console-like experience, but it's also not a buggy crash-prone experience for me either.
 
Because everyones PC is different too the next person, What works fine for someone, Might not work at all for another. On console everyone gets the same experience and it works, Over the last 4 years my gaming laptop has crashed, Overheated, BSOD.

Yet in the same timeframe, My PS4 has worked and never crashed at all.

I'll take that all day long over messing around for hours online fixing folders and settings like i was with my laptop.
 

petran79

Banned
I know people rag on it, but I honestly feel like I had fewer headaches with DOS gaming than modern PC gaming. A few boot disks and pkzip and driver fiddles were prettt basic in comparison.

Windows may look user friendly and simple but its layers of complexity are far too many and locked. New consoles turned like this as well.

I have far easier troubleshooting with Linux distros that share more in commom with old DOS.
 

Attem

Member
People shut down when it comes to computers. If you are the unlucky person that gets a random issue with a game or a piece of software all it takes is a quick google search of your problem and 9/10 you are going to have a resolution on the front page.

Is that more hassle than a console ? Sure, but the benefit of playing on a much more powerful machine with more freedom is certainly worth it.

Windows may look user friendly and simple but its layers of complexity are far too many and locked. New consoles turned like this as well.

I have far easier troubleshooting with Linux distros that share more in commom with old DOS.

Cool - you are in a very small % of people that find Linux easier to use that Windows.
 

Attem

Member
Driver and OS upgrades are certainly easier and faster and I dont shudder after every reboot.

Easier than windows automatically downloading OS updates for you ? Driver updates again are done through an automated process unless looking for a specific version, I don't see how it can be easier.

Dont get me wrong, Windows 10 is the worst and I wouldn't let it automatically update on my machine... but thats a much bigger... different problem.
 

Budi

Member
Just encountered problem when trying to play Bayonetta, game just didn't launch from Steam. When pressed play, it said "running" for few seconds in the library but then stopped and game didn't launch. Restarted Steam and it worked, wouldn't call that difficult or much tinkering.
 
I love PC gaming and it is indeed more complicated. It feels like I have to do something to fix 1 in 4 games. Granted I do like to play some older titles.

Agreed, it's crazy that some PC gamers just refuse to admit or believe this. It's clearly the best platform to game on but I wouldn't tell my mom/sister who just got a PS4 to get a PC instead.

I mean I got Forza Horizon 3 at launch and it just became playable last week, 8 months later. PC has it's downsides.
 
Agreed, it's crazy that some PC gamers just refuse to admit or believe this. It's clearly the best platform to game on but I wouldn't tell my mom/sister who just got a PS4 to get a PC instead.

I mean I got Forza Horizon 3 at launch and it just became playable last week, 8 months later. PC has it's downsides.

The vast majority of PC games launch without issue. That is not an opinion, it is a fact. More than 30 games release on Steam every week, very few of them have noteworthy issues. A few high-profile cases do not constitute the rule.
 
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