Recently I've finally built something that I could consider 'decent', 10th gen i5 and 16GB of DDR4 but what aggravates me the most is that I could only attain an RX 570 4GB within my extremely tight budget, how much can I get out of said cards nowadays? Specially given how stupidly high PC game requirements are nowadays. I play at 1080p, not even 2K.
I have a dripfeed of an income so it can be very difficult for me to even upgrade a storage device.
textures (twice the size, four times the storage) and having a colour / bump / reflectivity / emmisivity / diffusivity / &c texture for every surface
shadow maps - (most) lights have a high-resolution texture associated with them, see how far they 'shine' in every direction before they hit something. Modern games have a lot of lights
Turn down texture and shadow quality, watch your GPU RAM usage drop right off.
Nah, my aim has always been smooth/high framerates over "ultra" settings so I don't have worries about that sort of thing. Never been an "eye candy" kind of guy.
shadow maps
This I didn't know, I thought that textures were the main thing that really made GPUs choke nowadays, given how devs are obsessed with things like 8K textures and whatnot.
Still, good to see that I didn't buy an useless card for today's gaming, or at least I think so. I run Gundam Battle Operation 2 perfectly fine and stable so far.
I guess it depends on what kind of games they're gonna play, too. I think for Indies, non triple-A and older games this PC will do just fine. The thing with PC gaming nowadays is that there are so many choices, not everything is triple-A cutting edge games.