What is currently the most system intensive game?

[Enigma]

My brother is planning on building a new PC and has asked me what game has the highest system requirements. He wants to build a PC that'll surpass the most demanding game available.

So, which game would it be?

[Tribble]

Does he want to play games at 1080p or 4K? Does he intend on using VR? If he is content with 1080p gaming (coming from the old tube screens 1080p is way more than enough for me) the requirements are a lot lower. The resolution is really what matters the most IMO. For instance a previous gen Nvidia 1080 would be working hard for 4K titles, but at 1080p it’s still overkill.

He could build a great system for 1080p gaming at a pretty decent price these days and it’d last him quite awhile.

[Jub]

Focusing on the most demanding game right now is a fool's errand given that we're either going to see a ray tracing war or a shift away from video cards as discreet chipsets altogether in the next few years. I'd honestly hold off spending a lot of money on a rig until summer next year when we'll have seen how the first generation of a few new chipsets plays out. Wait for Navi and the 3rd gen Ryzen chips to drop and build a second gen Ryzen machine on the cheap with a generation out of date graphics card and you can play just about anything well.

If he's dead set on building a beast right now don't look at a specific game, even the hardest to run game, look at technical specifications and speculation on what's coming down the pipe and build around that.

[Enigma]

Does he want to play games at 1080p or 4K? Does he intend on using VR? If he is content with 1080p gaming (coming from the old tube screens 1080p is way more than enough for me) the requirements are a lot lower. The resolution is really what matters the most IMO. For instance a previous gen Nvidia 1080 would be working hard for 4K titles, but at 1080p it’s still overkill.

He could build a great system for 1080p gaming at a pretty decent price these days and it’d last him quite awhile.

Non VR. 4K, yes.

[bilateralrope]

Ray Tracing can be quite resource intensive. For example, someone added it to Quake 2 and the framerate results were not good:

Performance isn’t too bad. I’m running it on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 card at 1440p and 30 frames is more common than 60 frames, but it’s more than playable (less so at 4K, for what it’s worth). Even so, the idea of a 22-year-old game making a £700 graphics card strain like this would be funny if it wasn’t so disturbing.

[Zaune]

GPU-intensive, CPU-intensive or both?

[Enigma]

GPU-intensive, CPU-intensive or both?

Both.

[Zaune]

Hmmm. In that case, the most effective overall hardware stress-test of a game I know of is probably Planet Coaster of all things. Recommended specs are a GTX980 (equivalent to a mid-range current gen card) paired with an i7 CPU, which makes sense because in addition to fairly demanding graphics it's going to be simulating decision-making and pathfinding for a few thousand artificially intelligent NPCs.

[Marko Dash]

Children of a dead Earth with any kind of missile or gun spam ship can bring any system to it's knees and put you in frame by frame mode unless it CTDs first.


it's not very graphically pretty but it's trying to render/compute the path of ether hundreds of missiles, each with their own ai giudance, or/and tens/hundreds of thousands of gun rounds