After goofing around with some emulators on my Raspberri Pi over the weekend, I was struck by just how simple video games were back in the atari days that its hard to gain perspective on how groundbreaking and influential games like Yar’s revenge really were in the day.
Ignoring the graphical and sound limitations, today, a modern gamer would scoff at such games. Many Atari games are barely better than a tech demo that would fail to capture the attention of most of us for longer than 5 minutes. Hardware limitations meant you didn’t have the memory for a vast world to explore, you could only have the same 4 screens randomly shown (Pit Fall). Most games on our phones are more complex and more engaging.
We have become spoiled as gamers.
Its hard to realize that our environments and worlds are more realistic than they ever were. It’s easy to get lost and overwhelmed with options of good (and many many bad) games available at the click of a button now. We are currently living in a golden age of gaming and its still not good enough for our spoiled selves.
We literally have more games to play than hours in our lifetimes to experience it all. With the introduction of the 1050 Ti series of graphics cards, the barrier to entry to playing even some of the highest end games has just been lowered like never before. Its now possible to take an aging computer out of some businesses trash, put in a 1050 Ti and play some of the latest games for for very cheap. This is a good thing. Its also possible to spend a small fortune and have the latest and greatest everything and have a mind blowing experience if you want to do that too.
We really don’t realize just how good we have it these days.
The 950 generally required an external power source making them poor candidates for very low end or business class computers. The 750 Ti did fill this niche somewhat, but it was still difficult to run the very latest titles at ~60fps 1080p and not look like it was running on an N64. 30 fps was much more attainable.
As a person currently running the gtx750ti in his home\lan PC… surprisingly not. Sure titles like wticher3 your dumping settings to low to try and get a look in, but most games are honestly pretty good. Fallout4? Yep. Borderlands2? Your heading towards maxed out. Rise of the tomb raider even does fine. With no exaggeration I have never held off on buying a game because I feared I may not be able to run it, and only the witcher3 and metro have performance limitations that leave you with the 30fps or potato choice, although from what I’ve seen in benchmarks ashes of singularity may have also given poor results if it’d been on my want list.
I certainly wouldn’t recommend anybody race out and buy the gtx750ti, its a older lower end card, but the gtx1050ti really didn’t suddenly open doors in terms of performance, it was pretty much a typical trend incremental from 750ti to gtx950 and onwards, and I rather expect the same improvement for the card that will replace the gtx1050ti to follow suit.
Also the gtx950 was only 90w… so technically yes it had a external 6pin, and it could draw 75w on the PCIe slot, so even if your PSU did not you where not exactly burning your house down to adapt any other connector that happend to have a 12v line… and before you laugh, the only one I saw in person was a gigabyte and it came with a molex to 6pin cable in the box. Indeed some of the low profile cards didn’t feature a power comnector at all, but I don’t know if they where gimped on core counts\clockspeeds, or just worked outside of PCIe spec.
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