THE GOLDEN GRILLES

The agony of accepting your system is old now

- Phil Iwaniuk

I still remember the feeling when I installed my current GPU for the first time. Ray tracing! The future was here, on my desktop machine. Just as soon as I looked up the small list of games that supported it, installed one of them, and went hunting for either a puddle or a car bonnet in one of its levels, to observe its extremely limited implementation for myself and gaze in wonder at it.

But in the end it was neither Battlefield V nor Metro Exodus that gave me the post-upgrade hit I was looking for, as stupendous as their puddles were. The best moment when you buy a new graphics card isn't the latest visual behemoth you'd yet to try, it's loading up a game you'd already been playing on reduced settings or a flip-book frame rate, then returning to it and finding that you can now crank everything up to max, and going for a walk in all that newfound fidelity. And for me, that game was a heavily modded Skyrim: Special Edition.

PRECARIOUS HOUSE OF CARDS

If your GPU's never had to render an open world with amateur-made 8K texture mods, 300+ miscellaneous .ESP files, an aggressive reShade preset and an ENB effect over the top, it frankly hasn't had to work a day in its life. Loading up my personal install of