Turning The Settings Up Too High

Why do we game on PC if not to break stuff?

- Ian Evenden

For almost as long as I can remember I’ve tried to push games past the limits of my PC. These days that means trying to run them at 4K on a graphics card that’s not up to it. It means bringing framerates to a stumbling halt whenever anything interesting happens, never lowering detail levels beyond ‘medium’.

It’s a compulsion that goes back a long way. I was one of the lucky kids who got to use the PC their mum bought for word processing and ‘homework’ to play games on, a 286 with 1MB RAM, later upgraded to a 386 with 4MB, a CD-ROM drive and a Soundblaster 16 sound card.

On this latter machine I attempted to run Doom, a game that really wanted a 486. Graphics cards hadn’t been invented yet, but neither had proper detail levels. Doom ran in hi-res and lo-res modes, and if you wanted to reduce the strain on that passively-cooled CPU any more you could reduce the size of the viewable area by literally walling it in, grey-green bricks filling the space between the game and the edges of the screen. This had the desired effect, but on a 14-inch monitor was a dismal experience.