Recommended game specs are a joke — PC devs need to temper expectations

There's no denying that a PC is at least implied to be the superior gaming platform, thanks to the sheer power offered by various combinations of components. However, it's not the most approachable way to play compared to picking up an Xbox Series X and hooking it up to a discount-price gaming TV that most presumably already have in their homes.

Regular deals on pre-built gaming desktops help newcomers get their foot in the PC gaming door. Still, anything under $1,000 is likely to fall short of some lofty 'recommended' specifications in the latest AAA titles released this year and into the next. So, what's the big idea? Why are flush gamers complaining about struggling to run hit titles like Ark: Survival Ascended on their multi-thousand-dollar rigs?

Ignoring the world's most popular PC

The most obvious answer to why modern games have such strict specification requirements is that they're raising the bar on graphical fidelity, and only the latest hardware provides the necessary processing power to show it off. I'd be fine if that were the case for all games, but it's far from the truth for most titles released in the past year. Even when I've had access to a $1,599 graphics card like NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090, it struggled to run Wild Hearts at launch.

Not everyone has the kind of hilarious pocket change needed to drop on such an extravagant GPU. This is particularly evident when the RTX 4090 had only a 0.80% share among PC players who took part in Valve's Steam Hardware & Software Survey for September 2023. Even the slightly cheaper RTX 4080 shows a measly 0.53% appearance, which could be partially forgiven since the RTX 40-Series is still relatively young.

So what does the world's most popular PC look like, and why aren't PC game developers ensuring their game will run with a reasonable degree of quality on this combination of components? Previously, the top hitter was the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, a long-standing champion similar to my own GTX 1660 6GB. In September, the GTX 1650 finally relinquished its Steam Survey GPU status to a more modern option, which I chose as a value-conscious upgrade.

Picking up an MSI Ventus 2X variant of the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB felt like a no-brainer when it popped up among some early graphics card deals for Black Friday. Narrowing down the top CPU is a little trickier since Valve only reports on the most common clock speed range and physical core count for Intel, but it's fair to assume it's something like a 12th Gen Core i5-12400F. I generally side with the affordable Ryzen 5 5600X or 5800X, buying the latter for myself — it's just a shame that my new rig will barely run my most anticipated games.

Poor optimization gatekeeps PC gaming

PC deals for Black Friday

• Early graphics card deals
• 4K and Ultrawide monitor deals
• Early motherboard deals
• Xbox controller deals for October

If I'm honest, there were only two games that I felt genuinely excited about this year: Alan Wake II, which releases tomorrow, Oct. 27, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, which suffers understandable release date setbacks due to the ongoing crisis in its development home of Ukraine.

Both titles are unlikely to run smoothly on my Ryzen 5800X / RTX 3060 PC, given that Alan Wake II's recommended specs call for a $599 GeForce RTX 4070 or $499 Radeon RX 7800 XT GPU just to run at 'High' settings (with DLSS or FSR2 upscaling enabled, mind you.)

This assumes that the rest of your desktop or gaming laptop has the appropriate RAM and solid-state drive to back up a monstrous CPU/GPU combo and doesn't include the necessary mouse, keyboard, monitor, and headphones or speakers to complete the experience. There's a clear reason why Steam's Hardware Survey shows affordable parts as kings of the hardware hill: PCs are expensive.

Xbox stays on my desk for a reason

I'll admit it's ironic to consider upgrading my Xbox Series S to a Series X exclusively to play Alan Wake II, the one game that isn't getting a physical disk release. I love the first game and everything else developers Remedy made before it, so I don't want to risk lagging through its single-player narrative with frame rate issues and subpar PC performance. I might as well play it on a console with focus-tested graphical settings and (presumably) consistent patches.

For that reason, my custom-built desktop gaming PC remains an RGB-laden box resigned almost exclusively to playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 and Counter-Strike 2. Thrilling. Again, it's not that all new PC games fall victim to lazy development; some are genuinely an avenue into the future of graphics. However, it's hard to ignore how many bugged AAA titles are being released, with gamers simply assuming that the performance will be trash, maybe to improve later with patches.

I'm bored of needing to load a desktop with completely overkill hardware just to be so far ahead of performance hitches that I can actually sit and enjoy the gameplay. Watching frame-pacing graphs and temperature monitors is the opposite of fun, so I'll stick with Xbox to skip some AAA trainwrecks on PC.

Let me know if you're equally fed up with some modern PC gaming requirements in the comments.