Graphics Settings Rec?

Guys, believe me, even the latest and greatest hardware cannot cope with last year's games.

IMHO there's something misunderstood or misinterpreted in contemporary graphics engines, I mean from developer point of view.

Most games that come out get their first performance optimization tweaks 6 to 9 months after release.

During that time we are all sitting on time bombs. Some games even push hardware to such limits that they break it.

The fault in that great GPU I used to have, mentioned in an earlier post, is exactly one such case.

I installed a System Shock 2 demo that was available briefly some time in late 2016. It took it 20 min of gameplay to fry the graphics chip.

That particular card had such a good cooling solution that I never heard any throttling before it was too late.

By the time fan noise became audible the poor thing had been boiling for too long.

Two things to take away from that experience:

1) Always monitor system hardware statistics when running a new piece of software for the first time (heck, for the second and third time too, as well as after patches)!

2) Radeon HD 7XXX series graphics cards are one of the best GPUs made in the last two decades. And this comes from a person who has worked as a PC assembler for quite some time.

There are two circulating theories about this - either members of the dev community need more time to fully grasp the potential and intricacies of contemporary technologies to be able to tweak their games to perfection OR software is given to the public in a raw state on purpose so that hardware can be stressed in such a way that eventually forced replacements occur.

I don't want to think too much about any of those possibilities. Just keeping my lessons learned in mind and thinking thrice before making decisions.

@draqonin

All that said, your GPU is great, man. Regardless of the hardware I have, I always play with shadows, terrain and vegetation quality set to Low; film grain, bloom and motion blur disabled.

I have never noticed an unbearable drop in visual appeal with those settings in place. Yet again I've played games so old that your eyes would bleed if you looked at them now.

So probably I am not too choosy in that respect. Anyway, don't give up on your Radeon yet. You might want to think about a CPU replacement though.

As I said in another thread, AMD's first wave of APUs showed poor performance and quick deterioration in practice despite what was written on paper and said in interviews at the time.

Also, the old APUs don't work well with discrete GPUs on the same mobo. I can only imagine the ordeals you've gone through to actually be able to play games.

Still, I am looking forward to the new APUs. Hopefully AMD will nail it this time. This is a great technology and it deserves to succeed and thrive.