FPS Game suggestions ....

I'm after some shooter game suggestions .... but with some firm criteria.

I'm spec'ing up a new PC and much of it is pretty much decided, but one big question remaining is, assuming I can get what I want, what GPU? How much do I spend? And that depends largely on the what I am likely to be playing. But I'm well out of touch with games.

So .... I'm looking for recommendations for shooter-type games BUT :-

- standalone mode. Not interested at all in online gaming.

- must be available either via DRM-free sites (GOG, etc) or independently without requiring online activation/verification.

- to be clear, not Steam, Origin, etc).

That last bit usually provokes a "why not Steam" question. To pre-empt that, several reasons, but mainly I don't agree with the model, have heard all the argument in favour of Steam and am still not going to do it. And secondly, there's a good chance my new machine won't have an internet connection at all.

Given that I'm so out of touch with games over the last few years, I have very little idea what will be available that both meets those requirements, and is actually worth playing, specifically in standalone mode.

So before I decide to settle on an expensive graphics card with gaming in mind, is there actually anything much to choose from? By excluding Steam (and I am) if I have effectively locked off anything good enough to be worth buying other than basic (or embedded) graphics, then I can just ignore gaming as a factor in choosing that card.

As background, I am looking for a degree of future-proofing but despite that, I don't see 4k as a priority. If I end up supporting that, fair enough, but I'm more interested in 1440 and good fps, or even 1080. I will probably stick a reasonable monitor, probably 32" but maybe 27" on it but this is not primarily a gaming machine, so the focus will be on photo/video editing criteria, like colour accuracy, etc, rather than ultra fast response times and mega frame rates. If I can get both feature sets without spending silly money, great, but gaming is second fiddle to media handling.

Graphics card budget? Decent, but not silly. Under a grand, for sure. Over £500? If need be. If I can get what I want/need at £350, fine. If it needs to be £500-£600, .... okay, I can push to that, albeit reluctantly. This is a multi-year PC and probably my last one which I'm expecting to give me some years of use, so, okay. Up to £800-900-ish? I could be pushed to it provided there's a compelling reason.

But given my restrictions (no Steam, etc) do sufficient games even exist to make a compelling reason to go about £350-ish on a GPU?

What I'm really after here is thoughts about game recommendations, not GPU choice. That comes afterwards. I also will be looking at games that aren't shooters, but I assume shooters is where the most demanding games are, in terms of hardware needed?

I bought Cyberpunk 2077 through GOG,and AFAIK it does not need an internet connection apart from OFC downloading the game,and any patches. I assume it also applies to The Witcher 3 too,but that is a 3rd person RPG.

I know Fallout:New Vegas once installed does not need an internet connection once you have downloaded it. Also you can get it on a disc too. AFAIK,its the same with Fallout 4,as I played both on my laptop when on holiday and had to use Steam in offline mode(and I also modded both so used Vortex as the launcher). Not sure if there is a disc version of the game.They both will run under Proton too.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Saracen999

but I assume shooters is where the most demanding games are, in terms of hardware needed?

---

At the moment MS Flight Simulator and Cyberpunk 2077 (first person RPG) are probably the two most demanding AAA games so I'd look at them in terms of benchmarking specifications, though there's a small case to be made that poor optimisation is part of the issue for both.

But to go back to your shooters request: Metro: Exodus Enhanced Edition is on GOG

Bioshock remastered, and Bioshock infinite are on GoG. Well worth a playthrough. not too demanding either.

I'd go along with the Metro series as well.
Consider No Mans Sky but when on sale, not £40

Are you into a particular type of FPS such as the realism of ARMA or the arcade Doom style?

I personally would be aiming at 2060 SC/3060 cards depending on whats available. Unless you have an extreme desire for high FPS.
That said I've seen 3050's starting to be listed on Laptops, they may appear in the desktop soon as well, so if you're not going to game most of the time it might be worth waiting for something like that.

All available on GoG, all first person but a few different genres :

SWAT 3&4
Ghost Recon & DLC
Rainbow Six
Cyberpunk 2077
System Shock 1&2
Outer Worlds
Thief 1,2 & Deadly Shadows
Prey (new one)
Forsaken
Delta Force series
Hidden & Dangerous 1&2 (2 is awesome but the first is quirky and REALLY hard)
HEXEN, Heretic & Doom etc
Dishonored series
Fallout 3 & New Vegas
Elder Scrolls Oblivion
Metro series

Given you don't want Steam, Origin and so on there isn't a lot on GoG that older hardware won't run. There's only Outer Worlds, Metro & Cyberpunk that needs a more powerful system but then it depends if you want all whistles and bells maxed out at 4K resolution. I have found that a lot of the open world games like Mad Max and the newer Assassins Creed games need better hardware to run over the FPS

Sounds like you are down to GoG. The games they have are not new, but if you have the PC long enough then current games will become old and may well pop up on there.

I've been playing catching up on a lot of old games that I never played when they were new because at the time I had young kids. Stuff like Crysis and the FarCry games. So far I have been able to play them all on an old 2GB R9 285 GPU, but the next FarCry I will have to pull apart the old ethereum mining rig and put a proper gpu back in my PC. That still isn't going to be a bang up to date card.

So, assuming that GoG will at some point during your PC ownership be getting the cheap Steam/Origin games that I've been playing, I still don't think you need a blistering fast GPU. GoG do seem to have Crysis, and thankfully it is pretty easy to make sure you can run that these days :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Ferral

Delta Force series
Hidden & Dangerous 1&2 (2 is awesome but the first is quirky and REALLY hard)

---

Thank you for this. H&D and to a lesser extent Delta Force got me into gaming...off to GoG not to grab em.

if you want some retro gaming and you never got round to playing them at the time then:

Far Cry (was there a remastered version in the pipeline for this?)
Far Cry 2 (and I think all the way to FC3 and FC blood diamond have offline play) not sure about FC4/5 as not tried them personally.
Crysis, Warhead and Crysis 2 (especially now remastered with new graphics)
Unreal Tournament 3 is worth picking up on GoG. That has single player and quite good AI. I will happily give peeps on here a game or two of that should anyone fancy it.*
BF2 with the 64bot mod. (Shame its AI isn't slightly better as it gets a bit predictable after a while.)

And... spot where I stopped buying games due to invasive DRM and only-online shenanigans!

*My version is pre GoG and just needed an iso making to remove the 3rd party flash installer (no hacks, just they packaged a flash entry screen which modern machines complain about since flash was deprecated. Directing autoplay to the actual installer exe) and all works just fine on win10.

I think I ought to clarify my GPU thinking a bit, not least because I might be well off-track. If I get a very fast graphics card (within the budgetary constraints I outlined above) the primary motivation isn't gaming. It's video encoding/transcoding. Gaming is a side-benefit.

So this PC build is supposed to be a do-it-once, now, and get it right, and not have to ever worry about it again kind of project. No messing about, no upgrading, just build/buy once and be done with it.

That means I'd rather throw a bit of extra money at it now and get the right level of card than have to start thinking about upgrades later. But within reason. £1500 on a graphics card is a non-starter. I have to draw the line somewhere and that blows well past it. But if the difference between two levels is, say, £400 and £800, I will spend the extra now to avoid having to do it later, or wishing I had.

There is value to me in doing it once and avoiding hassle later, and frankly, that outweighs a few hundred quid difference.

That same logic is why I'm thinking 5900X rather than 5600X, and why I'm probably going X570 than B550. It's why I'll use a gen4 M.2 SSD (probably Samsung 980 Evo, etc) and it's why I'm currently contemplating, and pricing up, by-passing the 2.5Gbe network I was planning and just going straight for 10GBe and fibre cabling. It's also why I just got the NAS and four 12TB drives when four 6TB, or even 4TB may have been enough for quite a while. Do it once, over-specify and then don't bother about it ever again.

So I'm already in to the tune of £1500-ish on th NAS, and the above spec on the PC without GPU is probably £2k, or a bit more, including a decent but not top-end 1440p 32" monitor. So if I'm looking at £3.5k to £4k plus the GPU, then a few hundred quid either way on the GPU isn't a major concern, but doing this once and then forgetting about spec sheets, is. I want to get on with what I'm buying it all for, not fart about worrying about spec's on this or that.

Do I need a 5900X? Probably not. 10GBe? Nope. But as long as it doesn't shoot the budget hugely beyond that outlined above, I'd rather just do it and get it over with.

And given that I'm doing all that anyway, regardless of gaming considerations, I might as well get as good and future-protected setup as I can for gaming, while I'm at it.

That's why I'm looking at a relatively hairy-chested graphics card when a couple of years ago, I'd have laughed if someone suggested I spend even £400 on a GPU. Even now, though, I'm not looking to spend hundreds more than is sensible pointlessly. If I can spend hundreds less, great. But not if it adds significantly to the time those video encodes will take, because there's a lot of them to do.

RTX3080 FE is £650,so if you can get it at that price it should be reasonably "futured proofed" although that is very hard for GPUs. I would suggest an AMD GPU,but apparently AMD does not consider the UK a priority market,so won't bother selling reference GPUs here,so you end up with overpriced AIB partner GPUs.

In my estimation to be safely above a console,I would suggest the RTX3080/RX6800. The RTX3060TI/RX6700 are around console level IMHO(at least the PS5).

It's always tricky to try and forecast. I agree with Cat that a 3080 FE - in the current market - is probably the sweet spot for longevity, and there's going to be a year or two where it's still in that spot, which is pretty good going in this area. But the current market is horrible and the situation in a couple of years will probably be quite different - however only time will tell if we've reached an inflation step where we look back and think £650 was actually good value or if it was a hump and once supply/demand factors ease we eventually go back to slightly cheaper sweet spot card pricing.

Id stick old school Sara

Build a new AMD rig with their APU and forget getting a card yet

Get 32gig of DDR4, 2 or more SSD's and a 1440 screen

then find copies of Q2 and Q4 and start there at serious resolutions on a quick monitor

I cant exagerate enough how you'll be astounded by a GPU built into a CPU from AMD and you can THEN buy a proper discreet GPU next year when the ridiculous pricing/stock shortages are over.

https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/1...ryzen-7-5700g/

that...is a 65w 8 core 16 thread mondter CPU ....WITH a gpu built in that is scarily powerful for your current expectations.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Zak33

that...is a 65w 8 core 16 thread mondter CPU ....WITH a gpu built in that is scarily powerful for your current expectations.

---

I can't remember Saracen's choice of video conversion/rendering software, but some of it is better on CUDA. Heck, the video encode block is just plain better on Nvidia right now.

OTOH, if he is just software rendering then that's different.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

I can't remember Saracen's choice of video conversion/rendering software, but some of it is better on CUDA. Heck, the video encode block is just plain better on Nvidia right now.

OTOH, if he is just software rendering then that's different.

---

If he goes down the APU route then he has a machine that he can use now, and then at a later date get a GPU from AMD or Nvidia, depending on his software requirements, but with no APU he's sat waiting for a card before he can use the machine so this is at the minute a major advantage of APU's..

It appears the AMD UK streetprice for the Ryzen 5 5600G and Ryzen 7 5700G,and another £20 on top of what they should be,ie,£250 and £330.

I'll be tempted to look once they settle down a bit, and depending on what I can get rid of my 3400G for..

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Zak33

Id stick old school Sara

Build a new AMD rig with their APU and forget getting a card yet

Get 32gig of DDR4, 2 or more SSD's and a 1440 screen

then find copies of Q2 and Q4 and start there at serious resolutions on a quick monitor

I cant exagerate enough how you'll be astounded by a GPU built into a CPU from AMD and you can THEN buy a proper discreet GPU next year when the ridiculous pricing/stock shortages are over.

https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/1...ryzen-7-5700g/

that...is a 65w 8 core 16 thread mondter CPU ....WITH a gpu built in that is scarily powerful for your current expectations.

---

Appreciate the advice, but that's not what I want to do.

Firstly, there's only so much space on the die and to shoehorn the graphics bit in, you lose half the L3 cache. Secondly, I'm after a 5900X, i.e. 12 cores. And third, a significant part of my intention is build and forget. I don't want to be upgrading. So to get back to anything like the 5900X, I'd not just be adding in a dGPU later, but upgrading the CPU too.

The only downside to going full-bore now is the price I might have to pay for the GPU. I so, so be it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

I can't remember Saracen's choice of video conversion/rendering software, but some of it is better on CUDA. Heck, the video encode block is just plain better on Nvidia right now.

OTOH, if he is just software rendering then that's different.

---

A mix, that's currently under revie du to imminent mahooosive increase in CPU/GPU power from my current antique, I mean, system. ;)

MakeMKV, Handbrake and shortly, OBS and probably daVinci Resolve. Currently, a suitably antique Premiere, but I'm de-Adobe'ing. But also photo software, including Serif/Affinity Photo, and ACDSee Studio Ultimate 2021 as I'm de-Photoshop'ing too. Audio software including Audacity (no, haven't upgraded to the allegedly snopping version though I'm not convinced that's entirely a fair allegation). And so on.

Edit - And Emby.

if you want to get upset all the time install CS GO