New games are exciting for gaming PC owners. Especially new productions running in Unreal Engine 5 can bring more powerful hardware into the ground floor. Below is a list of games that require the most expensive components to run at high resolution.
As you can easily notice, the list doesn’t just include the biggest new releases. You’ll also find older products here – mainly aviation titles, but also games with poor optimization, such as Star Citizen.
It’s safe to say at this point that games running on Unreal Engine 5 have one thing in common: they have really high technical requirements. We can only hope that the necessary improvements will be introduced in new versions of this engine.
Alan Wake 2
Alan Wake 2 looks beautiful on powerful enough hardware, but – yes – it requires expensive components to achieve the best graphical effects. At least the publisher was honest about this by not artificially lowering the minimum hardware requirements for PC.
Cyberpunk 2077 (with ray tracing)
It should be said right away that over the years, CDP RED has made significant progress in optimizing Cyberpunk for PS5, XSX and PC. It’s basically a different game than it was at the time of release. With ray tracing turned on and in 4K resolution with DLSS, the game can still bring down the toughest PCs to the ground… while looking exceptionally gorgeous. Without ray tracing, you can count on a high frame rate, even at 4K with DLSS.
ARK: Survival Rise
The first ARK was known for destroying gaming PCs. This is mainly due to poor optimization, as the game was not impressive at all. We have a similar situation with the modified version of the network production. ARK: Survival Ascended can put even powerful gaming PCs to shame at high resolution. We’ll soon find out how the game works on XSX and PS5.
Starfield
Starfield will likely be dropped from this list in just a few days, because there is an update on the horizon that will significantly improve the game’s performance on PC. However, Bethesda’s RPG is currently one of the titles that puts a heavy load on even the best processors on the market (and a good GPU would come in handy, too). Several urban areas, such as Aquila and New Atlantis, present a particular problem.
The Tale of the Plague Requiem
Asobo is known for its amazing graphical quality (Microsoft Flight Simulator is truly next-gen in terms of visuals). This, of course, comes with high hardware requirements. In the case of the PC version of A Plague Tale Requiem, it’s quite difficult for many PC configurations. The game loads the GPU very heavily. For example, the 3060 has trouble cracking 60fps at 1080p at maximum settings.
The Immortals of Avium
Unreal Engine 5 technology has not shown its best side yet. Games running on this engine have major performance issues even on the most powerful computers. Immortals of Aveum belongs to this group, offering, for example, a GTX1060 on its knees at low resolutions of 1080p. This GPU is having trouble generating 30 frames per second. In contrast, monsters like the RTX 4060 at Ultra HD have a hard time maintaining a consistent 60fps at 1080p. The game is simply poorly optimized.
DCS World
DCS is already a few years old, but with maximum detail and high resolution, this production is still capable of bringing more powerful computers to its knees. The highly realistic Eagle Dynamics game, like other flight simulators, is very memory-hungry, which places a very high burden on the processor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFuC0PATEqE
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Microsoft Flight Simulator has undergone huge improvements around the release of the title on XSX/XSS (mainly related to cloud rendering). However, MSFS is such a demanding program that most people have to forget about animation at 60 fps, using the highest detail. As with most flight simulators, the game is processor intensive (but also requires an expensive GPU) and greedy RAM/VRAM (but not as much as Star Citizen).
Cities: Skylines 2
I’m starting to have serious doubts about the state in which Cities: Skylines 2 will launch on Xbox Series Nowadays, even owners of the most expensive graphics cards and processors can dream of stable animation at 60 frames per second at 1440p resolution.
Star Citizen
The minimum hardware requirements listed on the official Star Citizen website recently seemed like a joke. This MMO space simulation requires a much more powerful processor than the official specifications. The game has slightly lower graphics card requirements, but it’s not easy here either. For relatively enjoyable fun, the minimum level is a GeForce GTX 1660 GPU. Even the biggest fans of this online space game admit that the title is not well optimized. It’s also important to have 32GB of RAM – Star Citizen is one of the few games that actually uses these memory resources (especially when flying over cities).
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