Less than two weeks before the release of "Old Man Ring" "Old Man Ring", the game has won the most anticipated new title for two consecutive years as the sequel to the most live broadcast and the most innovative orthodox soul like. In addition to the early momentum of various plot speculations, a piece of news such as a bombshell has made the player group explode.
FromSoftware officially released the minimum configuration recommendation of the game on the 15th, in which the low configuration impressively said that the i5-8400 + GTX 1060/3G graphics card (or Ryzen 3 + RX 580), the memory required was also marked to 12 GB RAM.
The default standard for the minimum recommended configuration in recent years is the quality requirements at 1080p resolution and 60fps, while FromSoftware's games have always been better compatible with low-end optimizations, such as 2019's "Only Wolf" only needs GTX 970 graphics, and the earlier "Dark Souls 3" in 2016 only requires 750 Ti and 4GM RAM. Nowadays, the threshold of "low-end gospel" has risen to 1060, making many players unable to sit still.
RTX 1060 ownership has always been the largest number of desktop graphics cards among gamers, and the more convincing thing is the player hardware statistics released by Steam every month, which has occupied the top of the list for nearly 6 years since 2016, and even more outrageously, in these months, this data has increased - even if players have not been able to buy a new 1060 graphics card.
It can be seen that in the Christmas slots in Europe and the United States in December, the proportion of active users in the game using 1060 has increased, and it can be inferred that among players who play less frequently, the holding of 1060 is even more amazing.
The so-called king of cost performance has always been known as the "dessert level", before 1060 was 970, 760 and 610, but the dominance of 1060 is too durable, and now the 40 series graphics card is imminent, 2060, 3070 have failed to take over the 1060 class, but the early 1660 still has a little bit of encroachment.
Last Thousand Dollar Card: 1660
In fact, a generation of new cards for old cards, this is only a matter of time, 1060 is strong enough, the focus of the three words of "cost performance", just fall on this "price", after 1060, the dessert-level graphics card market price climbed to more than 2000 yuan, and correspondingly, the price of video games in the player's cognition did not rise, resulting in a significant increase in the proportion of players invested in hardware, about the PC game "soft-hard ratio" has become a difficult gap to cross. The choice between "waiting" and "being ruthless" is often the former that prevails.
Now that the lowest configuration of the life and death line has approached the feet of 1060 players, coincidentally, in fact, several recently released games have abandoned the GTX 9 series equipment, such as Shinji Mikami's Ghost Line: Tokyo and the aforementioned "Fading Light 2". What's more interesting is that in the current updated version of the "Saijon 2077" next-generation version, some content iterations of PS4 and Xbox One have been abandoned, saying that the processors of the old generation can no longer meet the new AI programs of the game, and at the same time, the minimum configuration has been adjusted to 1060.
Nostalgic for the "everyone can afford" generation of god card 970
Obviously, compared to the 1060 holders who feel the crisis, the players of the 9 series can only say goodbye to the next large-scale games, or say goodbye to their own consoles, and the GTX 970, which was born for 8 years, accompanies computer players through the entire eighth generation, and the performance is slightly higher than that of the contemporary consoles, which can basically be regarded as desktop-level PS4.
When the host generation iterates, the game developer will take the host configuration as the minimum requirement for large games, but in this next-generation upgrade, the corresponding floating-point computing power of the PS5 is equivalent to RTX 2070, or RX 5700XT, the current ownership of these two graphics cards is embarrassing, the actual reason is still not in the same price field as 1060, 2070 and the 2070 Super are still higher than 4000 yuan or even 5000+. The GTX 1650 on the list is in the field of thousand-dollar cards.
Compared with the data in the past five months, the willingness of players to purchase new graphics cards is even less obvious, which is still the case of natural damage to the graphics card, which has dropped from 8.64% to 7.79%.
Just today, Nvidia announced its fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2022 financial results (in fact, the full year 2021), with a net profit of $9.775 billion, an increase of 125% year-on-year, exceeding analyst expectations. On the one hand, the graphics cards that have long been delisted remain high, on the other hand, the graphics card chip manufacturers are making a lot of money, so where has the next generation of desktop hardware gone? The answer is self-explanatory.
30 series graphics card to make computing power limits, but the price of graphics cards that are hard to rise is not willing to go down, if only dealers and scalpers are unwilling to reduce prices, then the mining disaster that lasts for a year should also cause the price to fall due to storage costs. The reality is that the manufacturer of the brand graphics card is changing the price anchor in the minds of consumers, and the "dessert card" cannot be a "thousand yuan card". The suggested retail price of 2060 is 350 US dollars, equivalent to more than 2000 yuan, but the brand price is basically above 3500, compared to 2070 or 3060, which is increased to 4000 yuan, is it "cost-effective"?
Bitcoin in the past year has not been a stable rally, and the mining business is even more limited
Of course, it is also possible to lead to another result, players flow to the next generation of consoles, the cd-drive version of the PS5 has fallen back to 4000 yuan, leaving aside the performance of the graphics card, there are more efficient SSD SSDs, and more comfortable game optimization. If graphics card prices remain high, this generation is likely to be an effective growth point for console games.
If a year ago, "Cyberpunk 2077" stimulated the "heart-wrenching" motivation of PC high-end players, then this time "Eldon's Circle of Law" undoubtedly sounded the final alarm bell for "waiting" players. Interestingly, the low match of this game is 1060, and the recommended middle match is 1070, which seems to imply that the difference between the high and low special effects of the game is not much, leaving players with a little doubt.
After attracting a lot of attention, FromSoftware immediately withdrew the table data from the Steam store page, and a day later launched the official parameters of the picture version in the official Twitter. I thought that the official would appropriately lower the minimum configuration, but to no avail. According to previous reports, the PC version of the game will be locked at 60 frames, and under-configured players can only force it to run by reducing the rendering or blurring the image quality (opening small windows).
From the end of 2018 when 1060 6G can be written at the highest configuration, to the current 1060 3G status is in jeopardy, a generation of "thousand yuan dessert card" cool play 3A is gone.