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Hardware 11 February 2022, 14:19

Playing Dying Light 2 on Old GPU... Doesn't Feel That Bad

How often do you need to change your hardware to stay up to date? I found out that an old GPU can do a lot.

I bought a GPU in 2015. I did not upgrade for a long time because there was no need. For years, I played on a 22" monitor that offered a resolution of 1680x1050. On such a screen, the GTX 960 was able to deal with virtually every game I thrown at it. Battlefields, Total Wars, Metro Exodus. It just worked. Even when I bought a Full HD monitor, the good old 960 was doing well.

However, progress doesn't sleep. New generation consoles have appeared, more demanding games have came along with them. I played Cyberpunk 2077 on Xbox, but Dying Light is a game that requires a great deal of precision. I tried playing it on pad, but for me, jumping on the roofs without a mouse is not as much fun. Especially when you are chased by a bunch of living corpses. You just don't want to fall off the cornice.

WHAT GPU IS IT EXACTLY?

We're talking about Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 Windforce 2X 4GB GDDR5 model. This card is based on the Maxwell GM206 processor, 28 nm technology. It was definitely not a top card at the time of its launch, i.e. at the beginning of 2015. In those days, GTX 970 was considered the best choice for players, and the 980 was the stuff of dreams. However, they clearly exceeded my budget and I had to settle for a mid-range model.

With some fear, I downloaded a new game to my PC. I improved my rig in stages and the GPU is the narrowest bottleneck at the moment. The RAM chips aren't even a year old, and the processor and motherboard are half as old as the GPU is.

Quite obviously, Dying Light 2 automatically set the graphics quality to low. This was not enough, however, to obtain a satisfactory animation speed. The game offers quite a few options for adjusting the quality of the graphics. So I had to go down to 1680x1050 resolution (I can brave it) and turned off upscaling. At this point, the game becameā€¦ well, playable. See for yourself.

As for the quality, you can see it in the video above (courtesy of Gry-Online). It's definitely not the level of detail we expect from a 2021 game, and which Dying Light 2 actually provides at higher settings. However, let's agree that with such a gap between the age of the hardware and the game, we do not expect it to look all that modern. We just hope it will work.

And did it? The answer may go: "Yes, but." You can clearly feel the game still loading assets once the loading screen disappears. The animation crunches, jerks, chokes and suffocates. Usually it takes about 30 seconds to a minute. It's best to just wait it out. Later, the situation improves significantly, which does not mean that there are no clear stutters.

Initially, before the release-day patch, the game didn't want to show me the FPS counter, no matter what program and method I tried to use. It seemed close to 30 fps with drops. Later, however, the counter appeared and I must admit that it surprised me. When you didn't feel any stutter or drops, it showed a neat 40 FPS. Of course, 60 would be nicer, but that's not a bad score. The problem was that at some points, the dips in animation speed were more than noticeable. The merciless counter sometimes indicated values like 17 fps, and when the stuttering festival really started, it dipped to 7.

Ultimately, however, it is not a matter of how big the drops were, but of how frequently they happened. And actually they don't appear that often. First of all, drops rarely happen in the most crucial moments, such as chases or fights with large groups of opponents. This would be a big problem, because when a herd of living dead chases us, a sudden crunch of animation could really hinder the precision of a jump. Instead of a landing on a lamppost, you could land on the street, and this... Well, it's not certain death, because this game isn't as punishing as the original. Still, such situations would have a large impact on the reception of the whole experience.

Despite such trade-offs, I have to admit that I managed to play Dying Light 2 for about twenty-five hours.

Of course, I realize that my 960 is long overdue. The games will be more and more demanding, and her processor isn't magically going to shrink lithography. On the other hand, this experience allows us to look at the race for new graphics cards from a different perspective. Maybe the need to buy a new GPU is not so pressing? Maybe streaming will soon shut the entire consumer GPU market?

Martin Strzyzewski

Martin Strzyzewski

Began at Gamepressure in the Editorials department, later he became the head of the technology department, which included both news and publications, as well as the tvtech channel. He previously worked in many places, including the Onet portal. By education, a Russianist. He has been planning to return to diving for years, but for now he is mainly busy with a dog, a rabbit, and a YouTube channel where he talks about the countries of the former USSR.

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