ah pc gaming in one way or another it's
provided countless hours days weeks even
years of entertainment to generations of enthusiasts around the globe or
disc as it were these last 10 years have been something
of a roller coaster ride for enthusiasts and novices alike and today we begin our
story one of sloth and greed of loss and
rebirth and a never-ending thirst for
more so make yourself comfortable as we take
you back in time and celebrate pc gaming
in the only way we know how by building a bunch of gaming pcs it's gonna be fun
you ready it's very rude oh and it's brought to
you by actually powered by seasonic and
brought to you by lg's ultra gear ultra wide gaming displays yeah
you need a screwdriver too right i don't
the first chapter of our story begins way back in the long long ago time known
as 2009 the 44th president of the united states
of america was inaugurated the twilight series made its debut and james
cameron's avatar became the highest grossing film of all time depending on
your take on those events it was either a great year or one that you'd rather
forget but fear not 2009 was a pretty good year for pc
gaming we got borderlands batman arkham asylum left 4 dead 2
and dragon age origins just to name a few to run those games Intel had just
launched the core i series as a replacement for the core 2s that had
gone toe to toe with AMD in the years prior as a result while the linfield
core i7 handily outperformed its core ii
quad predecessors the price for those older chips fell
steadily as the new platform found its legs and they remained a highly popular
choice for builders especially with early ddr3 costing a pretty penny and
not significantly outperforming the outgoing ddr2 so our build then is
equipped with everything we need to make a great 2009 gaming machine a core 2
quad q9650 with a oh that gorgeous zellman
flower cooler on it four gigs of ddr2
800 dual Radeon hd 5970s in crossfire and of
course Windows 7 all for just under 1800 us
dollars at the time so i was actually pretty into both of
these games i guess i'll go with uh dragon age
it's probably the more graphically demanding of the two
Anthony have you actually tried these games i loaded them up to make sure they
launch and that they're in the right resolution but aside from that
nope you're gonna have to create a character in everything
i actually probably don't have to do that i could i could remote into my
computer at home and load up my save i think i still have it all right so theoretically i've thrown my old
uh save file for lira in here but i
don't know if it's actually going to work there's a previous folder that has
like a a portrait and stuff in it man i remember this
all right let's see if it's in there caverns
actually that ain't bad i think i was kind of an evil character
which is why my face ends up looking kind of like scary and stuff arcane bolt
damn i haven't played this in a while winter's grasp slow down you
poser finding her controls a little clutchy in this uh after this after so
long all right i obviously don't know any of
my uh my binds here oh it's immune to fire
that that makes sense how about some lightning for you there you know it's
funny new games are they definitely look better
but this looks alright doesn't it yeah
i mean like most of the graphical fidelity is made
up in the lighting i think because the textures
don't really hold up very well today no they've aged for sure that was
definitely a trip down nostalgia lane but one thing i won't miss
is how loud gaming machines were back then and how bad the cable management
options were this case sucked the following year saw bioshock 2 hit steam
libraries along with battlefield bad company 2 civ 5 mass effect 2 and
starcraft 2 wings of liberty carrying on this pattern of sequels AMD's new phenom
2 x6 offered more threads than the core 2s did at a price much lower than the
core i series particularly when it comes to the supporting hardware this made it
a favorite among enthusiasts looking for something better than a core 2 quad and
a multi-threading workload without breaking the bank because while it was
slower per thread it held its own in most titles wider availability of ddr3
made for a lower early adopter tax although ddr2 would remain much less
expensive for some time to come our 2010 gaming pc therefore is equipped with a
phenom 2 x6 1055t
four gigabytes of ddr3 1333 and twin
Radeon hd6970s still rocking Windows 7 we're again just
shy of 1800 in 2010 well remember when you could right click on network crap in
the bottom right and then you would well okay when it wasn't broken like that
yeah and then you could just go to your network configuration so it did do that
all right so what are we trying to run at here again 3440 by 1440.
so full ultra wide as you can see it uh doesn't exactly scale the
intro graphics very well no but once again the textures are a little
rough and mocap technology definitely
had a long way to go back then compared to now you can definitely tell when
things like god rays are hard-coded versus
dynamically generated by the engine and by the light
sources yeah in this case if you removed all the geometry in the scene those god
rays would still be there he looks like he just smelled something bad
so this game apparently scales to ultra wide by narrowing your vertical field of
view that's not a great gaming experience ultra wide support has
definitely gotten a lot better over the years so our number 10 bulb is actually
cut off and so is our point decrease button here uh well i'm not sure how to
proceed from here to be honest
2011 brought us a huge number of hot titles like portal 2 skyrim oh
that's a pretty dead meme sorry skyrim deus ex human revolution and everyone's
favorite masochism simulator dark souls but 2011 was also a dark year for AMD
with the release of sandy bridge and Intel's new consumer lga 1156 platform
Intel not only had a very fast lineup of cpus at their disposal but a
cost-effective one at that AMD's response in the form of bulldozer failed
on all counts giving them a reputation as the cheap option that would take
years to overcome now because in the early days hyper threading had a
tendency to negatively impact gaming performance there was very little reason
to go with the high end core i7 2600k so
as a result our build rocks a core i5
2500k with four gigs of ddr3 RAM whose
price had come down a fair bit since 2010. now this time around we've gone
green team for our graphics card because NVIDIA's gtx 590 outperformed AMD making
it the go-to card for over-the-top monster machines but it was also around
this time that enthusiasts began to shy away from dual GPU solutions due to the
prevalence of micro stuttering the gtx 590 would be among the last such
consumer cards from NVIDIA this year we picked up an SSD for the first time
bumping our total build price to nearly 1900
and that SSD option is something we'll be keeping in all future builds unlike
Windows 7 for which sadly the road ends
here one thing that was a big deal that we didn't cover in the blurb for this
year is that the define was pretty much the defining case of this time unlike
the p180 series from antec that preceded it it was actually affordable so you
could get a nice looking quiet discreet
case without breaking the bank now i actually never actually played skyrim i
was big into oblivion but i never played this one this is the one that everybody played i
know right i gotta say the texture
quality even just in the loading screens is
feels more than a year ahead of what we were just looking at that's a huge
difference and this is even without the modding community coming in and fixing
it for us yeah i remember the 8k texture packs that
were available for this wasn't actually 8k but you know should
we just uh jump to one of the towns sure you watch out boom yeah you like that
boom right fist left fist oh he's got a sword
oh where does sword go now he's just got a knife or maybe he only had knife in
the first place
oh i have an axe how do i equip it let's go ask some shiz
lightning axe oh wow this is how waiting works in this game yeah that is so ugly
and unnecessary
wow this is really a much
much better looking game though it's still
it still doesn't hold up that well compared to modern stuff like you can
really tell a lot of the assets in the trees are obviously reused
shadows are very lifeless feeling
it's a shadow map the trees don't move you know yeah no breeze but one of the
things that was really great about this game was draw distance like you could
really look out into the distance and feel like you were in an immense world while the
world didn't end in 2012 it wasn't an outstanding year for gaming as a whole
either standouts include far cry 3 xcom enemy unknown borderlands 2 and cs go
the CPU world meanwhile arguably came to a halt ivy bridge was a modest tick to
sandy bridge's talk representing a die shrink and not much else pci express 3.0
became a thing and they updated the integrated graphics and improved quick
sync support but neither of those things were earth-shattering at the time still
as gamers moved on to the new architecture the lessons of the previous
generation carried forward to this one too so many went with the core i5 this
time around and so did we the 3570k powers our rig this year along with
eight gigabytes of very inexpensive RAM and the Radeon hd 7970 which despite its
slightly lower performance out of the gate mostly kept pace with NVIDIA's
kepler and eventually outperformed it in the long haul thanks to its larger frame
buffer at least this build costs less than last year's at just over 1800 but
we're now also running Windows 8 so have fun with that i never actually
played far cry 3. neither did i well i played the first
one and loved it played the second one and literally had my save game tanked
because it had auto save and then it auto saved when i was too far from
anywhere to recover from some poison or something
oh the malaria yeah so i couldn't i couldn't do anything so my save game got
complete it was a crappy game anyway so i didn't bother with this one even though it was supposed to be good
yeah they skewed a little bit less towards the realism aspect of this one
you know as far as i know i was the first north american retailer to bring
in the define r2 really yeah we brought in almost a
container of them at a time when they were basically a
completely unknown brand it was like a huge gamble for me as a
product manager they had their issues i remember there was a big scandal where
their uh their front usb was like wired up wrong
or something oh yeah and they had to send us a bunch of like replacement usb
harnesses and i was like what am i going to do with these like you expect me to
have someone go in the back and replace all your stupid front panel cabling
literally open every case i guess they expected them to like be
shipped with the cases or something that was ultimately the solution making the
customer deal with it but it was not a good time people were not happy
facial animations have come a long way in even just a few short years
now they've come a long way further since then
like these releases here with specular highlights are much better than previous
gen like we're getting to the point now where
i'm not gonna play this game and go oh this looks old
yeah see the highlights on those packages yep and you can see them in
people's eyes too yeah the eyes especially it gives them a lot more life
vegetation still looks pretty static
view distance on this is pretty good as well but i can tell that like it kind of cuts off around there part of it too is
that they've also applied a depth of field effect that was something that didn't come into play until around this
time yeah 2013 brought comparatively few but major
releases like battlefield 4 dota 2 and
saints row 4. AMD wasn't having much fun though and their desperate attempts to
compete by both lowering their prices and increasing their clock speeds and
therefore power consumption never quite managed to break them free of the rut
they found themselves in haswell then was the next
talk and this time around we actually did get a bit of a performance boost
even if it was a single digit one thanks to a move to Intel's 22 nanometer finfet
manufacturing process hyper threading also became more useful this year as the
concept of streaming your gaming began to take off in earnest and the core i7
4770k was also clocked higher than the core i5
variant so that's what we went with along with 16 gigs of fast ddr3 RAM and
a GeForce gtx 780 ti kepler's second
outing certainly did a lot better than the first and unfortunately for AMD
Radeon still to this day hasn't made a return to the top of the benchmark
charts this year Windows 8.1 made its debut but i don't know that anyone
actually cared outside of the fact that it was a free upgrade for Windows 8
users which i guess might have helped a little with the ballooning prices of
enthusiast pc hardware this build all told commanded a total of just over 2100
us dollars now this is where we get into the games that really make me say
is this even that old like
i could play this game today and it would be perfectly fine this is
battlefield 4. textures look freaking
awesome high-res lighting reflections are handled
differently depending on the type of surface that the light is hitting
you can actually see objects that move into the god rays get illuminated by
them like my gun a lot of the improvements here aren't even just in technology they're also in style like
you can really just tell how much more attention to detail is put into mocap
yeah character models too
these are so detailed compared to the ones that we were looking at at the
beginning oh that bloom
yeah boom and lens flare love it like a really complex lens player too the final
year represented in this first part of our series is 2014 which was another
relatively light year for high profile releases with dark souls 2 alien
isolation shadow of mordor and the sims 4 representing as for hardware
and it's ivy bridge all over again but worse
tick-tock and war's law largely fell apart this year and instead of a new
micro architecture or anything of substance we got as well refresh
literally just a core clock improvement and admittedly much needed
more efficient tim we did get a new chipset to go with it though which for
the first time implements NVMe support not that anyone had any use for that at
the time but hey a feature is a feature so we went with a core i7 4790k along with
16 gigabytes of ddr3 just like last time
but now we're dropping our hard drive in favor of a faster large SSD
the other main difference is in NVIDIA's maxwell-based gtx 980 a complete rework
of kepler that improved efficiency and overall performance despite running on
the same process node that was a pretty impressive feat and
AMD wouldn't release their response until the following year
mercifully total cost is down significantly this year and this will
also be the last year that we build with Windows 8.1 with that said i'm sure that
there are still some fans of it out there
somewhere so this is alien isolation and
yeah one of the things that you'll notice is yeah that's kind of the aesthetic of
this but it was also something that kind of became popular in around this time
right real-time instagram filters yeah so as you can see it's like fine when
we're looking right at it but if we move the camera
yeah you get that red fringing on it yeah i think it'll go green over here
that's cute yep
lighting effects are so natural and it's amazing how much of a difference that
makes i mean the graphics card manufacturers are
constantly talking about how lighting is such a key component to
making a game look more natural and more
immersive but as we've gone through this six years
of gaming pcs it's like yeah certain things have improved like textures but
lighting is definitely the one that has been the most game-changing part of the
pun yeah and like this water effect here
the way the light plays off of that
that's something that just didn't happen in previous generations so much subtlety to it like just areas
on the carpet that are more lit like we've got actual light
bounces yeah
so as we come out here we can see that you know the carpet well it's not really
carpet but like it's way less
way less shiny than this this trim is yeah it used to be that like going back
to really old games like doom 3 just like the entire environment felt
shiny if they wanted to have light reflecting off anything like they it
lacked subtlety yeah and in this case you can kind of see here like the way
they did with the bump mapping here yeah it looks shiny but also gritty at once
which is a really difficult thing to pull off on previous generations
i remember it being a big deal to even be able to reflect the environment in a
scope before this oh yeah yeah it used to be like
it was red orchestra you could have something that was either like a static scope
or you could have a a low resolution or a high resolution
reflection yeah and there was a significant performance penalty for
enabling it it was a discreet menu option man the steam effects here look great
yep the fact that like when you go buy them and the the light is no longer i
mean it's that's kind of a screen space thing but it kind of also works
because it it no longer is in your your field of vision so it kind of just fades
out so this first half of the last decade represented a steady decline in
hardware improvements and innovation year over year
but somehow on the software side of the gaming industry they still managed to
squeeze far more realism and image quality out
of said hardware now some believed that
this decrease in performance improvement would continue ad infinitum as a result
of the death of moore's law and the future indeed looked pretty dim in 2014
it seemed as though pc gaming would begin to drop off along with the decline
in pc shipments in general but stay tuned folks because for part
two where we go from 2015 all the way up to today well
let's just say if you're new and you don't already know how this ends i think
you're going to be surprised at where things go from here what won't be a
surprise is this segue to our sponsors for today's video lg and c sonic who
provided these monitors and of course literally powered all of our systems
here so if you guys are looking for a great gaming experience lg's ultra gear
gaming monitors are a fantastic choice we're going to have those linked in the
video description and also down there is going to be some sea sonic power
supplies no matter what kind of a rig you're building small form factor large
power sipping power chugging doesn't matter sea sonic's got you covered
so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but it was awesome get subscribed hit that like
button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video
description also link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like
this one and that one and that hoodie and our community forum which you guys
should totally join