So.  Back in the fall of 2024 I boxed up my XBOX Series X and my PS5 and took them over to the local Gamestop and took the (fairly generous) trade-in credit they offered in return.  And it felt pretty good!  There were fewer plastic boxes under the television set, and life felt generally simpler.  At the time, it felt like even the most console-centric developers were coming around to the Gospel of Gaben and PC gaming meant more frames and prettier ones, with very little of the tinkering from days past required.

And, for a time, that seemed like it was going to be true. With the exception of HDR. Which is, frankly, a pain in the neck on the PC – both because it seems extremely inconsistent in terms of quality and because just getting basic screenshots turns into your choice of “washed-out flashbang” or “dark-as-midnight-on-a-moonless-night” and even the right screenshot key to press might differ depending on whether you’re playing a game that is natively HDR or that is only HDR because Windows is forcing their auto-HDR on.

So I turned off HDR.  And life was better.  It was a small compromise.

And PC gaming was great.  I got through a ton of backlogged games, and I even managed to finally gel with the Resident Evil series after 30-ish years of never getting very far into any of them.

I even played some modern AAA games with Mac ports!  Things were crazy!

Then I started hitting some more recent games.  Games that didn’t ever get released on the Xbox One or PS4, that had modern expectations for hardware, that used various kinds of AI upscaling to hit their resolution targets, that might have ray tracing (but only if you had the right kind of GPU)… I started launching games and spending a couple of hours dinking around in the settings menu instead of going directly to Press Start to Play.

For full disclosure, this is also about when I switched to playing games on Linux.  Which did add its own level of pain to the whole thing.  Steam games generally worked just fine, at least.  As long as you didn’t want HDR.  Well, you COULD get HDR working.  But you needed to use a different Proton version.  Also things like Resident Evil Requiem had flawless support for DualSense controllers under Windows but just didn’t even see them on Linux.  So that extra bit of complexity is 100% on me.

Then I bought Pragmata.  Which is an AMAZING game.  Cannot speak highly enough of it.  But I got spoiled by people telling me how much I Needed To Turn Path Tracing On.  But that is only supported in Nvidia cards, and only in Windows, so I had to switch back to Windows and …well, yeah.  It looked really good.

But.

I wanted to hit a reasonable frame rate, with path tracing on.  Which my 4070ti Super couldn’t do at 1440p native.   So I needed to experiment with AI upscaling.  Or I could use frame generation… but I couldn’t run frame generation AND cap my frame rate output, so my computer would go into Jet Fan Cooling Mode.

There’s a very early hallway in Pragmata.  It’s a hallway you walk down just after you leave the shelter for the first time.  You fight about five robots in it, and there’s a bit where you can look to your side and you see the reflection of Hugh carrying Diana.  If you don’t have ray tracing on, you only see Hugh.  If you have regular ray tracing on, you can see Diana but she’s just kind of a blue blob.  If you have path tracing on, you can tell she actually has hair.  TRANSFORMATIVE.

I walked down this hallway so many times trying to dial in Just The Right Settings, not actually playing the game.  It was ridiculous.

I did eventually stop dinking around in the settings and just played the game.  It was incredible.  Strongly recommend playing it whatever hardware you have at hand.

And then, like I mentioned, I bought a PS5 in order to get out ahead of Sony’s price increase.

And because I had a PS5, well, might as well check out a PS5 game from the local library.  Which you can do with PS5 games because they still come on discs.

So, I checked out Astro Bot.

I don’t know if it HAS a settings menu.  I don’t know if it was using AI image upscaling, or frame generation, or what the LOD or DOF settings are.  Was it using subsurface scattering for improved skin tones? I DO NOT KNOW.

I just put a disc in.  Waited for a few minutes for it to install.  And then played the game.

And then I considered how many hours I’d spent Not Playing Pragmata.  And I thought about how many hours I had in the evening after work (it’s not many).

And I think I will be buying new releases on the PS5 from now on.

I’m not 100% a filthy console peasant.  I have a Bazzite box under the TV which I’m also working towards making a Sunshine box for remote play over Tailscale.  Because making things complicated is my idea of a good time, I guess.  I’ll try not to let that project eat too much of my evenings.