With GOTY and all the "expansions"

That's why I went back to the roots. I'm now playing older games at 4k 60 fps no problem. I'll stick with emulators. I'd rather not spend the $700. I'll still complain about new games not running for me, though. That's the only thing I can do beside playing older games instead

Or just run newer games at 1080p. Unless you're unhealthily close to the monitor you probably won't even see the difference.

If you're rubbing it on a TV across the room, you probably literally can't see the difference.

Not the newest game but still newer, but one of my biggest gripes is how much you need to be able to run the newest Ratchet and Clank. I'm lucky my steam deck can run it or I'd be screwed.

Lmao. That game runs so bad without FSR. Eith FSR on, it looks so weird.

Not the newest game but still newer, but one of my biggest gripes is how much you need to be able to run the newest Ratchet and Clank. I'm lucky my steam deck can run it or I'd be screwed.

I do run them at 1080p, trust me. Here is the thing, though, running 1080p on a native 4k screen makes for a horrible looking picture. It just looks off and very bad. Try it if you can.
It's best when the screen itself is physically 1080p. I think you fat-fingered the "b" in "running". Came out funny

I've been a PC gamer for almost 30 years now. This perpetual march of buying new PC upgrades to play new games is an old song.

Absolutely spot on. It needs a personal change. A change in mentality, the way we think of entertainment, games in this case. We need to stop believing these profit hungry people and stop chasing after those "shadows" and "highlights" and every single detail in games. When you enjoy a game, you won't even notice all those "details". You're not going to be running around in a game looking at trees and sunlight. I guarantee you that it all becomes blur in the background and you won't even care about it. It's all a collective anxiety they've trained us into. Chasing after those fps numbers and details is what got us hooked to their exorbitant prices and shit performance. It was somewhat a wakeup call for me, if you wanna call it that. I just got tired of stressing about my hardware, that's totally fine and capable, not playing their shit and poorly optimized games. Then come those who defend corporations and berate you for "choosing the wrong resolution". Why? I like 4k. It looks nice. Why do I have to bear the burden of their poorly optimized games. They ARE 100% more than capable of optimizing their games to run on 4k ON MY RX6600, but they don't want to. They're lazy. It won't make them enough money. It won't squeeze the last penny out of our pockets. They're also listening to Nvidia. Of course Nvidia wants us to believe that games are "so good" nowadays that we need their top of the line $3000 GPU to play them on 4k. How dare we peasants play on 4k on a non $3000 GPU? Blasphemy!!! Fuck'em. At least there are still folks like you out there who understand this bullshit and don't bootlick.

You'll want to use Lossless Scaling. It'll quadruple the pixels without any filtering and make the output not look weird on a 4k display.

I didn't mention that in the op, but Indiana Jones was running like shit on 1080 low settings. The fucking game forces DLSS. This is where gaming heading, forced DLSS and forced garbage so we are forced to buy expensive shit

This is getting out of hand. The other day I saw the requirements for "Hell is Us" game and it's ridiculous. My RX6600 can't play anything anymore. I've downloaded several PS3 ROMs and now I'm playing old games. So much better than this insanity. This is probably what I'm going to be doing now, play old games.

Edit: I wanted to edit the post for more context and to vent/rant a little.

I don't want to say I made a mistake, but I buy everything used, and I have scored a good deal on two 27" 4k monitors from Facebook marketplace. Got both monitors for $120.

They're $800 on Amazon used. Great monitors and I love 4k. I also bought an RX6600 AMD GPU for $100 from Facebook. It was almost new. The owner upgraded and wanted to get rid of it. My whole build was very cheap compared to what I see some folks get (genuinely happy for those who can afford it. Life is too short. Enjoy it while you can).

I can't afford these high end GPUs, but now very few games work on low settings and I'd get something like 20 FPS max. My friend gave me access to his steam library and I wanted to play Indiana Jones the other day, and it was an "omfg, wtf is this horrible shit" moment.
I'm so sick of this shit!

I don't regret buying any of these, but man it sucks that the games I want to play barely even work.
So, now I'm emulating and it's actually pretty awesome. I've missed out on so many games in my youth so now I'm just going to catch up on what I've missed out on. Everything works in 4k now and I'm getting my full 60FPS and I'm having so much fun.

Using 1440p for 20 years doesn't mean 4k is a scam

Because running 4k is extreme. Asking it to run well at 4k is asking them to quadruple the pixels for the same processing cost. You're saying you want the vast majority of people who dont have a 4k setup to have their games downgraded so they'll run well on your boutique monitor.

It's a balancing act, and they can either make the game look like something from 2010 on all systems just to make sure it runs in 4k on older cards, or they can design it to look good in 1080p on older or cheaper cards, which is fine for most most people.

If you want to game in 4k, you need to buy a video card and monitor to support it. Meanwhile, I'll keep running new games on my older card at 1080 and be perfectly happy with it.

Idk man, I bought Sol Cesto yesterday, and I'm pretty sure my toaster could run it

Edit:

RX 6600, two 4k monitors

Bruh. I have a 3080 Ti and barely feel comfortable running my games in 2k. I'm pretty sure the 6600 was made with only 1080p and lower in mind.

I didn't mention that in the op, but Indiana Jones was running like shit on 1080 low settings. The fucking game forces DLSS. This is where gaming heading, forced DLSS and forced garbage so we are forced to buy expensive shit

That's just on Indiana Jones and bad optimization. There are still plenty of other, newer games that should run perfectly fine. Of course the big, chunky games that are marketed as "Look at how graphically intense this is! Look at the ray tracing!" are going to run poorly.

Though I will absolutely agree that a lot of studios are throwing optimization out the window when developing new games, just relying on the latest hardware to power through it.

It is a scam if you're buying 27" monitors like op. You can only cram so much dpi in a monitor before you get diminishing returns. I've been playing in 1440p, 27" for a while, and can barely see the pixels if I put my eyes 10 cm away from the screen (and I've been playing arma reforger, so there's been a lot of squinting at bushes through a high-powered scope lately).

I've also used a 4k, 32" screen for a long time at work (in gamedev, so I wasn't looking at excel files either... Well, actually I also was but that's besides the point) and couldn't really tell the difference with my home setup on that front (though I admit 32" at 1440p doesn't look great sometimes, I also tried that for a while). Really, the most noticeable things were the HDR and the ludicrous fps I could get from having a top-of-the-line CPU and GPU (and 128 Go RAM also helped a bit I guess)

i made two statements and you made none.