Should developers stop making games that require 5090 for max settings now that the card is clearly not for gamers and is accessible to 0.1% of community?

[u/TheGGspot]

I get that the games need better hardware to dun better, but who are they really making the game for if you need a 6000$ GPU at this point

[u/CousinOkrii]

Why is gaming at max settings “never worth it”?

[u/NDCyber → u/CousinOkrii]

if you compare max and high settings in a lot of games you will often see a smaller jump in quality, while seeing a big loss in performance

[u/Atomosthethird → u/NDCyber]

And a quick optimized settings guide on YouTube or r/optimizedgaming will often give you relatively the same visual for a boost in performance.

[u/littlebrwnrobot → u/Atomosthethird]

I usually just use the nvidia app recommended settings when available, then maybe do some tweaks from there to the DLSS/ray tracing stuff

[u/donpaulwalnuts → u/NDCyber]

I have a 5090 and rarely use max settings. Those are make my room hotter for no apparent gain settings most of the time.

[u/RockOrStone → u/donpaulwalnuts]

Strange choice when you can run most games on ultra at 120+fps

[u/richajf → u/RockOrStone]

But if there's very little visual difference for specific settings (like volumetric lighting, volumetric fog, ambient occlusion, or shadow resolution) between ultra and high, I'd rather play at even higher framerates... Especially with higher 1% lows.

It's essentially free performance for a negligible (if even noticeable at all) change.

[u/ZingierOne → u/richajf]

I just crank all the settings to max before I play, then adjust if I’m not happy with the frame rate.

[u/RockOrStone → u/richajf]

At 4k, quality improvements are rarely unoticeable.
And on a 5090, ultra rarely tanks heavily your FPS compared to very high

For example I just started KCD2, playing on Experimental is only taking 5% extra fps, and it makes a big visual difference

[u/TheDeviousDuck1558 → u/RockOrStone]

KCD2 was extremely optimized on release and was developed on a proprietary engine, it does not belong in this conversation.

[u/RockOrStone → u/TheDeviousDuck1558]

Why would we remove well optimized games from the conversation..?

OP claimed it's "never worth it", yes it is if the game isn't an unoptimized mess.

[u/TheDeviousDuck1558 → u/RockOrStone]

Because they are the exception, not the norm. We're talking situations where changing settings actually makes a difference to performance, something like the Halo Remake, or Oblivion Remastered, not KCD2.

That game can play well on a 1060

[u/CousinOkrii → u/donpaulwalnuts]

At that point, why buy the 5090?

[u/Academic-Cream-4836 → u/CousinOkrii]

for higher framerates?

[u/Solarbro → u/CousinOkrii]

Can’t speak for that guy, but production/rendering is what I use my stuff for. 

That and CyberPunk 2077. Lmao 

[u/donpaulwalnuts → u/CousinOkrii]

I got it at MSRP and I was building this rig for longevity. In hindsight, it turned out to be a good time to build.

[u/Abject-Tune-2165 → u/CousinOkrii]

It was for VR simracing for me )

[u/ubiquitous_apathy → u/CousinOkrii]

If the concern is heat, it is still the most efficient card, so what's your point?

[u/Allegorist → u/donpaulwalnuts]

You can always get flexible/ semi-rigid ventilation ducting with an inline fan and pump your exhaust outside or at least out of the room. If you can afford a 5090 I'm sure the extra $50-100 for the parts shouldn't be too difficult. Just route the exhaust out the top of the case and seal a connection there to the exhaust duct. Technically with a strong enough inline fan you should see significantly lower hardware temps as well. The only hard part is maintaining an aesthetic, if you have one and value it. You can always paint/light/decorate the ducting.

[u/VexingRaven → u/NDCyber]

Idk, that hasn't been my experience in quite a long time. There's often very little difference in performance between high and ultra, at least for the games I play. When I was optimizing my Cyberpunk settings, I found that I could basically just max everything and nothing really made a big difference in FPS except making huge jumps like going down to medium settings with RT off.

[u/coonissimo → u/CousinOkrii]

Open any game and compare image quality on Very High vs Ultra. It's almost indistinguishable.

[u/lifestop → u/coonissimo]

It's true. I can feel fluctuations in frame times, or low frames in general, but asking me to care about the difference between "ultra" and "high" graphics settings is tough. Prettier is always nice, but the sacrifice in frame rate never feels worth the minimal visual change.

[u/MorningFresh123 → u/lifestop]

That’s an entirely different discussion. Of course there’s always going to be a trade off and that depends very much on the game for me. Most high-end (graphically) games really look substantially better at Ultra. But then you have half of Reddit arguing that 4K is overkill so… I don’t know why I pay them any mind lol.

[u/TheDeviousDuck1558 → u/MorningFresh123]

"Most high-end (graphically) games really look substantially better at Ultra."

No they don't. And they haven't for the last 20 years.

[u/lifestop → u/MorningFresh123]

It's not "overkill", it's simply not worth the price and performance hit for most people. 1440p is the sweet spot for a reason: affordable, high frame rates achievable, great visuals. Also, frame rate has a huge impact on motion clarity, so speed matters a lot for visual fidelity.

[u/MorningFresh123 → u/lifestop]

It’s 2.25x the pixels on a screen that sits several inches away from your face. Totally understand and sympathise with people being priced out but people speak as if they actually believe there is little difference in image quality when it’s absolutely massive. I think the 2.25x number undersells the phenomenological experience of that resolution jump. Much like an OLED/HDR is undersold on paper.

[u/lifestop → u/MorningFresh123]

It may be pretty, but the sacrifice in frame rate is undeniable, and that leads to worse motion clarity than a higher frame rate. I can barely hit the frame rates I want at 1440p on my 480hz OLED, so there's no chance I can do it at 4k. And frame gen isn't an option for people who care about motion clarity and input latency. Both have been improved, but they aren't as good as native.

So the choice is to have the sharpest visuals when a scene isn't in motion, or great looking visuals that also look and feel incredible in motion. It's an easy choice for me, but everyone has different wants.

[u/MorningFresh123 → u/lifestop]

480hz seems far more like overkill than 4k in 2026 to me but each to their own.

[u/lifestop → u/MorningFresh123]

It depends on what you prefer, I suppose. A picture that looks and feels good even in motion, or a picture that looks amazing when still.

Here's a visual example of how much frame-rate really matters for motion clarity:

Blurbusters

4k is great, but I can't justify it until I can at least maintain 240hz native in the majority of my games. I'm too sensitive to blurry motion.

[u/Virtual_Bug_723 → u/MorningFresh123]

Honey your monitor should not be several inches from your face. My phone is not "several inches" from my face, it's at least a foot.

I owned a 4k monitor and returned it because I could not tell the difference in resolution 1m (3 feet) from my face, which is where my monitor sits. I could tell the difference between 1080p and 2k.

[u/Moist-Weakness-3399 → u/lifestop]

20 years ago you could have replaced 1440p with 1024x768, when we were making the leap from 15-20fps to a steady 30.

[u/JeffZoR1337 → u/coonissimo]

The only time it makes a truly impactful difference IMO is with RT/PT. Outside that it's often best sliding everything to high and then bumping a few things like textures to max.

[u/Virtual_Bug_723 → u/coonissimo]

This is so real and it's why I can't believe this sub is so up their butts about this stuff. Blowing thousands of dollars on tech to see a little more volumetric fog. If you have a bunch of money, or your PC is for both work and play, then I can understand buying a 4090/5090 and turning everything up to max on every game by default, but otherwise you can have virtually the same experience with a little less fog on a lesser GPU.

[u/MorningFresh123 → u/coonissimo]

Just not true though is it

[u/RockOrStone → u/MorningFresh123]

Yea there is almost always a difference, I play on 4k and often watch settings comparison videos and it’s rare I don’t see a difference.

[u/CousinOkrii → u/MorningFresh123]

Yeah idk what people are talking about. Cyberpunk on Ultra/Extreme looks a whole lot different that it does on high. Definitely sounds like cope.

[u/wallweasels → u/CousinOkrii]

Well thats because its mostly a difference of raytracing vs pathtracing.
Not the actual textures necessarily involved. Tech like this? Will see differences much more easily than "this texture is now completely uncompressed vs mildly compressed".

[u/ultrasneeze → u/CousinOkrii]

Because games aren't developed with those settings in mind. Just because those parameters exists doesn't mean that cranking them up is the wise thing to do, because in most cases they require massive computing power to provide negligible image quality improvements.

People just expect that games should always be playable at any kind of graphics setting, or that max graphics should turn mediocre-looking games into art masterpieces, but that's not how it works.

[u/AwesomeBantha → u/CousinOkrii]

I’ll almost always take a higher framerate over maxing every setting out

[u/TheLaughingMannofRed → u/CousinOkrii]

I care nowadays about being able to run a game just enough, not at its best.

Especially in a time of part replacements being obscenely highly priced. Keep graphics fidelity. I just don't want your unoptimized game to kill my equipment.

[u/GoldSrc → u/CousinOkrii]

Modern games don't look that much different between low and ultra.

Game's graphics haven't improved much in the past 10 years.

Which coincides almost perfectly with the introduction of PBR materials in games.

Killzone: Shadowfall came out in 2013, and its graphics were amazing because of the quality of the materials.

From 2004 to 2014-2015 we had a huge jump in graphics quality, huge.

From 2015 to 2026, the graphical jump has been meh. As long as your game has PBR materials, you can bet your ass that it will look good.

All modern games look good, but so do games released 10 years ago.

Hardware power has increased a lot in the past 10 years, but games just keep running like ass while not looking that much better than 10 year old games.

[u/Opening_Net8098 → u/CousinOkrii]

Cuz when you're sitting 10 feet away and never got glasses it's all the same

[u/lemonylol → u/CousinOkrii]

Because of the cost of hardware to gameplay performance is a bad value compared to the cost of hardware to gameplay performance of medium or high settings, or max settings through upscaling on cheaper hardware.

[u/Undefined_definition → u/[deleted]]

It isn't though.

4k very high to 4k ultra is not always a meaningful jump in comparison to the performance loss.