PC gaming is great, really. You get access to oh so many games, there are countless different stores you can get your games from, so many options when it comes to customising both the games themselves and your play experience. It’s something of a paradise for those who want more freedom.
But that freedom comes with a whole lot of responsibility. PC gaming isn’t for the faint of heart. When everything works, you feel unstoppable, playing the newest games at the max settings with a diverse set of mods. And when it doesn’t work, you’ll be wondering “Why didn’t I just get a console?”.
10Putting It All Together
It’s Great That There Are So Many Pieces. I Love It, Really.
Building a PC is a bit like Lego. You have all the pieces, you know they fit together and what it’s meant to look like, it’s just going to take time to get there. Except unlike Lego, many PC parts are incredibly fragile and will simply not work if they’re not placed in the right spot in the right way.
Can my PC fit a graphics card this big? Should my RAM sticks go in alternating slots or right beside each other? Which way should my fans be facing? It is trial by fire. Refer to the manual as much as you can, but sometimes, you just have to learn what a piece actually does it put it in right.
9Drivers
Yes, More Than Just The Graphics Card
More than a few times, I’ve booted up a game and wondered why it just isn’t working. I mean, I was playing yesterday and it was fine, so what changed? Turns out it was my drivers. Sure, I’ll just update them real quick, everything should be fine. Oh, now my controller isn’t working. Ugh.
When you do remember drivers are a thing, you typically just think about the graphics drivers. They will fix most issues, but not all of them. Sometimes, you need to find your Bluetooth drivers, your controller drivers, your audio drivers. Sometimes even your chipset drivers might be outdated. And you better know where to find the most up-to-date ones.
8Can My PC Actually Run This?
Specs Are More A Guideline Than A Requirement
When it comes to making games, it is in general a bit easier for consoles. You know the exact hardware you are working with, you have the actual console manufacturer with you, and you know those specs have no way of changing. With PC, developers are more working within a framework of specs, rather than exact ones.
I have a nice and modest RTX 4060. I see something requires an RTX 2080. Hm, my graphics card is newer, but has less VRAM than the older card. Can I run this? Oh, my CPU is way better than what’s required, though will that help boost where I might be lesser, or is that just excess power going to waste? A lot of the time, it is simply trial-and-error, and why you should always try a demo before you buy the full game.
7What Do All These Settings Mean?
You Better Brush Up On Your Acronyms
With consoles, you tend to get a more curated experience. The way the game looks and plays is, mostly, predetermined for you. That’s the benefit of set hardware, so you just don’t have to worry about any other settings. For the most part, they won’t even exist. Ambient Occlusion, Antialiasing? Don’t even worry about that.
You’re on PC? Do you know what DLSS is? Frame Gen? Fidelity FX? The difference betweenRay-tracing and Ray Reconstruction? Resolution scaling? Then there’s even PC-wide graphics settings that exist outside of the games. Sometimes these settings go together, sometimes they don’t. Have a browser tab open to check out these pages like a dictionary.
6The Multiplayer Hackers
The Freedom Of PC, Warts And All
One of the great joys of PC gaming is being able to make your game look and play just how you want. I have used a great many Skyrim and Minecraft mods to make those games, fundamentally, a different experience altogether. A freedom that is only present on PC. However, there can be downsides to that.
And that would be all the hackers and cheaters. It’s not an issue exclusive to PC, nor is it a massive issue in some of the most active multiplayer games either. However, if you want to play a great game that just isn’t monitored very well, you will have to contend with lobbies full of cheaters who aren’t up for a fair game. And because PC is so easy to mod, you don’t really have a means of combating this.
5So. Many. Cables
Who Knew You Needed More Than HDMI And Power?
I remember when I got PSVR2 and was shocked by the fact that the entire headset could function by plugging just a single cable into the PS5. Sure,PSVR2 itself isn’t well-supported, but it’s a really impressive piece of kit. Then I decided to get the PSVR2 adapter for PC so I could get more use of it, and the number of cables grew exponentially.
In fact, unless you rely on Bluetooth dongles, you’re going to have cables everywhere. It wasn’t until I got a desk with built-in cable management that I realised just how many there are. They will get knotted and frayed if you don’t care for them, and that will make them very hard to move or replace in the future. So please, take the time to organise your cables before it becomes an issue.
4Shader Compilation
Why Is It Always When I Don’t Have Time?
Not to get too technical with it all, but shaders are, in a nutshell, instructions for the GPU on how to render complex graphics. With incredibly detailed games, this is necessary so that your GPU can properly render the game when it is running. This is why you don’t see it very often for older games, but is basically a necessity for modern games.
Because shaders are an instruction for the GPU, they need to be compiled in advance since a game on PC cannot guarantee what GPU you have. And this is also why, after every driver update, you also need to recompile those shaders in case your GPU no longer processes them the same way. Since consoles have set hardware, these shaders often come already compiled, saving you the effort of ever having to spend an evening watching the shaders compile on game launch.
3DRM, And Its Many Invasive Forms
No, I Do Not Need Anti-Cheat Built Into My PC
This isn’t an issue only present on PC, though it is one that is felt the most on the platform. DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is the bane of much of modern gaming. Its stated goal is to force games to check in online so your licence can be verified, and also to block certain modifications to a game. As such, DRM is quite prevalent in online games, though it sneaks its way into plenty of singleplayer games, too.
Where it becomes a bigger issue is with kernel-level anti-cheat. This injects itself at the deepest level of your PC, letting it functionally do what it wants to cancel out cheats. But because of this unrestricted access, it can also hog the system to an unnecessary degree, making games run much worse than they should without an easy way to remove such a system.
2Just Broken PC Games
Both The New And The Old
While PC can offer you some incredible experiences that vastly surpass what is possible on the current generation of consoles, it also gets harder to develop for them. A developer can never guarantee what specs you have and what features they have access to, meaning that, in general, PC is always going to be just a bit more unstable.
However, this extends past just modern games. It is next to impossible to fully futureproof something. Suddenly,archaic gamesthat should be possible to brute force just don’t work. Memory leaks occur because the game doesn’t know how to interact with more advanced hardware, or some hardware feature it relied on no longer exists.
1Never Knowing What’s Broken
Is This My Fault, Or Something Else?
Undeniably, the worst aspect of playing games on PC is not knowing what’s wrong. If your whole PC crashes, and you hit a blue screen, you’ll at least get a blue screen with an error code. When your game is stuttering or the graphics are flickering, or it’s become suddenly sluggish, there’s sometimes no way of knowing the actual issue.
Maybe a driver is outdated. Or your CPU is faulty. Or maybe the game just has a bug. I had an issue in a game recently where it would crash only when loading into certain areas, but not always. Nothing on my end changed, nor did the game update. So was it a Windows update, or did some obscure background detail change? I may never know.
