 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 ten years have been something of a rollercoaster 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. I'm building a bunch of gaming PCs! This is gonna be fun! You ready? That's very rude. Oh, and it's brought to you by, actually, it's powered by Seasonic. And brought to you by LG's UltraGear UltraWide Gaming Displays. Yeah. You need a screwdriver too, right? I do. 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 Egg's Origins, just to name a few. To run those games, Intel had just launched the Core i series as a replacement for the Core IIs 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 II Quad Q9650 with that gorgeous Zellman flower cooler on it, 4 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 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... Huh. Nope. You're gonna have to create a character and everything. I actually probably don't have to do that. I could remote into my computer at home and load up my save. I think I still have it. Alright, so theoretically I've thrown my old save file for Lyra in here, but I don't know if it's actually gonna work. There's a previous folder that has a portrait and stuff in it. Man, I remember this. Alright, let's see if it's in there. Caverns! Woo! Actually that ain't bad. I think I was kind of an evil character, which is why my face ends up looking kind of scary and stuff. Arcane Bolt! I haven't played this in a while. Winter's Grasp! Slow down, you hoser! Finding their controls a little kludgy in this after this after so long. Alright, I obviously don't know any of my binds here. Oh, it's immune to fire. That makes sense. How about some lightning for you there? You know, it's funny, new games, they definitely look better, but this looks alright, doesn't it? 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, Cib 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 in a multithreading 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, 4GB of DDR3 1333, and twin Radeon HD 6970s. 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. And then you could just go to your network configuration and say it did do that. Alright, so what are we trying to run at here? Again 3440 by 1440. So full ultra wide. As you can see, it 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. 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, 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, hyperthreading 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 $1,900. 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 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, 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 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. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Oh, where'd his sword go? Now he's just got a knife, or maybe he only had a knife in the first place. Pop, pop, pop, pow. Oh, I have an axe. How do I equip it? Let's go axe 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 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? 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. Well, 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 CSGO. 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 8GB 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 autosave and then it autosaved when I was too far from anywhere to recover from some poison or something. Oh the malaria, yeah. So 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 DefiNR 2. 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 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 gonna 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? Yeah 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. Bloom and lens flare love it. Like a really complex lens flare 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. TikTok and Boars Law largely fell apart this year and instead of a new microarchitecture or anything of substance we got Haswell 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. It's got like that VHS yeah. 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. 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. Yeah. 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 pardon 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 it was 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 I think it was Red Orchestra you could have something that was either like a static scope or you could have a low resolution or a high resolution reflection. Yeah and there was a significant performance penalty for enabling it it was a discrete menu option. Man the steam effects here look great. Yep. The fact that like when you go by 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 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 Seasonic 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 UltraGear 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 Seasonic power supplies no matter what kind of a rig you're building small form factor large power sipping power chugging doesn't matter Seasonic'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 linked 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.