The Frustrating Downside of PC Gaming

Get ready to tweak and troubleshoot

Getting these ray traced shadows to work properly in Diablo IV on PC took me far more work than I thought it would…and the solution was rather unintuitive. Game screenshot captured by the author.

At the tail end 2021, it wasn’t a great time to buy a new gaming PC. You might even call it “the literal worst.”

That didn’t stop me from doing it anyway.

The pandemic had put a crunch on the supply of many different parts and computer chips, and a recent cryptocurrency boom meant that gaming video hardware was even tougher to get ahold of at reasonable prices.

During that swirl of uncertainty, I managed to get an okay deal on an Alienware pre-built machine, based entirely on AMD parts. I know that you’re probably already shaking your head at me if you’re a “serious” PC gamer, and that’s your right to do, I guess. But you should know that I’m also one of those serious folks. I’ve built many of my own PCs over the years. I always get elbow deep into any new machine that I purchase, whether I put it together myself or not. I love this stuff as much as anyone, and I’ll happily spend more time getting a game to run well than I will actually playing it.

That’s the PC lifestyle, after all.

The prebuilt machine route might not be the choice of the elitist hardcore among you, but at that specific time it was the only good way to get a new GPU without getting totally destroyed on price. I ended up with…