Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unboxed it's that time of year again 2018 is nearly over and we're here today to give you our best PC games of 2018 so actually just a big list of all the good games that came out this year but we do have several categories that we'll be handing out some awards for for these awards we asked the wonderful members of our patreon exclusive discord community to put in some nominations for their favorite games of the year both Steve and I don't always get a chance to play every single game that comes out in the year we do play a lot of titles for benchmarking and testing purposes but we don't often get a ton time to just yeah sit down and enjoy some PC gaming sessions so our discord was super helpful in narrowing down some of these choices and if you want to come and chat with us about games and you know all sorts of other stuffs you you can sign up to our patreon links to that in the description anyway without further ado let's get into the pics I thought picking a best overall PC game in 2018 would be a bit of a challenge there's been lots of high-quality titles released throughout the year but there was one that received an overwhelming number of nominations from our community that game is forza horizon 4 from playground games and microsoft studios i personally played a lot of this game and thought it was absolutely fantastic and it's a highly deserving winner of best PC game I think racing games can sometimes get a bit stale but that's definitely not the case with forts of horizon for this game is loads of fun it's continually evolving with lots of new challenges and events to participate in and it's such a good experience whether you're playing it in single-player or multiplayer modes in fact for this video I originally had separate categories for best single-player and best multiplayer but after examining the nominations I think for to horizon for takes that in both categories the game world is vast and beautiful plus the changing seasons is such a unique and innovative way to vary conditions as you play through the library of cars in this game is phenomenal as well good luck trying to earn them all but it's not just the gameplay that makes this PC game great it's also the way this game runs on the platform while developed primarily for Xbox what's a horizon for has everything you'd want from a PC title support for arbitrary resolutions aspect ratios and frame rates are wealth of settings options proper high-end anti-aliasing excellent controller support and best of all superb optimization this game runs brilliantly on both AMD and NVIDIA hardware without favoring ear the company while still delivering some of the best visuals you get in a game this year the only downside I can think of is the fact that it's only on the Windows Store which is a steaming pile of junk but when you can get around that limitation there's nothing about good things to say about forts rise and fall and I completely agree with our community that suggested this title for best PC game of 2018 as PC gamers we love graphics we love running at high resolutions we love running at high frame rates and we love our games - a beautiful after all that's part of the reason why we choose to play on PC rather than on consoles to get you know the best experience a game can offer so to us a category praising the most visually stunning game is very important lots of games delivered impressive visuals in 2018 including thoughts of horizon for that we just spoke about along with titles like battlefield 5 Far Cry 5 and for that 76 wait maybe not that last one but in our opinion the game with the best graphics in 2018 was shadow of the Tomb Raider this title developed by iris Montreal and published by Square Enix is graphically phenomenal it might not have the biggest open-world or the best gameplay of the year but Shadow the Tomb Raider gets nearly every aspect of its graphics right textures are very high quality environments are well modelled and packed with details foliage quality has been stepped up a notch and it's capped off by one of the most impressive lighting systems of you with excellent volumetric effects bloom ambient occlusion screen spaced reflections light shafts and high-quality shadows shadow of the Tomb Raider is one of those games that as you move through environments is worth pausing and just admiring the work that has gone into producing such stunning visuals even smaller details like Lara's hair and the motion blur implementation are impressive while it's one of the first games I've seen where temporal anti-aliasing actually looks decent best of all the game isn't ridiculously punishing to run sure it does take a high-end system to enjoy this game in all its glory but I think the visuals match the performance you get unlike some other titles released throughout 2018 it also makes a great benchmark for PC hardware that will continue to use I'm sure will be used by PC builders to see how their system is faring for years to come optimization is another one of those categories that's very important for PC gaming with any new release it's one of the first things that's discussion ooh is this game well optimized or is this just another crappy console port we all want games to look good but we also want them to run well across a wide variety of systems from those on a budget to those that can afford an RT x20 atti again Forza horizon four was one of the best optimized tiles of the year but there's another game that really stands out and that's battlefield 5 this is a visually stunning game and one that's more complex and ports our horizon for in terms of environments effects and multiplayer netcode yet it manages to run extremely well on hardware not just from today but also from several generations ago in our big benchmark video we showed that GPUs like the Radeon r9 390 geforce gtx 970 and newer offerings like the gtx 1060 and iris 570 from the mid range are suitable for 1080p 60fps gaming in battlefield 5 using the ultra preset that's very impressive considering how the game looks using those quality settings then a 1440p you only need an RX 580 for an average above 60 FPS while high-end cards like vega 64 and the RT x 2080 are good for near 100 FPS or more on top of this the game scales very well when adjusting the in-game quality presets gaining 45% more performance from turning down a variety of settings is well within the realms of possibility and that brings even more enjoyable GPUs up to a performance level that's acceptable while maintaining decent enough graphics ei dices frostbite engine continues to impress in this regard we are ignoring battlefield 5 DirectX ray-tracing implementation here's that's less than impressive and isn't particularly well optimised but the good news is you don't need to play with DX are unable to factory recommend you don't and with just the regular graphics options battlefield 5 looks fantastic and it runs very well this category runs out a list of more technical awards for PC games released in 2018 hey yeah we're a technical Channel we love digging into games and seeing how they run but we're also interested in seeing how games evolve and we do get a little excited when new and innovative technical achievements are brought to the table for this technical innovation category we're going to hone in on one specific title and it might be a bit of a surprise to some of you that game is ubisoft's far cry 5 now you might be wondering what aspect of Far Cry 5 was all that innovative from a technical standpoint I mean sure the game was fine the graphics were good and it ran pretty well but was there anything out of the ordinary about the game and well the answer comes down to HDR this game impressed us for being the first and one of the very few titles available right now with proper decent HDR support on PC this is the first game I played on an HDR monitor that really wowed me and highlighted where hgr gaming is set to go in the future unlike some of the older HDR titles far cry 5 shg our implementation is actually a significant step up from its regular SDR presentation and best of all it just works flawlessly without any fiddling we're giving this award to an HDR implementation for a number of reasons firstly in this title enabling HDR comes at no performance cost all you need is an HDR monitor and bam you can enable HDR for basically a free visual improvement it looks better and it runs just as well as before secondly it works with both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs right now again if you have an external monitor it will work with the majority of hardware in gaming pcs today it's also clear that a lot of work has gone into this hjm implementation to make it great and that's something I appreciate no YH Jonas - in its infancy it's great to see a company like Ubisoft setting an example for others to follow the main competitor for this category was direct x-ray traced reflections in battlefield 5 but ultimately we decided not to award race racing just yet while technically impressive and also the future of gaming DXR doesn't run particularly well right now there are artifacting issues it's only accessible to those who purchased Nvidia r-tx graphics cards and in battlefield 5 specifically it offers a minor visual improvement for a significant performance cost we think hgr right now is a bit of a more well-rounded technology and one that's more ready for primetime but I think far cry 5 showed us that this year so far in this video we've discussed a lot of triple-a titles but there were also a bunch of excellent non triple-a games released in 2018 so we couldn't make this video without honoring at least one of them one or a game we personally have played return of the aubergines sounds absolutely fascinating from all accounts in case you didn't know it's a mystery puzzle game where your main objective is to discover the fate of crew members on the odd Verdean a vessel that appeared in port with everyone on board dead you spend the game piecing together what happened to everyone and who killed who it's one I can't wait to check out over the Christmas break I'm not going to mention any other story details because of spoilers and it's not the sort of game that you need a powerful PC to run well here's a 3d game it's black and white art style gives it a unique and old-school visual style and if you don't trust our communities recommendation and let's be honest you guys are amazing you know given us some great recommendations return of the aubergine has been widely acclaimed by critics if you pay much attention to that stuff that's it for this one both know what games you loved in 2018 and whether you agree or disagree with our picks there are lots of other excellent games we played in 2018 that we didn't even touch on in this video so check out the comet - I'm sure a lot of other people will put in some recommendations as always you can subscribe for more Hardware and box content consider supporting us on patreon to get access to our discord chat and monthly live streams and I'll catch you in the next one