UNFAIR ADVANTAGE
PC HARDWARE makes us play better, say the ads – is it true?
Marketing around games has changed considerably over the last two decades. There are far fewer young women in lingerie trying to make a network adapter look sexy, for example, or gamers whose entire heads are exploding due to the intensity of the latest title. But in the realm of PC hardware, at least one maxim has remained more or less unwavering: buy this thing, and you’ll magically see your own prowess as a gamer transform.
There’s more sophistication to the message now. Esports team-endorsed products. MMO mice. MLG gamepads. Still, it boils down to the same idea PC hardware was sold on in the Razer Boomslang days: that there’s some kind of linear relationship between money spent and k:d. And that ignores the greater truth about the reason we invest in our pastime: it brings us comfort and enjoyment to indulge in a little nook of escapism. And just like any leisure pursuit, spending the money is actually part of the fun.
However, we’ve all experienced some delighted moment when we discover we’re actually much better at Team Fortress 2 now we’re not trying to aim on a laptop trackpad anymore, or that in the advent of a newly purchased GPU, Battlefield V is quite a bit easier at 60fps than 14. Extreme examples, but they get us wondering about where else we might squeeze extra kills, lap time, or XP without having to actually be better at the game.
Such was this writer’s disposition during the peak of my CSGO habit. Here’s a game that’s been in circulation in various guises since 2000. The players you might meet on any given server may well have two decades of skin in the game. The standard of play is implausibly high. Languishing in the silver ranks, I looked for every possible marginal gain I could find. How much better could a few hardware upgrades really make me?
THE GOLDEN RATIO
Not being the first to think along such lines, I consulted the wealth of wisdom already out there on forums, pro players’ streams and YouTube vids. Most serious players stretch a 4:3 aspect ratio out and run a 1280x960 resolution on a 16:9 panel. The idea is that by warping the image horizontally you make headshots easier, since heads are now rendered using more pixels. You lose some FOV at either side, but if an enemy appears over to the extreme left or right of your screen they’ve probably got the jump on you anyway.
I had to downgrade my 32-inch 16:10, 2560x1600 monitor to a tiny 23-inch 16:9 panel to achieve this. It was the opposite logic to that of the typical hardware ad – in this case, older, lower spec hardware offers the advantage. Personally, I didn’t find myself getting any more headshots than before, though. Probably the shrink down in panel size offset the potential benefit to stretching a 4:3 image out.
Next: frames per second. The theory to this isn’t complicated: the more frames of information about an enemy’s exact location are available to you, the more accurately you can track their position with your crosshairs and, ultimately, make them go on the floor.
The catch, of course, is that you only see as many frames as your monitor can actually refresh in a given second. Since CS:GO’s not a particularly demanding game, most systems can run it at hundreds of FPS, but high refresh rate monitors are less commonplace. I swapped one in – a 240Hz panel that could give me 240 new bits of information on my enemy’s whereabouts every second.
And this was a game changer. The smoothness of mouse movement, the clarity of enemy silhouettes in motion, was extraordinary when jumping up from 60fps. My k:d ratio made an immediate leap forwards.
IN THIS CASE, OLDER, LOWER SPEC HARDWARE OFFERS THE ADVANTAGE
MAJOR LASER
Finally, the mouse and keyboard. I tried several gaming mice, all designed for shooters, all with massive DPI ranges, and found that the simple two-button Zowie FK1 was the clear winner. Most CSGO players use a DPI under 800 (I’m a 400 player) so the smoothness of movement in this sensitivity range mattered so much more than anything else. Even braided cabling. No mouse, however, affected my performance more than using the right DPI. In short: the correct software setting trumps any hardware upgrade. As for keyboards, I noticed no difference in my performance between using membrane or mechanical models.
I concluded the venture with a slightly higher rank, slightly less money in my bank account, and a sense of what investing in gaming hardware really buys you. All of us probably have one potential upgrade to our systems that we’d really feel a tangible benefit from, and perhaps even a little boost to our ability. But more often, we’re investing in ourselves, committing to our pastime and enjoying the look and feel of a space that’s devoted to what we love.