Anyone who has spent considerable money on video cards, CPUs, or memory is undoubtedly looking for demanding games to test their high-performance PC builds. Many of the most popular PC titles like PUBG: Battlegrounds and Fortnite have been out for several years and are catered to running on even older PCs. Even so, there are plenty of games out there that adequately stress even the most powerful gaming PC builds.

How Cyberpunk 2077 Brings PCs To Their Knees

Released in December 2020 to mixed reviews, one fact that isn't in dispute is how incredibly demanding Cyberpunk 2077 is on PC hardware. Rendering a futuristic city with jaw-dropping textures and lighting comes at a steep price. With heavy use of ray tracing, lower-end PCs will require a Core i7-4790 or Ryzen 3 3200G CPU with a GTX 1060 or R9 Fury video card just to run the game smoothly at 1080p resolution. Fortunately, Nvidia's DLSS technology can help their line of video cards generate more acceptable frame rates.

Why Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II Demands Superior Specs

As a recently released FPS game with ultra-realistic maps, you would expect Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II to threaten to push PC components beyond their limits. The game requires an immense amount of storage space, totaling over 100 GB of data. A GTX 1060 video card should be able to maintain 60 fps at 1080p resolutions but a much more costly RTX 3070 is necessary to run the game on 4k displays.

Why Forza Horizon 5 Requires A Speedy PC

Forza Horizon 5 is considered by many gamers to be the best-looking racing title ever to be released, and the PC version offers some graphical presets that can render the open-world Mexican map in its full glory. Both the over 600 vehicles and the stunning towns and landscapes may have you mistaking the game for the real thing on a 4k display. To race with ray-traced reflections and ultra-detailed textures at this resolution, it may be wise to try to snag an RTX 3080.

Why Rendering The Entire Planet Can Stress PCs

For 40 years, Microsoft's Flight Simulator has put the most powerful gaming PC builds through their paces. Flight Simulator 2020 is viewed as a historic achievement in simulation gaming and it renders the world as we know it with amazing accuracy. With photo-realistic plane interiors, convincing weather effects, and countless airports and scenic locations, the game is unusually demanding on CPUs as well as video cards. Even RTX 3080s will struggle to produce anything close to 60 FPS with settings maxed out, but if your target is closer to 30 fps, Flight Simulator 2020 is still a sight to behold.

How Spider-man Remastered Monopolizes CPUs

When looking for games for high performance PC builds, plenty of titles will tax video cards, but few ask for more from CPUs than Spider-man Remastered. Developers have pledged to address the issue, but upon release, the game was utilizing 60 percent of CPUs in some cases and drawing 100 watts of power from AMD's Ryzen chip sets like the 5900x. With that amount of strain on CPUs, you will want to make sure you have a high-performance heat sink attached to keep these chips cool.

How Dying Light 2 Can Pose A Mortal Threat To Gaming PCs

Although it may not take 500 hours to complete the main campaign of Dying Light 2, that much gameplay requires a gigantic open-world environment. When these maps are complete with some of the most convincing lighting and shadow effects ever seen in a video game, it may have some PCs begging for regular breaks from the action. Disabling ray tracing has a significant effect on performance, otherwise, an RTX 3070 or higher is necessary to play at 4K resolutions.