M
arketing 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 Te a m
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 wemight 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.UNFAIR ADVANTAGE
PC HARDWARE makes us play better, say the ads – is it true?
PHIL IWANIUK
Phil Iwaniuk still
isn’t a Global Elite
in CS:GO, he just
doesn’t blame his
setup anymore.
Rumoured to be
prototyping the
world’s first
all-mechanical
key mousemat.TECH TALES
HIGHS AND LOWS
Finding marginal gains, chartedGodlikeCompetency
achievedqqProbably 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 ADVANTAGEPhil Iwaniuk
THINGXXX straplinexxxxxxxxxxxx
HARDWARE
Dusting
mousemat300FPS,
60HzEnergy
drinks240HzOne week
off399DPI