I don’t know any sites besides maybe PC Part Picker, but you should be able to just check that the desktop you use as a benchmark has the same model of GPU and CPU as the one you want to buy.

You might have one with a GPU built by Asus vs another by NVidia itself, but if they’re both 3070’s then they’ll still be comparable.

Alternatively, if the one that’s been benchmarked has weaker hardware than what you want to buy, but still passes the test, then the one you want to buy will probably work. Typically weaker hardware has lower model numbers (3060 < 3070, 3600X < 5700, etc).

You could just find the machine that best matches the one you might buy? A 3070 is a 3070, and a 5700X is a 5700X. As long as you pair the CPU and GPU with appropriate memory, you’re only going to see a few percentage points’ difference in framerates.

If you’re approaching your 30’s, that sounds more like ordinary degradation that comes with age. Maybe try finding some prescription computer glasses if you haven’t already? If I remember correctly, they’re different from reading glasses in that they have a focal distance of around 18”, which is good for a computer screen. They made a world of difference for my partner.

It depends on how large the monitor would be and how far away you’d sit. My setup has me sitting only a couple feet away, so a 25” 1440p is hard to improve upon for gaming. For me, it’s better to stick with lower res and get a couple more years of Ultra settings out of my card.

If you’re wanting something closer to 32” and several feet away, 4k will make a huge difference because you’ll get the same apparent clarity from much further away.

Another 4k use case is any at-home office work. If you regularly code or write on your gaming monitor, 4k IPS can help a lot with the readability of text. (Not a 4k VA, though. That’ll make text notably less readable.)

Yeah, Origin screwed up my cloud saves a couple times. They were two for two on it desyncing and nuking my data, so I‘ve left their cloud saving disabled for… damn I think six years now. And I’ve needed a cloud hosted save in Origin exactly 0 times since then, so no regrets there.

I also had my first Dark Souls 1 character nuked. I let my roommate sign into my desktop to test something real quick in the game, and that blew away the save file for whatever reason. Thankfully I hadn’t gotten particularly far, so it was fine.

32” seems a little large for a 16:9 1440p, and it’s a VA that isn’t curved. How far back will you be sitting from it? If you’re too close, you’ll be able to see the pixels; and the colors might be wonky at the edges of the screen. If you’re far enough away, it’ll probably be fine.

It’s worth mentioning that FNV’s gameplay is good. Just older.

We’ll need more info. Are there any kinds of games you’re particularly curious about? It’s kinda like asking what kind of food to start with, or how to get into movies. The range of possibilities is so wide, and people’s tastes and aptitudes vary so wildly, that it’s hard to give a good non-patronizing suggestion without having any sense of direction.

We can try to help, but as I’ve told someone else in a previous thread, your partner is going to be the person most capable of translating your interests into games you’d likely enjoy.

A spaceflight sim that isn’t a shallow grindfest, vaporware, or cookie clicker with walking.

Preorders overall are not good because they subsidize bad development practices. A tremendously large portion of a game’s lifetime revenue is day 1 of purchasing, after which point there’s significantly less money to be made from further development. I think this ultimately diminishes the quality of the final result because executive priorities can shift earlier in the game’s lifecycle.

It’s also a symptom of an extremely bloated industry. These studios and publishers have gotten too big for them to afford to build a product in a reasonable timeframe, so they have to resort to tactics like crunch, pre-orders, and week 1 overhauls to sustain themselves.

I don’t think they’re comparable styles of horror. Alien is about being powerless while you’re constantly being hunted. You can’t relax because you don’t know when the Alien is going to round the corner or when you can leave your safe space. Dead Space is about defending against a constant onslaught of gruesome enemies, in a gruesome setting, and with jump scares to render all locations unsafe. You can’t relax because you’re either in a firefight with too little ammo or probably about to be.

No, the keep-your-character mechanic sabotages a core characteristic of the genre; and the mechanic doesn’t benefit in any way from being paywalled.

You could have locked it behind an in-game challenge or a puzzle, or you could have buried it away subtly as a kind of “assassins creed style memory device”. But instead it’s just a microtransaction.

Its only purpose is to generate money, not provide a meaningful service or enable a unique experience. That’s predatory.

It was a so-called WoW-killer that was specifically meant to be more successful than WoW. I think they ended up breaking the then-record for the highest-budget game? Or at least they came close. Obviously it was not more successful than WoW and eventually went F2P as a way to boost microtransactions, since subscriptions weren't cutting it.

I was saying it as a bad thing because they spent so much money and had such high aspirations, but ultimately they failed because they were trying to compete with WoW by making WoW.

Nope. The third kind is the sort that got tired of it and built a little contraption to block each other’s view of the screen. It was the best piece of junk we ever made.

Hehehe it certainly feels like it.

Eh, it's basically a WoW-killer that didn't kill WoW, except it cost a bajillion dollars to produce. It's F2P now, so there's no reason not to try it if you have the time and storage space.

Start with the Sith Inquisitor or Sith Warrior. If I remember correctly, they're supposed to have the better stories. (Research that on your own first. I didn't make it particularly far, and it was a long time ago.)

From what I've heard, they managed to break the cycle finally. But I'm not aware of any improvements that I find worth the effort of upgrading yet. For once I have a stable system that doesn't have weird game crashes or stupid performance issues, and I'll be damned if I lose that in the hopes of better HDR support.

Usually KB+M, but something like a third of my games are better with a controller.

Hyper Light Drifter

Axiom Verge 1 & 2

Hollow Knight

Hotline Miami (maybe 2? 2 is slow on some machines)

Heat Signature

BPM (maybe?)

Dead Cells

FTL

Into the Breach

Hades

There are lots more, but I’m tired of listing.

There's not much that can be done? You can't get her to share your nostalgia because that's not how nostalgia works. If she was a gamer, she could learn to find the relationships between titles like the Zelda/Metroid influence in Dark Souls or the Half Life influence in Dead Space. But if she's a non-gamer, the best you can probably do is explain that those relationships exist, give examples, and see if you can find any older titles that are legitimately still fun today (Doom and Super Metroid are potential candidates).