While the launch of Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 marks the start of a fresh console generation, the PC can also ring in a new era of framerate and hi-res milestones with a slew of hardware lineups from Nvidia and AMD. Though there is a new generation of RTX cards with the new 4000 series, the 3000 series are still an excellent bang for your buck, offering high-fidelity graphics and smooth gameplay in most modern titles.
Whether you're looking to drink from the legendary chalice of 4K at 60fp, max out a 144hz display, or bask in the glorious beams of ray-tracing, here are twenty games to revisit once you've procured your pass to the world of next-gen PC gaming, and want to move beyond the limitations of consoles - even if those limitations are surprisingly low this time around.
Updated November 28, 2022, by Seth Parmer: Even with the new 4000 series from Nvidia out, huge discounts were made to the preceding 3000 series, making it the perfect opportunity to pick up and experience the capabilities of PC gaming without breaking the bank. The 3000 series is still more than enough in most cases to provide excellent visuals and smooth framerates on modern games, making this the best time to provide you with even more titles to give a shot on your new GPU!
20 Microsoft Flight Simulator
The 2020 release of Microsoft Flight Simulator allowed players to witness the peak of video game graphics for themselves. The visuals of this title are downright photorealistic and make the act of flying around the world extremely enjoyable.
Of course, the game itself is surprisingly relaxing, and an aficionado of planes and other forms of air travel will feel right at home with this title. The realistic gameplay and mind-blowing graphics make for one of the greatest simulation games of all time.
19 Shadow Of The Tomb Raider
The reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise was much welcomed by fans of the series, who were frustrated that the franchise was in limbo for a while. The latest title in the series might not have made waves in the video game landscape, but it's still a great title that any fan of the series should check out.
It helps that the graphics of Shadow of the Tomb Raider are in a class of their own. The RTX 3000 line of graphics cards will help this game shine even brighter from a visual perspective, making for a sublime video gaming experience.
18 Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition
The Metro series was a great FPS franchise that was absolutely dripping with atmosphere. The first two games were released to somewhat muted fanfare, but the third game in the series exploded in popularity, making their first jump into the wasteland a gorgeously terrifying one that they will remember for quite some time.
Now, with the release of Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, players can finally enjoy this brilliant title with the highest level of graphical fidelity. Running this game on an RTX 3000 will be nothing short of a visual treat and one that runs like a dream, capitalizing on uncapped framerates, which is a must for FPS titles.
17 Elden Ring
FromSoftware is known for its impeccable art direction, challenging boss encounters, and lore-rich worlds that make everything feel like it has a purpose. And unsurprisingly, Elden Ring has all that but amplified tenfold, making it FromSoft's most ambitious project yet, and one that they delivered on from the moment you begin your journey in the Lands Between to the bitter end.
Elden Ring is a stunning game with tons of areas that will make your jaw hit the floor in pure amazement at what they crafted. While Elden Ring looks phenomenal on current-gen consoles, experiencing it on a powerful PC places it in a league of its own. The draw distance, amount of foliage, and ultra-detailed textures make everything pop. If you can, you should experience Elden Ring on PC.
16 Resident Evil Village
The latest entry in the Resident Evil series was widely celebrated by many as another stellar title that contributed to the resurgence of this classic franchise. The hype for this game was through the roof, with its graphics being one of its many selling points.
So, it's only a given that any owner of an RTX 3000 graphic card who wants to push their system to the limit should play Resident Evil Village. It helps that the game is an absolute blast to play through, combining its action and horror into one enjoyable package. This may be the most immersive the series has ever been, and playing it on PC only furthers that notion.
15 Horizon Zero Dawn
Horizon Zero Dawn is considered by many to be one of the most brilliant and imaginative new IPs released in recent times. It was clear that Sony had uncovered an absolute gold mine in the form of a post-apocalyptic world overrun by mechanical dinosaurs.
Players were absolutely overjoyed at the fact that this game would be ported to the PC... but this port was poorly optimized. While patches have been released to improve the state of this title, only a robust system — preferably with an RTX 3000 graphic card — will be able to run this game with no issues.
14 Control
Remedy's powerhouse third-person shooter seemed to come from nowhere in 2019. Along with a chilling sci-fi story of psychological hijacking and government conspiracies, Control wowed both critics and the public with stunning visuals, courtesy of bombastic telekinetic superpowers and ray-tracing support.
The game was one of the first triple-A titles to support the new lighting technology. For early adopters of the RTX 2000 series, the result was an astounding spectacle of god rays, particle effects, and light reflections. A graphical tour de force with a complex story, Control is the perfect contender for showcasing your $500 - $1,500 ticket to the next-gen party.
13 Minecraft
There's an irony to buying a powerful, expensive graphics card at the turn of a generation to test it out on the most popular low-fidelity game of our time. But Mojang's recent updates to the standard FCK version of Minecraft warrant a re-download of the game.
Microsoft launched a beta version of Minecraft on Windows 10 with RTX compatibility, and despite the game's pixelated art style, it benefits significantly from ray-tracing. The flattened textures of those iconic bricks pop into tangible, breathing reality with small details like soft sun rays through a window or how your screen adjusts to the light as you step into the daylight. Minecraft has long held the potential for beauty, and ray-tracing adds to its practical, minimalist style.
12 Ghostwire: Tokyo
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Ghostwire: Tokyo is one of this year's most underrated titles and one of the most prettiest and drop-dead gorgeous games of the year that seemed to have gotten buried when the heavy hitters hit the scene. Nonetheless, playing this action-adventure game with light horror elements set in an abandoned Tokyo will be a visual treat unlike anything else you have experienced.
While it pops without it, Ghostwire: Tokyo also supports RTX ray tracing, making the empty streets of Tokyo come to life, with the street lights cascading off puddles left from the rain and red lanterns illuminating the sidewalks that contrast nicely with the cold and lonesome streets and buildings. You should give this a shot if you have a 3000 series card or greater. You won't regret it.
11 Ghostrunner
If you look up cyberpunk games that launched in 2020, you're likely to come across a couple of dozen articles about CD Projekt Red's controversial Cyberpunk 2077. You may also come across Ghostrunner, a speedrunner's dream of stage-based platforming action and neon-lined skyscrapers.
The game supports RTX ray tracing, but it's best played with a super high framerate, so earlier graphics cards might not be the most optimal way to experience this reflex-reliant cyber-samurai sim. The new Nvidia cards, however, let this game run smoothly with ray tracing turned on.
10 Battlefield 2042
Even with the rough launch acknowledged, Battlefield 2042 is a gorgeous first-person shooter that flexes the muscles of the Frostbite Engine's capabilities, making for an immersive experience that was unfortunately plagued by far too many bugs and questionable decisions. While it has gotten much better since its initial release, it still has plenty to go to live up to some of its more legendary predecessors.
This series has always been sort of a benchmark for players to test their rigs and push them to their limits, and Battlefield 2042 is no exception, even if it does need a bit more work. Still, despite that, 2042 is a fun, exhilarating, and rewarding experience, just with far fewer bells and whistles you'd expect from a new installment in the franchise.
9 Cyberpunk 2077
Despite its tumultuous launch, rife with controversy and often hilarious bugs, Cyberpunk 2077 can be an incredible spectacle of cityscapes and eye-popping special effects. Night City is full of neon lights, AR advertisements, skyscrapers, and all manner of technical fireworks on display. CD Projekt Red built this RPG shooter to shine, and ray-tracing allows it to do just that.
It's a long road until Cyberpunk 2077 looks even remotely like what the demos promised, but if you just want to see the glamor of urban dystopia in 4K with ray-tracing on, this game might be worth the trouble. If your last experience with this game was near its launch, we urge you to give Night City another crack, as it has been drastically improved.
8 Hitman 3
Despite its massive following, Hitman 3 somehow still feels very underrated and niche, which is a bit of a bummer considering how excellent the rebooted trilogy is and how much heart and soul of the devs you can see in everything you see and do in the game. The moment-to-moment gameplay of Hitman 3 is robust, freeing, and honestly quite terrifying at times.
Hitman 3 has varied and distinct sandboxes for you to play around with and supports RTX ray tracing on 3000 series GPUs, making them come to life even more than ever. The map Chongqing, for example, places you in a megacity in China on a rainy night, having the neon lights reflect off the puddles of water and saturated pavement. It's an unreal and breathtaking scenery, which happens on every stage in the game, especially with RTX enabled. If you've been sleeping on this game, resolve that issue ASAP.
7 Fortnite
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Folks often reduce all of games culture to a simple image of a single game. Fortnite has served as that reductive image more than once, but that does not detract from the game's quality. Epic's battle royale shooter is a monumental achievement in continuous design and upkeep, an ever-changing and evolving service game, a cultural phenomenon, and even an advertising platform.
All that said, Fortnite's appearance has changed little since its sharp rise in popularity. So when Epic announced that it would support RTX ray-tracing in the game, Fortnite became an essential game to try out on the new cards.
6 Death Stranding
With Hideo Kojima's departure from the Metal Gear Solid saga, the visionary's already explosive imagination seemed to be unleashed. With Death Stranding, players were treated to a beautiful wasteland of rocky, green hillsides and snowy mountaintops, all serving as a backdrop to a terrifying world of alien ghosts waiting to drag Norman Reedus into a pool of ink at a moment's notice. It's a game that stuns, as often with its realism and beauty as its bizarre mythos.
There's no ray-tracing support in Death Stranding, but it supports Nvidia's DLSS 2.0, allowing for 4K resolution at 60 frames per second on any 3000 series card. Also, if you got a free copy of the game from Nvidia's past promotions, you might already be set to revisit this visually stunning game.
5 Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is the direct sequel to the 2019 reboot of the series Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and is crafted with Infinity Ward's enhanced IW Engine, which brings the series to even greater heights, providing lifelike visuals, robust sound design, and much more. While Call of Duty may not be for everyone, there's no denying the graphical fidelity for MW2 is off the charts, especially when taking the campaign's Amsterdam level into consideration.
Furthermore, the map variety is on point in Modern Warfare 2, giving us various sights and sounds to take in during the fast-paced, unrelenting action you'd expect from the game's multiplayer modes. Unfortunately, MW2 lacks the RTX support its predecessor had, but its raw graphical fidelity more than makes up for it, making it stand out as one of the best-looking games to release this year.
4 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Before the hype monster 2077 reared its neon-emblazoned head, CD Projekt Red was best known for its watershed open-world RPG, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. In 2015, both critics and the community lauded this game as the new title to beat in multiple categories, including graphical fidelity. And, with the Next-Gen upgrade just around the corner, this game will look even better than ever, which is hard to believe.
Everything from the rays of sunlight scraping past mountaintops to the wind brushing through Geralt's long silver hair has specific sliders in the "graphics" options menu. Few owned a rig powerful enough to max out all of those sliders. Fortunately, any of Nvidia's 3000 series cards will get you the power to enjoy every ripple in Geralt's beautiful mane.
3 Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade
Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade is a special game to many for a variety of reasons, one being that it fully realizes the game that made an enormous and emotional impact on them when they were kids. It's nothing short of a miracle that Square Enix not only delivered an excellent title but one that pulled on the heartstrings of newcomers and those who played the original.
When Final Fantasy 7 Remake initially launched, it was exclusive to the PlayStation 4, and while it mostly looked tremendous, some areas and moments were clearly held back by the console's capabilities. Enter the PlayStation 5 upgrade and PC port of the game, which overhauled the visuals and propelled it from a very pretty game to an absolutely gorgeous one that should be played on PC.
2 Red Dead Redemption 2
Rockstar's most recent open-world, part-shooter, part-life-simulator sandbox, Red Dead Redemption 2, is also one of the current pinnacle games in photorealistic artistry. It is quite possibly the most visually detailed game ever made, with meticulous attention to things like a pocket watch's engravings or how a civilian might flee in pure terror upon witnessing a shootout.
Most impressive is the world – a majestic rural landscape unmarred by the imminent civilizing of the industrial revolution. There's no ray-tracing support in RDR2 or Red Dead Online, but this game's in-house lighting and overall graphical fidelity are still unmatched four years after its release. Throw in some incredible work from the modding community, and you've got a great-looking game to test-drive your new card.
1 Doom Eternal
Bethesda Softworks has made its hyper-violent shooter almost synonymous with the new line of Nvidia cards. For the hardware announcement, the company released a promotional video of Doom Eternal running on an RTX 3090, touting the game's use of ray-tracing and DLSS technologies.
Even without top-of-the-line gear, id's high-octane shooter is one of the prettiest to have come out in recent years. However, a high-framerate count with all the bells and whistles makes this successor to the illustrious Doom 2016 a beautiful hellscape.