Games these days have some of the most beautiful worlds to explore, and they’re also increasingly more graphics intensive. The two don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand though. You can have a graphically intensive game that looks good, but wouldn’t necessarily be considered a title that has a beautiful world for the player to roam around in. On the reverse, games with gorgeous visuals may not be as demanding on hardware.
Crucial, which makes RAM and storage devices, recently put together lists of games that are most popular for game photography and the most demanding on their hardware due to photorealistic graphics. If you play a lot of different games, you likely won’t be surprised by some of the games on these lists. Especially if you spend any amount of time on social media sites or apps like Instagram.
Based on Crucial’s findings, these were some of the most popular games for photography. Thanks to stunning vistas, sprawling landscapes, and some of the best photo modes any game has to offer.
The most beautiful games for photography
It goes without saying that Ghost of Tsushima is on this list. Which you might have guessed based on the image above. And it’s earned its spot. The islands of Tsushima and Iki have some of the most gorgeous locations for in-game photography of any modern game. And that’s only improved by the game’s excellent photo mode. However, it’s far from the only game with a photo mode or some excellent backdrops. Other notable games include Red Dead Redemption 2, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Cyberpunk 2077, Gran Turismo 7 and more. You can view the full list of games in the screenshot below.
Which factors in things like total number of Instagram posts, the number of photography posts, and the percentage of posts that were game photography. Of course, graphically intensive games are a different story.
Games that are extremely graphically intensive
As mentioned above, the most beautiful games aren’t necessarily the most graphics intensive. Worth noting of course is that some of the games in the list above aren’t the most graphics intensive because they’re PS4/PS5 titles. And you can’t really adjust the graphics much.
For PC games though, many games offer a wide variety of graphics settings. And tuning them to output some insanely good visuals can require a really powerful rig. Crucial ranked these games based on titles are known for being challenging to run. Then organized them based on their recommended PC requirements. Games like A Plague Tale: Requiem have a recommended spec of 16GB of RAM and at least an RTX 3070 or Radeon RX 6800 GPU. Check out the full list below to see some of the most graphics intensive games based on spec requirements.
