We played roughly five minutes of every game on our list, and to avoid Internet connectivity issues, we stuck to single-player. The only features we disabled were VSync-so we wouldn’t be bottlenecked by our monitor’s 60Hz refresh rate-and supersampling-to keep all games on the same resolution playing field.

The point of this story is to really push these games to test the ultimate limits of our current high-end PC. This isn’t at all an optimization guide where we’re trying to find an effective balance between performance and fidelity, however. Yes, this includes fully pushing anti-aliasing, which admittedly doesn’t make much sense at 4K where the high resolution handles much of the aliasing issues for you. To really push the games to their absolute limits, we ran every single game at 4K (3840x2160) with maximum settings. The lower the average frame rate, the higher the ranking in our list. We ranked all of the games based on their average frame rates. We used built-in benchmarks whenever they were available and frame-rate capturing tool Fraps when they weren’t. We also tested and ranked them by how much they made our high-end PC struggle. Want to know which PC games will push high-end rigs to their limits? We’ve rounded up 18 of the most graphically demanding PC games we could get our hands on (This story has been updated with Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds).

Latest top pc games 2015