so most anticipated games this year?

Nothing i am aware of being released this year that i really want to play.

although on a side note... I just got a 'Geforce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB' graphics card today (for $135 from Newegg) and it made a BIG difference vs my old Radeon 5670 512MB card. it's worth every penny! ; I only got a i3-2120 CPU which is not even a real quad core CPU even though Windows see's it as one due to the it's hyper-threading feature (it's actually dual core). basically that's THE best graphics card you can get for $150 or less right now and what's nice about it is that it's powered from the PCI-E slot so you don't need additional power connections to it. basically if your playing games @ 1080p, which is all my 24" monitor supports anyways, it's hard to complain.

i am mainly going to be playing games i wanted to play from not long ago but could not due to my GPU simply being too old. but now that's fixed. basically ill be playing Mafia III/GTA V for the first time and i might eventually try Hitman to. but outside of those handful of games or so there probably very little of any real worth.

i tested the new graphics card on Max Payne 3 a bit earlier and it made a big difference to that games performance as it's basically liquid smooth now as even without checking my actual frames per second it was obvious it was quite a bit improved and then once i checked it was basically liquid smooth(i.e. 60fps) on the section i briefly tested it on, which was clearly not smooth on my old graphics card, and with the new card it was not even maxing my CPU or GPU either as i checked with the MSI Afterburner program so you can see actual factual data on CPU/GPU usage along with frame rates. even on Mafia II, which is one of my favorite single player games, that got a solid boost to performance also as i can basically have everything MAX but with Nvidia PhysX disabled as that seems to be a performance killer for barely any visual improvement and i pretty much have a liquid smooth performance a large portion of the time as on the Mafia II benchmark (the one built into the game) it's pretty much liquid smooth with a dip in frame rate mainly when camera is zooming away from building with explosions going off and even that is still into the mid 40's or so but it's largely 60fps. also, with Mafia II that's the game i was forced to upgrade to the Radeon 5670 back in 2010 to be able to play it and while that card largely is easily good enough, especially once you turn off a anti-aliasing and put shadow quality to low, i still get a noticeable boost with the new graphics card.

so right now if anyone is looking for a solid graphics card for 1080p gaming with solid frame rates and does not want to spend a boatload of money then the Geforce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB is the card you want as it's the best card for $150 or less right now (i would avoid the 2GB version simply because you really need at least 4GB of RAM for that not to be a noticeable issue in the future especially if you plan on turning your graphics settings up to MAX or close enough). it's pretty much the sweet spot if you ask me right now. sure, getting faster cards will future proof yourself a bit better but with my current system it's not worth buying a faster graphics card because my CPU is generally the bottleneck now where as before it was clearly my GPU when i was on the Radeon 5670 card. so if i upgrade anything else... it will be to build a entirely new PC of which ill likely just use the 1050 Ti card in the new build (assuming it's still good by then) and put in the Radeon back into my current PC so then ill have two decent PC's as outside of my main computer right now my backup computer is ancient (i.e. from 2001) and even as a basic internet machine it sucks even though you can still do very basic stuff like browsing a website, although slowly.

in fact, i am going to go as far as to claim this is the best graphics card (the 1050 Ti) i had in quite a long time now given how solid the frame rates are on a card that does not break-the-bank and you can pretty much keep the graphics maxed as about the most ill have to do for now is turn off the luxury graphics stuff like anti-aliasing which, while helps a bit(gets rid of jagged edges on things), it's pretty minimal to the overall image and gives a decent performance boost when it's turned off. but ill leave it on if my frame rates are anywhere near 60fps.

p.s. graphics cards i owned in the past... 3DFX Voodoo 4MB(i still got this as it's basically the first good graphics card back in the day for Quake etc(in it's day those graphics where great). it's the first graphics card i bought.), 3DFX Voodoo 3 (i am pretty sure i had a 2000 and 3000 models at 16MB each at some point in the past back around the year 2000), Geforce 2 GTS 32MB(got in 2001), Geforce 3 ti200 64MB(i want to guess i had this around 2002-2003), Geforce 7900GT 256MB(got in 2006), Radeon 5670 512MB(bought this in 2010), and then current card Geforce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB(i just installed it today).

if your still reading. congrats on reading my novel

EDIT: i was just playing around with those Benchmark programs for your video card (which is graphics generated by the card in real time designed to really tax your graphics card)... that 'Superposition benchmark', which was released this year, looks quite great as you can really see graphics have advanced quite a bit vs not all that long ago and the '1050 ti' i got runs that pretty well on the '1080p medium' (even this still looks great) setting as even the '1080p high' setting runs is at a decent enough frame rate as it's only when i load up the '1080p extreme' setting is when it comes down to a crawl (i.e. 10fps or so for the average which is not playable and is damn near a interactive slide show). but basically that's a solid way to really tax your graphics card. they even have 4k and 8k options but you need more video ram for those as the 4k needs about 100MB more than my video card has (8k needs nearly 6.3GB of video ram) so i can't run it and not only that my monitor only supports 1080p anyways. those graphics look pretty great though

EDIT #2: i just installed GTA V a moment ago (July 8th) and... i have a feeling this game is going to stand out unlike pretty much all of the previous games. as if that intro (the intro shootout and then little drive once i get into the city which is all i have seen so far) is any general idea of the overall game it looks like we got a gem here as i can see why that game had a huge budget and sold more than 80million copies so far (it's amongst the highest selling video games in history). but some quick notes on performance... considering i pretty much have the graphics MAXED (technically i could go a little higher but it's basically performance killer settings like MSAA(which i just leave off) which has minimal visual improvement but puts quite a bit more load on the GPU) the game still runs pretty solid given what little i have tested so far you can see the GPU and CPU top out (so the bottleneck fluctuates between CPU/GPU) and given what MSI Afterburner shows i don't think i have dropped below 40 something fps and many times it's into the 50's and occasionally 60fps which is not bad at all considering my CPU is not even within the minimum requirements for the game as it's supposed to require a quad core etc and i only have a dual core (even though the game will see it as a quad core given the i3-2120's hyper-threading feature). but anyways... depending on how performance is as i progress through the game i might tweak the graphics options a bit to potentially sqeeze more performance out of it. but if i get anything close to what i got now for the vast majority of the game ill likely leave the graphics at their MAX (like i was saying, the graphics are pretty much maxed right now). that game install is huge compared to what i am used to as it takes up nearly 65.1GB of space on my SSD drive. a nice little bonus with that 1050 Ti card is it runs quite cool in general as it seems to stay around the mid-60's in temp (that's Celsius) and idles around 30c with a room temp of in the ball park of 80f.

EDIT #3: after playing through roughly 25% of GTA 5 (as of July 11th-12th)... i can say that the frame rate is typically in the ball park of 40-50fps give or take most of the time even though i have seen it get into the low 30's but i don't think it's went under 30fps+ so far that i have noticed and a fair portion of the time it's 60fps or close enough to that range. so if anyone is wondering whether you can run GTA 5 on a dual core CPU the answer is YES but you will likely need a CPU that has hyper-threading (which basically means the i3 line of CPU's or newer Intel CPU's that do) to do it since the game (and Windows) see's it as a quad core CPU even though it's not. that's solid considering i have had my CPU since May 2012 and 5 years is a lot of time in terms of technology advancement but yet it still works respectably for gaming when paired with a decent GPU. but anyways... since the frame rate seems to stay 30fps+ at all times (with most of the time being comfortably beyond 30fps) that i have noticed that means the game is definitely playable. as general guideline when it comes to FPS(frames per second) in games... you don't want to go much under 30fps otherwise the game will start to become unplayable and 60fps (or more) is perfect. so as you can see my general 40-50fps give or take figure most of the time means you will have a solid experience with the game and, like i was saying, i am running the game on MAX graphics @ 1080p although MSAA i got turned off which is just a performance killer anyways with negligible visual gains.