3. Crysis
There have always been games that pushed PC gaming to its limits and forced fans everywhere to upgrade their hardware in order to keep up. Of them, none is perhaps more significant than Crysis. Released in 2007, Crysis was most certainly the graphical benchmark of its time. Its large open-world rarely needed time to load, despite the sheer amounts of lighting and particle effects on display feeling impossible. Never before had a game of such incredible visual innovation allowed players the same freedom of gameplay as Crysis did. What is most impressive about Crysis, though, is how the game holds up to this day. Crysis is still used to performance test modern graphic cards and with a couple of modifications is still in the running for the best looking game available. Crysis demanded that players have the very best gaming computer available if they wanted to run the game and the result of that ambition is a game that many others are still chasing to this day.