Today's Hardware on Tomorrow's Games

GweeDo writes: "Anandtech has gotten their hands on a recent build of the Unreal Engine to give today's hardware (Geforce 3 ti's and upper-class Radeons) a run for the money to see how they will do on tomorrows games. The article is here and quite a good read ..."

Comments

Fast, Hard-core 3D GFX != Good game

[Masem]

I've got a very bad feeling that the gaming industry is heading towards a black hole of development. Sure, the GF3 and other graphics boards are truely amazing in terms of HW, with all the new pluggable rendering devices, hardware T&L, etc. And I'm certainly not going to complain about the graphics in a game that take advantage of such graphics.

However, you can put all the greatest graphics in the world, but if you don't add something interesting in terms of the game itself (plot, gameplay (both single and multiplayer), etc), then all you've got is a pretty looking game that no one is going to buy. And too many of today's games are just that; there hasn't been anything 'different' in the FPS arena since Half-Life, Deus Ex and No One Lives Forever, Diablo 2 in terms of RPGs, and so forth. There's only two interesting areas of games that I've seem them take great steps above their predecesors as to make them different; first is the X4/real-time strategy games such as Black & White and the recent Dune title, which are now combining good 3d engines with good gameplay (though Myth would be the first real entry in this catagory). The other is the simulation area: recent entries of games like Startopia combine the graphics and a rather detailed but playable ruleset to make a good game.

So while the hardware makers keep pushing out better cards capable of running all the graphics effects today, the game makers seem to be too tied up in taking advantage of that and not of improving the underlying game itself. I'm hoping that we hit a plateau in the graphics card ability, as once that is hit, then the game makers will turn back to the game since they can no longer optimize the pretty-ness of the game itself.

Re:Fast, Hard-core 3D GFX != Good game

[NutscrapeSucks]

I'm hoping that we hit a plateau in the graphics card ability, as once that is hit, then the game makers will turn back to the game since they can no longer optimize the pretty-ness of the game itself.

There's also the real problem that game companies are outpacing the market penetration for top end hardware. While you can do wonderful things with a GeForce 4 or whatever, it's a real question if there will be enough GF4 users to profitably sell games to.

Gone are the days when you could slap Doom or Quake on pretty much any old computer in your office and have a network shootemup. Requiring recent 3D hardware eliminates the vast majority of PCs in the real world.

Another example -- it sounds like Unreal Tournament greatly outsold Quake III. UT can be played unaccelerated (don't laugh, I know people who do this and have fun), and it played fine on the shitty i810 PC I had at an old job. QIII barely played on the hardware that was out at the time of it's release (PII, TNT2, for example). Half-Life is another game friendly to low-end boxes. Not to mention SimCity, RR Tycoon, Sims, and other big sellers that didn't require much hardware-wise.

Not to mention that the average user probably finds the whole world of 3D card to be a mess of confusing brandnames, limited retail outlets, driver woes, hardware upgrades, and so on. It starts to become real work for something that's supposed to be fun.

I guess I'm being presumptuous in telling game companies how to run their businesses. Just that from what I've heard, it sounds like the PC game sales are in the dumps, and only half the problem is unoriginal game concepts. Maybe they should consider quitting chasing the l33t gamer crowd or techies like myself that find it fun to keep up with the gear, and get back to the broader market of people who just want to blow off some steam after work.

Re:Fast, Hard-core 3D GFX != Good game

[uebernewby]

game makers will continue to put out good games. Top of my head, Black and White

Hmm... I'd say you just named the one title most of my friends (and myself) consider to be a prime example of "looks good but sucks". No one I know played it for more than a few hours, because in the end it turned out to be Populous With Extras That Take Away The Fun. I'm really glad I was smart enough to try the warez version instead of coughing up the full USD 50 for it like most of my buddies.

Re:Fast, Hard-core 3D GFX != Good game

[ergo98]

Doom blew everyone away with its revolutionary 3D engine, but the game was pointless. Fun, but pointless, and got old fast

Nice job with revisionist history there. The reality, of course, is that for the overwhelming majority of people Doom was extremely engrossing (the classic is jumping out of your seat when one of those red bull things appeared) and was directly responsible for billions of hours of slack time. Duke Nukem 3D was very similar in that it's a simple concept, but I played that game multiplayer for hours upon hours upon hours.

including everything id has done since

Now this is just dumb. While I haven't ever really gotten into Q3, Q2 gave me thousands of fun hours, especially with the mods. The Quake series, and this is something that many pundits fail to realize, is more of a sport than a RPG : You excel and because exemplary in it just like you would perfecting the perfect dive or running the 10s 100m, and it's the same sort of quest for perfection that draws people to excel. When I see complaints about the Quake series I often wonder if these people expect some RPGing to break out in the middle of the Olympics : Maybe the downhill skiers can have a pseudo hill economy. I mean otherwise they're just falling with gravity right?

The whole point of this? Don't discount a game just because it's not a genre that you prefer, and don't presume that if an element works in one game (i.e realism, or RPG factors, etc.) that therefore it should be in all games.

Re:Like Microsoft...

[biglig2]

Read the article again - no-one is suggestig you upgrade, in fact almost the reverse. They talk about how all the early adopters of GeForce 2's were, in a sense, burned, because nothing has yet come out that needs that power, and so they could have waited until now (or even later) and picked them up cheap.

So, the point of the articel is to look at how a pre-pre-release game engine works on the different cards. They're saying, a year from now when games are using this kind of engine, what are todays cards going to be like?

Which is surely a Good Thing, since if you are buying a gaming card today you know it'll run everything out now damn fast, it just will it run Quake 6 or UT 5 or whatever. And, more usefully, if you don't want to pay big bucks for the latest and greatest how low down the tree can you safely go? For example, it's clear from this that the various GeForce 2MX variants are not a great buy for futureproofing, and that even the lowest spec GeForce 3 is a big advance.

Re:Like Microsoft...

[jilles]

NVidia and ATI would very much like us to buy their video cards in order to be able to run next years games. If you read this review well you cannot come to another conclusion that anybody who bought a gforce 3 card last year has been wasting money since until next year there won't be any games taking advantage of it. By then, the hardware required to run these games will be much cheaper and the same money wasted on a geforce 3 last year will buy you much more performance when you will actually be able to use it.

My two year old pc has a voodoo 3 3000 which at the time was a relatively cheap card. It runs wolfenstein 3d just fine (ok barely but it's playable) so I consider it to be a good investment. If in a year or so Unreal II is released I'll upgrade my pc to be able to run it and invest some money in a good enough video card (I'll settle for full featured unreal 2@1024x768@35fps) and I'll be able to run any game to be released until 2004/2005.

Re:Like Microsoft...

[jilles]

Whether you own a geforce 2 or 3 is pretty much irrelevant for most games I know. My voodoo 3 is pretty crappy by todays standards but it still plays wolfenstein, quake 1,2,3, unreal (tournament) and many more games just fine. The driver issues are annoying but can be resolved with a little technical knowhow.

The nice thing about voodoo cards is that most game developers test against it (even though 3dfx no longer exists). My previous pc had an nvidia riva128 which was a fantastic card that was unfortunately poorly supported by most games (unreal 1 for instance ran much better on the inferior voodoo 1). These days I'd definately want a low end nvidia card since they are market leader.

A geforce 3 was overkill a year ago and it still is for most games today. Of course somebody who just wants the best doesn't care about the price of a video card and will buy a geforce ti 500 anyway. However I would recommend against buying one to be prepared for future games because when those games arrive the required hardware will be much cheaper and your ti 500 will be old news anyway.

Dropping a high end card in an old box is nuts since most games that actually require such a card also require high end cpus. Of course, if you insist on running quake 3@1600x1200@200fps you can't have enough hardware but most people would be more than happy running it at 1024x768 with around 40-50fps. Last years budget cards provide that kind of performance for most games on the market today.

I've never considered upgrading a PC a good alternative since invariably I end up replacing most components in the box to get what I want and buying a new box gives me much better performance at just a slightly higher price. The PC I currently have (PIII500, 512 MB and said voodoo 3 card) runs everything I need to run with an acceptable performance level. I have considered upgrading it a few times but its just not worth my money to get a few more fps.