Localizing High-End Games for Low-End Machines

CowboyRobot writes "Intel engineer Dean Macri has an article at ACM Queue listing the challenges in designing PC games that will run on very different processors. PCs vary widely in their performance, and if game developers design only for the high-end, they limit their market. The article lists specific tips on how to guarantee that even old slow machine can run new games, such as 'the number of triangles used to create the trunks and branches could vary based on the available processor and graphics hardware performance', 'replace the clothing on characters in a game with actual geometry that separates the clothes from the underlying character model', and for simulating ocean waves, having low-end systems rely on basic sine waves while higher-end machines use more sophisticated methods."