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Hardware Manufacturers Making PC Gaming Too Elite?
Thanks to AVault for its editorial discussing whether PC hardware/graphics card manufacturers are fragmenting PC gaming too much with constant hardware upgrades, thereby "making it a sport for only the serious few." The author argues: "With the impending release of Valve's Half-Life 2 and id's Doom 3, we're looking at the first required hardware upgrade in gaming history... the reported minimum requirements for these two heavy hitting titles include fully DirectX9 compatible video cards. This demand excludes all low-end and many medium-level computers out there today." He discusses the "partnership" of "hardware manufacturers turning over reference equipment that won't see the retail market for some time to software developers to use in the creation of their games", and queries the "expensive process of habitual upgrades" by suggesting: "If everybody turns to an Xbox or a PlayStation for entertainment, who's going to need new PC equipment?"
The minimum requirements for Doom 3 are, essentially:
* 1 GHz CPU
* 256 MB RAM
* GeForce 1 or equivalent
In other words, a medium-range (or even low-range, depending on definition) computer today. Just to set things straight.
Uhh... I call Shennanigans? Reading the Half-Life faq, you will find:
Q: What are the minimum hardware specifications?
The bare minimum you will need is a Pentium II 800Mhz processor, 128MB RAM and a DX6 class graphics card.
Michael C. Hollinger
Physics haven't changed since Quake? Where've you been? Part of the draw of next-gen games like Doom 3, HL2, and Unreal 2004 is the much improved physics engine. That stuff is pretty CPU-intensive. For that matter, even GPU-accelerated graphics still tax the CPU pretty heavily.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Yeah, this isn't about PC games in general, but Penny Arcade definitely addressed this.
[o]_O
Apparently the poster isn't familiar with Origin's early Ultima and Wing Commander games. It was widely assumed that the $50 games would routinely end up costing between $500-$1000 to play, hardware prices being what they were back then.
>The server wouldn't pause for you so before I could even load the dungeon my guy would die.
If its the end boss of ActII, then it was a problem with the coding.
Lots of people had that issue because you meet a boss in a small area. There was a patch that preloaded the small area before you went in which helped alot of people.
Is it a "bug" or a "performance" issue?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
They did though - I remember back in the day, a friend of mine got a laptop for school, and asked me to help her set it up. It came with like 22-24 floppies to install Windows 95, because her laptop didn't have a CD Drive. Took the better part of 2 hours, as I recall.