whats ppls opinion on the level of hardware you need now to run eveything on full detail
I was reading fp comment on moorowind sucking ass from a game engine point of veiw but i was playing around with sof2 and after a hour of playing it had used 573 megs of ram
Is this a glimpse of the future or just sloppy coding etc
i.e game proggrammers to lazy to write good code and just bloating the shit out of everything
Comments please
games now
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FlyingPenguin
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SOF2 doesn't seem to be much of a resource hog in my experience, and runs very well on midrange systems.
However all Quake3 engines will use a certain percentage of available ram. I have a display that shows me the amount of physical ram in use and while Quake3 Urban Terror is running it will increase until about 75% of it is used - whether it's on my 512Mb system or my 256Mb system.
The Quake3 engine was one of the first game engines that, while it didn't REQUIRE more than 128Mb, it definately ran better with more than 128Mb available (this was on 98 system - needless to say Win2K and XP are bigger memory hogs).
Morrowind does seem to be a major performance hog, but a lot of that was resolved by updated video drivers from NVidia - I have no idea how well it runs on Radeons.
People just don't realize WHY video drivers are updated: it's often to tweak them for new game. This is why Voodoo5 owners were left hanging after 3Dfx folded - doesn't matter how good the card is, if there's no driver support to tweak it to new games performance will suffer.
I play on a P3-1000 system with a GF3 Ti-200. I mostly play 1st person shooters, but I've tried a bunch of new games at a LAN party recently: GTA3, SOF2, JK2, Dungeon Siege alll run fine on this system at resolutions up to 1024x768, and SOF even plays pretty well at 1154x864. They also play pretty well on my LAN party system (Athlon 900 w/GF2 GTS) at 800x600.
I truly believe that you no longer need a high end system for gaming. Games are being designed to scale themselves to the system they are running on (Unreal was one of the very first games to do this - the first time you run it, it configures itself to your hardware, all games do that now).
Just about any mid-range system will run any new game just fine - at least at lower resultions. Those who crave gaming at very high resolutions are the ones that need to spend the big bucks.
Frankly, all first person shooters look just fine to me at 1024x768 and I don't really feel any big compelling need to go any higher.
I think, overall, game programmers are the ones writing the most efficient code. Game programmers need to eck every bit of performance out of their game engines, and there's not a whole lot of bloat in a game like SOF2 for instance.
Granted, some games are poorly coded or suffer from lack-luster engines. An example was Deus Ex - GREAT game, great atmosphere, great story, great everything EXCEPT the 3D engine sucked eggs anytime you had any large open spaces around you - even with high-end hardware. I'd be zooming along and open a door leading to a large room or outdoors and suddenly the fps would drop from 80 to 10.
Blood2 was another poor performer (in that case the game sucked as much as the engine) which always puzzled me because it used the same game engine as Shogo and that game ran GREAT (one of my all time favorite FPS games).
However all Quake3 engines will use a certain percentage of available ram. I have a display that shows me the amount of physical ram in use and while Quake3 Urban Terror is running it will increase until about 75% of it is used - whether it's on my 512Mb system or my 256Mb system.
The Quake3 engine was one of the first game engines that, while it didn't REQUIRE more than 128Mb, it definately ran better with more than 128Mb available (this was on 98 system - needless to say Win2K and XP are bigger memory hogs).
Morrowind does seem to be a major performance hog, but a lot of that was resolved by updated video drivers from NVidia - I have no idea how well it runs on Radeons.
People just don't realize WHY video drivers are updated: it's often to tweak them for new game. This is why Voodoo5 owners were left hanging after 3Dfx folded - doesn't matter how good the card is, if there's no driver support to tweak it to new games performance will suffer.
I play on a P3-1000 system with a GF3 Ti-200. I mostly play 1st person shooters, but I've tried a bunch of new games at a LAN party recently: GTA3, SOF2, JK2, Dungeon Siege alll run fine on this system at resolutions up to 1024x768, and SOF even plays pretty well at 1154x864. They also play pretty well on my LAN party system (Athlon 900 w/GF2 GTS) at 800x600.
I truly believe that you no longer need a high end system for gaming. Games are being designed to scale themselves to the system they are running on (Unreal was one of the very first games to do this - the first time you run it, it configures itself to your hardware, all games do that now).
Just about any mid-range system will run any new game just fine - at least at lower resultions. Those who crave gaming at very high resolutions are the ones that need to spend the big bucks.
Frankly, all first person shooters look just fine to me at 1024x768 and I don't really feel any big compelling need to go any higher.
I think, overall, game programmers are the ones writing the most efficient code. Game programmers need to eck every bit of performance out of their game engines, and there's not a whole lot of bloat in a game like SOF2 for instance.
Granted, some games are poorly coded or suffer from lack-luster engines. An example was Deus Ex - GREAT game, great atmosphere, great story, great everything EXCEPT the 3D engine sucked eggs anytime you had any large open spaces around you - even with high-end hardware. I'd be zooming along and open a door leading to a large room or outdoors and suddenly the fps would drop from 80 to 10.
Blood2 was another poor performer (in that case the game sucked as much as the engine) which always puzzled me because it used the same game engine as Shogo and that game ran GREAT (one of my all time favorite FPS games).
Christians warn us about the anti-christ for 2,000 years, and when he shows up, they buy a bible from him.
