14 Oct
2012
14 Oct
'12
11:45 a.m.
On 10/14/2012 04:34 PM, Jules Richardson wrote:
On 10/13/2012 04:21 PM, Pontus wrote:
Probably not, maybe that is a goal for some, but certainly not everyone.
Have you seen a modern 3D game? they push the
hardware pretty hard.
Certainly harder than a Core 2 Duo can handle. At least if you want the
bells and whistles.
I still can't get my head around that, though. Do today's gamers
forget that they're playing a game, then?
To me a modern 3D game still looks no more realistic than the 2D
platforms that were around in the 80s - in that it's still so
obviously not "real" that the bells and whistles are pointless - and
the level of entertainment extracted from pushing pixels around a
screen is no different, so I can't see the logic in spending spending
the kind of cash required to run a modern game when all it will ever
be is "just a game".
When DirectX 11 came along (I could be wrong) a feature called
"instancing" was introduced. It allowed the graphics hardware to reuse
geometry and thereby reduce memory usage on the graphics hardware. In
practice it allowed, for example, a strategy game to render hundreds if
not thousands of units. Now that is a real boost for that kind of game.
Now tell me, should we stop upgrade our hardware now that this limit has
been raised? Why should we draw such a line, simply because "it doesn't
look realistic enough anyway".
Also, shader effect has really brought graphics to a new level. Seeing
hot air refract light around a burning tank in World of Tanks adds to
the game.
Now we are too far off topic, so I'll stop here :)
/P