First post, by Kerr Avon
Out of interest, what PC games would you class as well optimised, as in programmed well to make the most out of the CPU/GFX/etc?
My first machine was a ZX Spectrum in 1983 with 48K of RAM (which included the video RAM), only supported two colours per 8 x 8 pixel square, no extra hardware to support sprites/scrolling/bitmap block copying/etc, and it's only sound was a beeper built into the case of the machine, that stopped the CPU dead whilst it was making sound. Yet this machine, like all of the successful 8-bits in those days, produced some amazing games and demos ('demos' as in (mostly non-user interactive) programs produced purely to show off the porgrammers skills at graphics and/or sound , as the programmers learned how to push the machines and do things that even the machines' designers didn't think possible. On the Spectrum, for example, we had games with sprites of all shapes and sizes, smooth scrolling, continuous in-game music, solid filled in polygon graphics in some real-time games, more than two colours in an 8 x 8 pixel block, and so on. And some of the games crammed so much into 48K it was unbelievable.
The difference between then and now is that back then the machines didn't change much, so
(a) the programmers could get used to the hardware's idiosyncrasies and take advantage of the undocumented features safe in the knowledge that the games they wrote only had to work on that hardware, and not on different hardware that wouldn't support those 'shortcuts', unlike with the PC, where the programmer's have to play safe and only use documented hardware/driver entry points and procedures, and
(b) back then they had to make the games work at playable speed on the existing machine, unlike the PC nowadays (well, at least the last sixteen years, for as long as I've owned a PC) where the games companies can take the attitude "It doesn't matter if it runs too slow on some of the target machines, they can lower the draw distance, resolution, etc, or go out and buy a new GFX card".
So I was wondering what PC games were notably well optimised, so that they make impressive use out of the hardware they require? Maybe it's impossible to answer, given the range of PC software and hardware, but are there any games or whatever, from any year, that stand out as really pushing the hardware?