Mostly 1080p video, for cut-scenes that can't render in real time on consoles.
Uncompressed audio is used often too, so they don't have to pay royalties.
Uncompressed audio is a waste of space. They should use FLAC (lossless, very fast decoding, royality free) at least.
11 1 111 11 1 1 1 1 1 11 1 1 111 1 111 1 1 1 1 111
It doesn't really take that much to run Assasins Creed Unity. Here it is running with a GTX 660 quite comfortably and far better looking than consoles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFcX--70vN4 . Hell, the GTX 650 plays this at the console standard 30 fps and better looking to boot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O4nKl-F3g0 .
It is not really true that new games are starting to have crazy requirements. They probably write requirements so high because every "gamer" wants to play at "all maxed out" and ultra at 60 fps or more. By this standard Quake 1 would have required a 400 Mhz Pentium II at least. It is the opposite syndrome to the mid-90s syndrome when minimum requirements meant "will play at 320x200 at 8 fps". Hell, most modern games run far better on an old Pentium 4 + a GT 210 videocard than Quake did on 486/66.
This is what "minimum requirements" played like in the mid-90s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMdVCIdbXb4 .
I love looking at the min req's for new games on Steam.
Its like they don't even try to test them at the low end, just make a guess, thats far off and much higher then needed.
And yea they could use Flac, and frankly I'm fine with compressed OGG's, yet few games use either.
Not to mention they could go back to midi, and games could go back to sounding more unique again, if they don't need a voice track in a song.
GOG is even more notorious for this. OK, DosBox takes resources, but I've run GoG games on a real DOS Pentium 133 Mhz system (without using the built in Dosbox, it is actually not mandatory to use it, it's there just for convenience with modern systems) and they ran perfectly well while the requirements state a 1.5 Ghz CPU. This is even more unacceptable for old Windows games that usually only have something like a resolution tweak added in (with capability of lowering the resultion however). To add insult to injury these "requirements" all tend to be the same copypasted "generic low-end modernish PC" kind of deal.
AFAIK MotoGP 14 "requires" a GTX 680. O R'ly? My GTX 660 runs it at 60-90 fps full detail. It seems companies are just desperate because silicon is nearing its limit,CPU development mostly means quieter and more ecological chips instead of any meaningful performance increase and someone wants people to buy new hardware.
wrote:I love looking at the min req's for new games on Steam.
Its like they don't even try to test them at the low end, just make a guess, thats far off and much higher then needed.
Exactly. I was super worried that Half Life wouldn't run on my lowly Pentium G840, since the minimum requirements state a 2,8GHz dual-core and a Geforce 8600/9600GT or AMD HD2600 GPU and I only had the Pentium's IGP. Turns out it runs with everything maxed out at 1920x1080 with vsync enabled and it's still smooth.
Super worried? Really? Half Life, the 1998 game from back when even SGI workstations didn't use dual-core and no CPU went beyond 500 Mhz? Or Half Life 2 from the Athlon XP/Pentium 4 singlecore era when Geforce 8600 didn't exist ?
wrote:Super worried? Really? Half Life, the 1998 game from back when even SGI workstations didn't use dual-core and no CPU went beyond 500 Mhz? Or Half Life 2 from the Athlon XP/Pentium 4 singlecore era when Geforce 8600 didn't exist ?
Haha. Yeah not sure what he was thinking. There's alot of "smaller" nuances with system requirements too lately. Don't Starve for example claims to require a 5450 with 256MB Ram minimum and DirectX 9.0c. I ran it completely fine though on an X800 with 128MB, which only supports 9.0b.
wrote:Super worried? Really? Half Life, the 1998 game from back when even SGI workstations didn't use dual-core and no CPU went beyond 500 Mhz? Or Half Life 2 from the Athlon XP/Pentium 4 singlecore era when Geforce 8600 didn't exist ?
I know what type of hardware existed when Half-Life was released 😜 However, I'm talking about the Linux version, which was a big unknown. That combined with only a Pentium G840 and relying only on the IGP got me worried, because it would be money down the drain if it didn't run well. If you look at the system requirements for the Linux and OSX versions of that game on Steam it lists crazy requirements, so I assumed it wasn't as optimized as the Windows version. Turns out it's just the same lazy attitude of listing much higher system requirements than what is really necessary as some other members mentioned.
A reason for that is technical support, and the fact Linux distro lifecycles are so short there's so much fragmentation for hardware support so they really can only care for the latest that have working Linux drivers for the Steam supported kernels/distros
yeah, makes no sense when TF2 on Linux requires DX11-gen hardware because of some minor recent GL extensions, and on Windows it still supports DX8 hardware
Curiously this also affects FOSS gamedev, having high requirements to compensate for the lack of optimization or even art ability (even a 2D game would get devved with OpenGL3 in SDL2), and then when it comes time for people wanting a port to like a mobile or some sort of Pi, it's always 'hopelessly impossible'.
wrote:TF2 on Linux requires DX11-gen hardware because of some minor recent GL extensions
Where did you get that from? That was the first game I tried on my Pentium G840 when the Steam client became available for linux (in 2012) and, although a bit slow, it did run. Back then Mesa only provided OpenGL 2.1 for my hardware, and the requirements only say "OpenGL 2.1", so that would be something like DX9.
Quake II - 1997
Min req = Pentium 90 or AMD K6-III with 3Dnow patch, video card
Recommended Req = Pentium 133 or AMD Athlon, accelerated video card
Heavily favors Intel CPUs, even more so in software mode.
http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/2mx … g_far_cry_4_on/
This is ridiculous, folks. Companies have stepped up to block games from running on processors perfectly capable of running them (as proven by the hack). This is probably because they see that people are perfectly happy with their PCs and want to artificially make another "upgrade cycle".
Fuck upgrades. I'm not upgrading until realtime raytracing or good AI is available. Of course Youtube will probably force me when they switch to some codec that will require a hexacore just for 360p playback.
The worst thing? The most probable cause is a stupid unfixed bug that causes the game to overtax the third thread without checking if there IS any third thread. I wanted to buy Far Cry 4 but now I'm thinking twice, even through I have an i7, I will not support poor programming and developers.
wrote:Quake II - 1997 […]
Quake II - 1997
Min req = Pentium 90 or AMD K6-III with 3Dnow patch, video card
Recommended Req = Pentium 133 or AMD Athlon, accelerated video cardHeavily favors Intel CPUs, even more so in software mode.
Where did you get these specs?
K6-III was released in February 1999, Athlon in August 1999. Those can't be the specs from the first release of Quake II.
And I'd consider Quake II on a plain K6 (or K6-2 without 3DNow! patch) totally playable. Sure it is slower than a Pentium at the same clock, but it shouldn't be a problem to match a Pentium 133.
And even a K6-2 with the 3DNow! patch is fine for Quake 2.
See eg.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd,68-3.html
Fuck upgrades.
More like F game developers that don't bother to optimize their software anymore (thanks to the availability of super high end components)
And F any programmer that blocks their software from running because of detected hardware
wrote:Quake II - 1997
Min req = Pentium 90 or AMD K6-III with 3Dnow patch, video card
Recommended Req = Pentium 133 or AMD Athlon, accelerated video card
I have the original Quake II in a big box and it only says "Pentium 90MHz (133MHz recommended)".
Those specs for Quake II are bogus. It runs perfectly fine on a K6, on a K6-ii 400 Mhz with 3DNow at 56.9 fps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_5Qk2VXVAQ, and that's in a demo, in normal gameplay probably even higher.
It's strange to think that some people appear to believe that a K6-III is on a performance level with a Pentium classic. I mean, in ALU heavy tasks, a K6 MMX could actually outperform a Pentium MMX clock for clock, although the Pentium MMX had a much better FPU. This was one of the things that AMD used to market the K6 with back in the days. They kept arguing that most every-day tasks relied more on ALU than on FPU, and showed their own (probably hand-picked and heavily biased) collection of benchmarks showing the K6 performing favorably compared to a Pentium MMX. The K6-2 continued that trend. It was fast in ALU dependent benchmarks, slower in FPU benchmarks. Highly 3DNow! optimized benchmarks and games however, would run at speeds similar to a Pentium II at similar clock speeds.
I used to have K6 MMX 200MHz back in the days, that I ran on an Asus TX97-X motherboard at 75MHz bus speed, and hence 225MHz CPU clock. This combined with 48MB SDRAM and a Matrox Mystique 220, was fine for running Quake 2 at 640x480. Sure, the fps probably wasn't smooth by todays standards, but back then, it was playable enough for me. The CPU was very noticeably faster than my previous Pentium 120MHz.
System requirements for Quake II was clearly not "K6-III with 3DNow patch", as that would put it in near Pentium III territory.
WinXP : PIII 1.4GHz, 512MB RAM, 73GB SCSI HDD, Matrox Parhelia, SB Audigy 2.
Win98se : K6-3+ 500MHz, 256MB RAM, 80GB HDD, Matrox Millennium G400 MAX, Voodoo 2, SW1000XG.
DOS6.22 : Intel DX4, 64MB RAM, 1.6GB HDD, Diamond Stealth64 DRAM, GUS 1MB, SB16.
wrote:It's strange to think that some people appear to believe that a K6-III is on a performance level with a Pentium classic. I mean, in ALU heavy tasks, a K6 MMX could actually outperform a Pentium MMX clock for clock, although the Pentium MMX had a much better FPU.
I don't think that they are on the same performance level at the same clock for FPU heavy tasks. But a Pentium 133 or even the fastest official model Pentium MMX 233 can be matched by a K6/-2/-3 running at a sufficiently high clock rate.
AMD was actually right, most users are NOT gamers so you cannot judge a CPU by Quake benchmarks. The first cacheless Celeron might have been O.K for gaming but was still absolutely awful for any productive use (talking about Covington here, not the great 300A). Besides, the only FPU heavy game that comes to my mind was Quake, because Mechwarrior II, Descent II, Earthsiege etc. all were pretty much ALU-only and run ok on a 486. Quake I runs at 27 fps on a good AMD K5 vs Pentium 133 at 30 fps so even with the ancient K5 the difference wasn't dramatic. By the time games more graphically intensive than Quake I came into play, 3D acceleration started to make FPU heavy 3D less relevant so... There's a reason why the K6 was lauded as the golden price/performance point.
