I like the TNT2 and played games using that card for years without 'knowing' that they 'should' be played with a newer card at the detail & resolution that i selected

most systems are more capable than we credit them for

often people's perception are skewed by seeing benchmarks and so on, if we discover afterwards that the average fps was around 30 with a low of 15 and it could have been 60 if we used this other card then we want 'better', but in actuality - we enjoyed playing the game anyway, and is the experience going to really be *that* much better after the new card is installed

it's only when games choke frequently on a card or simply cannot display things (due to lack of features) that it become clearly inadequate

that P3 too is more than powerful enough for the game 😀

Hmmm, I have played many games on my PS3 and PS4 .... 30fps hasn't killed me yet!

When I play games on my PS2, sometimes I forget this black box has a measly 297Mhz risc chip, 4mb of vram and an extremely rudimentary graphics chip.

subhuman@xgtx wrote on 2021-09-27, 11:02:

When I play games on my PS2, sometimes I forget this black box has a measly 297Mhz risc chip, 4mb of vram and an extremely rudimentary graphics chip.

Oh yes. Because any given console has fixed specs and hardware, any games developer with enough skill, time, and the will to push the hardware can do amazing things on that console. Such as the original XBox, which did an amazing job of running very good ports of demanding (for the time) PC games such as Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Serious Sam, and Painkiller.

Nice sarcasm, but does it take any of the merit away to compare a 300$ console from early 2000 to a 2500$ pc from 2001 that kept getting outgunned year after year?

Kerr Avon wrote on 2021-09-27, 14:10:

Oh yes. Because any given console has fixed specs and hardware, any games developer with enough skill, time, and the will to push the hardware can do amazing things on that console. Such as the original XBox, which did an amazing job of running very good ports of demanding (for the time) PC games such as Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Serious Sam, and Painkiller.

there's many demanding PS2 games that wouldn't fly on PCs for years until the era of shaders. The way PS2's video memory worked wasn't like PC's, so a lot of developers could pull off buffer effects for free effectively without needing to go through a pass in a pixel shader or whatnot, and they were already doing plenty of this (along with general new highs in polygon counts at a full framerate) in 2000.

Xbox was literally an reorganized locked-down x86 PC in console form, so ports of PC games aren't as much of a feat. Even "lazy" Windows CE ports on Dreamcast were more technically involved. also thank xbox for how deus ex 2 turned out 🤣

leileilol wrote on 2021-09-28, 01:24:

Kerr Avon wrote on 2021-09-27, 14:10:

Oh yes. Because any given console has fixed specs and hardware, any games developer with enough skill, time, and the will to push the hardware can do amazing things on that console. Such as the original XBox, which did an amazing job of running very good ports of demanding (for the time) PC games such as Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Serious Sam, and Painkiller.

there's many demanding PS2 games that wouldn't fly on PCs for years until the era of shaders. The way PS2's video memory worked wasn't like PC's, so a lot of developers could pull off buffer effects for free effectively without needing to go through a pass in a pixel shader or whatnot, and they were already doing plenty of this (along with general new highs in polygon counts at a full framerate) in 2000.

the PS2 always impressed me, games like GT4 and GTA-SA and a bunch of others

Xbox was literally an reorganized locked-down x86 PC in console form, so ports of PC games aren't as much of a feat. Even "lazy" Windows CE ports on Dreamcast were more technically involved.
also thank xbox for how deus ex 2 turned out 🤣

so that's why it took hours upon hours to back and forth between rival coffee shops!

subhuman@xgtx wrote on 2021-09-27, 16:39:

Nice sarcasm, but does it take any of the merit away to compare a 300$ console from early 2000 to a 2500$ pc from 2001 that kept getting outgunned year after year?

Er, if you mean me, I wasn't being sarcastic. I meant what I said, I was just speaking about the advantage gained from a console's hardware being pretty much 1:1 across the entire release of that console (at least performance and programming-wise). Sorry if I wasn't clear, mate.

leileilol wrote on 2021-09-28, 01:24:

...also thank xbox for how deus ex 2 turned out 🤣

To be fair, it wasn't due to any XBox limitations that Deus Ex: Invisible War did away with experience points, did away with you having to upgrade your weapons skills, added universal Ammo (who thought that this would be a good idea?), had such an intrusive and unpopular HUD system, had such a largely boring story (I mean how is is possible to make a story that starts with a terrorist attack, includes the player getting involved with various factions and gaining superhuman abilities, and ends with a world altering event, and yet that story is BORING? I wouldn't have thought it was possible), has a completely life-less seeming world, bodies/corpses don't contain objects, and basically this sequel lacks almost everything that made the first game so iconic and brilliant?

Yes, the *tiny* locations in the game were no doubt caused by the XBox's relatively tine amount of RAM (the XBox had 64MB of RAM, that had to house everything, including system memory and GFX memory), but the game engine itself was terrible. It's only two advantages over the first game's engine, that I can see, are better graphics and real-time shadows. Alright, maybe particle effects and stuff like that. But the engine didn't even allow swimming, the people animated like they were mannequins, the colour palette was very limited, and (to repeat it's biggest fault) it obviously couldn't manage fairly large areas on the XBox. It was the wrong engine for the job. I only know of one other game that used it, Thief 3 - Deadly Shadows, and *all* of the faults I've listed (no swimming, small areas, very little colour onscreen, etc) all apply to that game too.

The first game ran fine on the PS2 (well, by PS2 standards, I mean, with 2000's hardware style frame-rate and resolutin), and the second game, given the right game engine (and people actually making the right design choices, this time) could have had sufficiently large areas, swimming, an actual Deus Ex feel, etc. But they used a very unsuitable engine, and then made the (to me inexplicable) mistake of making the XBox version the primary version, then porting the game to the PC with no attempts to fix the faults and limitations of the XBox version. Companies should always write first for the most powerful platform (almost always the PC) then port downwards to lower hardware, not the other way around. Otherwise, as with Invisible War, the PC get a version that's way behind what the PC could and should receive.

Seriously, how is it possible to make so many terrible decisions when making a game? And that was when they were making a sequel to one of the best and most popular games of all time.

I've certainly forgotten what hardware was in a rig. In fact I'm not completely sure what's in any of my 4 PCs at the moment. One may or may not have a PCX2; one has some sort of modern-ish nvidia card; one has an Audigy 2ZS... or does it?; and the other one is either a Cyrix (or maybe some other socket 7) or a slot A, and depending on that might have... not sure which sound or video cards. In theory that could affect the playability of games on any of them, and might well surprise me, if I ever got round to it. And to think I used to know the spec of my machines off by heart.