I basically rebuilt my system when I got Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 (at the same time), and I haven't had to mess with it since then; BioShock sails along nicely at 1280x1024, so I'm happy. The first three you mention were just before my time and I only played them after the fact, unfortunately. I understand Quake forced quite a number of hardware upgrades when it came out, though.

I think I did upgrade to a Voodoo2 in part because of Quake.

quake3 made me realise my v2 wasnt up to the job any more
got a gf256

ut2004 made me realise my gf2mx wasnt up to the job any more got a gf44200ti

oblivion made me realise my 7600gt wasnt up to the job any more got a 8800gts

That's interesting; Oblivion actually confirmed that my 7600GT *was* up to the job. I never had a single problem with it.

oh oblivion runs without problems but its slow if you max the detail

Games never made me upgrade. Dead parts made me upgrade.

Well Oblivion tought me not to buy crappy video cards like 5600 XT 😜
I got the 7600 gs and a 2.8 ghz processor and now I can run it at High lvl 😜

Oh, I can max the detail and still run Oblivion just fine, at least at 1280x1024 (which is all my monitor supports). However, I played the Crysis demo a few days ago; very pretty slide show. Might be time to start looking for upgrades again.

Outcast. Forced me to upgrade from a K6-2 400 to a Slot A Athlon 800 so I could get that glorious 512x384 resolution with decent FPS.

Oblivion. Took a paycheck and dumped it into a second 7800 GTX (fastest card at the time) so I could get that beautiful game running smoothly at full detail. Sad to say it still struggled a bit when the screen got busy even with a top notch SLI setup. It was definitely a Crysis level demanding game (at full detail) when it was released, but man it sure was purty.

Great Necro!

Got Voodoo 2 for q3demo - I wasn't able to run it in software mode. Still remember the day I installed the GPU and played some deathmatch.

Mafia made me upgrade to an ATI 9700 PRO, i can't remember what i was running before exactly but it was either V2 in SLI + P3 or a GF MX.

Doom to 4mb 386, Ultima Underworld to 8mb 486, Diablo to Pentium, and Unreal to 3dfx.

keenerb wrote on 2024-08-01, 14:57:

Doom to 4mb 386, Ultima Underworld to 8mb 486

Did you perhaps meant it the opposite way? UU is plenty playable on 40MHz 386DX with 4 megs. Back then I finished Doom on such a PC as well but I really wished I had more RAM and a faster CPU. I think I borrowed unused 1M of RAM from a friend to make my system 5MB and that too helped a lot.

Deunan wrote on 2024-08-01, 16:30:

keenerb wrote on 2024-08-01, 14:57:

Doom to 4mb 386, Ultima Underworld to 8mb 486

Did you perhaps meant it the opposite way? UU is plenty playable on 40MHz 386DX with 4 megs. Back then I finished Doom on such a PC as well but I really wished I had more RAM and a faster CPU. I think I borrowed unused 1M of RAM from a friend to make my system 5MB and that too helped a lot.

I probably switched those, yeah.

There was a bunch of games that convinced me to upgrade from Hercules to VGA...
Curiously, the one I craved to play most, was Lemmings - which in theory should work with Hercules via CGA emulation, but I couldn't get it to work.

I'm wondering what was the problem - corrupt/incomplete copy? Or the CGA emulators I had weren't good enough for that particular game?

Anyway, the upgrade was well worth it - Lemmings became my favourite game for quite some time...

Unreal Tournament 2004 and GTA San Andreas. I really liked those games (still do) but my 1.1 GHz Athlon and Geforce 3 TI200 couldn't keep up, especially in UT multiplayer. I upgraded to an Athlon XP 2500+ and Radeon 9600XT just for those games. Huge improvement, I think the speed more than tripled.

Literally every recent AAA game until I became a working adult. As a kid/teen I always had discarded office PCs or low-end budget supermarket PCs and the first PC I bought in my late teens with my own money was still deep into the budget-end. I got so used to playing games at low settings and barely going above 30fps that I still have a high tolerance for games running poorly and don't require more than 45 average fps to be happy.

RandomStranger wrote on 2024-08-01, 17:01:

I got so used to playing games at low settings and barely going above 30fps that I still have a high tolerance for games running poorly and don't require more than 45 average fps to be happy.

I used to be like that too, but after watching Digital Foundry for years, I've come to appreciate a locked frame rate. Be it 30, 60 or 120 FPS I simply prefer when it doesn't waver. To clarify, locked 30 works for me if I'm playing with a controller. But with keyboard and mouse, I need a locked 60, or the camera controls start feeling too sluggish.

On topic, as many other people, I replaced my GeForce 2 with a GeForce 3 to get the shiny pixel shader water in Morrowind. It also worked pretty nicely for playing the original Splinter Cell. Later on, I got a brand new rig with a 6600 GT to run Neverwinter Nights 2. After that, I haven't really upgraded my hardware for any specific game. I just did it so that I could play any currently relevant stuff at reasonable performance levels.