Gameguru Mania

[truecksuk]

Hello gamerz,
The aspect of buisness is to sell as many products as possible and generate new 'trends' which show that there is no alternative to your buiseness/company.. if we take a look at the games market at the moment; in terms of hardware, if one is to upgrade a PC, it wouldnt last very long, as new software is released demanding a new form of hardware, etc etc

As you know many games still use very old games engines. We can look at the example of Splinter Cell: Double agent > (which requires the latest technology in order to run)
However it is using the Unreal 2 engine. which is a very old engine>

What they have done is added the latest shaders and lighting effects...
as u can see this what the engine was and is>

Now, imagine if we could get rid of the extras that have been added to the engine and just run it as a dx7/8 game. It would mean that we would never have to upgrade(so long as we are happy with the graphics)
NOT PLAYING INTO THE HANDS OF BIG COMPANIES LOOKING TO EXPLOIT US

There must be a way to get rid of the lighting effects and shaders and other stuff like decals etc... there MUST!

CMON look at the PS2> it has completely got rid of certain graphical elements of Splinter Cell and SOOO many other games like Blood Money and runs them smoothely, YET, my PC cannot run them, even though it may be 3x better > hardware wise than the PS2!
Im not ready to always be paying top dollar for stuff that wont last me very long, even after i've worked my ass off for it!
Any thoughts guys? or is this impossible to acheive?

THERE MUST BE A WAY TO PLAY THE LATEST GAMES WITHOUT THE LATEST SOFTWARE EFFECTS! > IE IN DX8 MODE(UNOFFCIALLY) BY DOING SOMETHING WITH THE CONFIG FILES, AND TEXTURE FOLDERS! thats basically what im trying to say guys

[The Outlaw]

Hey truecksuk I partially agree with you buddy, if games are designed in a way to use all hardware to the optimum we can play them on old hardware as well.

But the thing that you are talking about is at Developer level where you need to have access to the program code to make those changes.

But yes you are right a lot of times it gets annoying to upgrade ur h/w so frequently.

[devilhood]

truecksuk, you're slightly missing the point in regards to graphics detail configuration.

When you load a recent game, the options menu usually has graphics options which allow you to turn the detail down, which in-turn disables a lot of the 'lighting' and 'shader' effects.

If you are running on old hardware, the graphics you see would only be what is compatible with whatever graphics card you have in your system i.e. you cannot utilize DX9 effects on DX8 hardware.

If you turn all the detail down and the FPS is still slow, there is no excuse you can use other than to say "I have old hardware and need to upgrade as soon as possible".

Console games run better because they are developed for a specific hardware base and do not have any resource hogging elements such as an Operating System or 3rd party programs running in the background.
It is a much faster and entirely direct process.

Also, try to imagine what the developers have to go through in order to make something work properly across a multitude of different GFX, Motherboard, RAM and CPU configurations?