Honestly, the PC upgrade cycle having slowed to a crawl is kind of a relief; I remember what it was like when things were the other way ‘round. You’d buy a brand new, top of the line gaming PC, and three months later the latest games wouldn’t run because their minimum requirements exceeded your machine’s specs – and you couldn’t even think about upgrading, because each new generation of video cards required a new type of slot that your theoretically cutting-edge motherboard didn’t have. Heck, I recall games whose recommended system specs just plain didn’t exist on the consumer market at the time of release – publishers were so keen on staying ahead of the curve that they’d develop games based on what they imagined the next generation of gaming PCs would look like, and the gaming mags would give them nine out of ten in spite of the fact that they ran at about twelve fps on any reasonable setup, purely on the basis of how they might play if consumer hardware ever caught up with the developer’s speculations!
@fell-reverie replied:
Is this about Crysis
Crysis was either the era’s swan song or a slight throwback, depending on who you ask. There was a span of the better part of a decade – from about the mid 1990s to the early/mid 2000s – where nearly every AAA PC title was like that in terms of being designed for purely speculative hardware. And a fair number of non-AAA titles, for that matter; at one point I ran into a fucking Frogger clone whose minimum VRAM exceeded what most consumer video cards were bringing to the table at the time of its release.
Tags:
#a chorus of past selves: ”twelve whole FPS?? sign us *up*” #I assured them that we do get more than 12 FPS now #and on an eight-year-old laptop! #(admittedly it was top of the line back in 2011) #(and I don’t really go in for the *super*-high-graphic kinds of games) #games #history #(close enough)
Brinens and Things 