New Game Engine thoughts

[Greg Wak]

Let me start by saying that computer gaming has become my favorite hobby. Considering how much I enjoy sports and scifi and numerous other things this somewhat surprises me. I say this because I don't want to seem like I'm complaining, just observing.
I HATE the constant need to upgrade hardware or the fear of having to upgrade soon. One of the coolest things about the hobby is looking ahead to new games. Not so much fun is wondering if you will be able to run them in all or at least mostly all of their glory. Two new trends have helped me to worry less. Doom 3 and HL2 were very scalable, and prcessor speeds won't be increasing anytime soon. I think/ hope it will be a while until games can take much advantage of dual cpu's.
The whole point is there are some monster engines on the horizon. Oblvion, Unreal 3 and to a lesser extent, Gothic 3. Do most people think high end rigs now will be able to crank those games when they ship at the end of 05/ begining of 06? I just upgraded this year and it will be a good long while before I can do it again. That being said, Oblivion has become #1 on my long term radar. I'm Just wondering what other people thinK.

[The Mad Hatter]

The only significant upgrade I've made to my system in the past two years is an extra 512 megs of ram. I'll probably upgrade the video card in the next month or so but otherwise it's still in the ballpark for everything that I've thrown at it. I'd say the pace of upgrading has slowed down considerably over the past few years.

[Greg Wak]

I think it has slowed down as well and I hope you are right. I had to get a new rig this year as my old one was 4 years old. I'm Hoping to get that much out of this one.

[Eel Snave]

Mine is 4 years old and is still quite the workhorse. If I had some money to pump into it, I could probably scrape another year or two out of it, easy.

[Rich in KCK]

I figure I only spend $10-$20 a month per computer if you average it out on upgrades. Each main component still lasts 18-24 months for me and for a lot of people myself included researching and buying new parts is actually part of the fun of the hobby.

[Dhruin]

The only significant upgrade I've made to my system in the past two years is an extra 512 megs of ram. I'll probably upgrade the video card in the next month or so but otherwise it's still in the ballpark for everything that I've thrown at it. I'd say the pace of upgrading has slowed down considerably over the past few years.

Ditto! In fact, I recently wanted to upgrade but couldn't really justify it - my rig handles everything to satisfaction...although a new video card will be desirable in a few months.

[Kraken]

My 2.66 GHz pentium is going on two years old, but 2.66 still seems respectable enough to me. I just doubled the RAM to 1 gig, and will buy a modern video card when I can afford one. Add in a new big honkin' hard drive, and I fully expect this machine to perform acceptably for at least two more years. Any game developer who pushes the tech too far risks losing the mass market, because the upgrade curve has definitely flattened, especially among more casual gamers. That's a very welcome development. I hate moving from one machine to another.

To answer your question, I don't expect to upgrade anything except my video card and main hard drives for years to come, and no game on the horizon is going to change my mind.

[RunningMn9]

A year ago I bought a 3.2 GHz P4 w/ HT, an ATI 9800 XT, 1GB of RAM and a 250 GB hard drive.

It still runs everything flawlessly (although I suppose I'm missing out on some goodies that the newer generation of vid cards offers).

I have since added another 160 GB of hard drive space, and an Audigy 2 sound card to replace the onboard audio.

It has to last me 2 more years before the wife will sanction a system-replacement level upgrade, so I'll keep telling myself that everything is running flawlessly.

[Greg Wak]

So you guys think these rigs will run the new stuff pretty easily? Unreal 3 looks pretty amazing.

[Blackhawk]

Four years.

Practically every game that is released will work on any system from the past four years. The majority of casual gamers do a serious upgrade every four years, so any developer that puts a game on the market that requires a machine built in the past year is locking out 3/4 of his audience. They know better than to do that, and they design their engines to scale appropriately. If you buy a machine right now, you will be able to run everything on the market for at least four years.

Note that the further into that four years you go, the more you have to compromise, though. A four year old system can run Doom 3, but not on the top quality setting at 1600x1200.

For more flexibility with settings, plan on replacing a video card every two years, and the mobo/RAM/CPU every three. Do that and you will be able to run everything at 80%+ detail all the time.

[\/\/olverine]

A lot of upgrading depends on how picky you are with your graphics. Me, I'm an untter graphics whore, its why I rarely pick up a console game any longer. I bought my system around a year ago, its a P4 3.2, 1GB RAM, and originally came with a GeForce 5900. Since then I have only needed to upgrade my video card, so I currently own a Geforce 6800 GT. Everything runs about as good as it can, processor speeds seem to have hit a speed bump and most games coming out in the future really only ask that you have the latest video card anyhow if you want all the bells and whistles. If not, you can scale it down.

[raydude]

So you guys think these rigs will run the new stuff pretty easily? Unreal 3 looks pretty amazing.

I think so. I think current rigs can handle Silent Hunter III, Dangerous Waters, TC 1861 pretty handily. Oh, you mean the pure eye candy stuff? Don't know, don't care .