[QUOTE="BeardMaster"]
[QUOTE="Wasdie"]
What are you talking about? It's higher than it's ever been. Gaming hardware sells more and more each year. The PC market exploded in the early 2000s. Then in the middle of the 2000s laptops took over. Everybody was buying a laptop. The PC market was 100x the size it was so those laptop sales were vastly outpacing gaming PC hardware sales. However gaming hardware sales continued to increase.
There are more PC gamers now than ever before. The PC market may be dying out but custom built PCs are doing just fine. They have always been a faction of the market. Custom built PCs and gaming rigs are their own market. What happens to the PC market as a whole usually doesn't affect the power users.
jhonMalcovich
im talking about software devs pushing hardware minimum requirements, and how they no longer do that. Mainly because they want to court the exploding userbase of low spec users and gain access to the wider market.
For instance when warcraft 3 was released in 2002, if your PC was more than 3 years old... you were boned. When diablo 3 was released nin 2012, got a 7 year old PC? no problem.
No. They just release the games with high scalable visuals setups which are usually low, medium, high, very high, ultra and extreme. I would say game optimiation and scalability improved hugely this gen. You can run Crysis 3 on a 6-year old PC, and low setting are still better than Crysis on consoles. Or you can run it on ultra and it blows away anything next gen consoles show.
PS. Diablo was never a benchmarker. Diablo 2 was made to run on Pentium 200s. I ran it maxxed on my Pentium 266 mmx ;)
well diablo 2 was only a 2d game, and hey that pentium 2 was still fairly new at the time.
and actually you cant run crysis 3 on a 6 year old PC, it requires DX11 and the very first DX11 cards came out at the tail end of 2009 so at release it only supported cards a little over 3 years old. Which is precisely my point, what is now reserved for benchmarking software used to be the norm.
scalability certainly has a role, but is also the reason quad cores are underutilized as well DX11, the tradeoff is you design the game around the older standards then add some bells and whistles in for the enthusiasts, but for the most part games arent designed/optimized around newer hardware standards as part of the tradeoff.
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