save_vs_death [they/them]

  • 0 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
Cake day: November 27th, 2020
  • save_vs_death [they/them]@hexbear.nettoGames@hexbear.net•What’s Happening With System Requirements Is Getting RidiculousEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    Yeah, we’re reaching the leveling off of moore’s law.

    Games always pushed the envelope. The video brings up the original Deus Ex, the MINIMAL requirements were 16Mb of VRAM. Back in the day, in the 2000s, the top of the line Voodoo4 had 32Mb of VRAM. That meant that if you ran Deus Ex, a game that I love to bits and that is butt ugly, on a budget card with 16Mb of VRAM, it would run at minimum settings across the board and a hope and a prayer. What’s more, memory comes in powers of 2, so you either had a 16 or a 32 card, kiss it goodbye if you had less. 25 years ago we were complaining about the same things this video is complaining about now, but I digress.

    Of course a couple of years later, cards with more VRAM were less of a luxury and so it was something of a guarantee that you could, like clockwork, play every game that came out up to a year ago with a budget computer you put together today. Because hardware would get better at an ever increasing rate. What I think we’re seeing now is, hardware is plateauing and as such budget cards aren’t really punching above their weight with the help of time anymore. If you got a really good card before covid chances are you’re able to play most of the slop coming out on medium settings and only now, 8-10 years later will you be flatout unable to run games for missing specific shader features. That card might outdo present budget cards, still.

    This is exacerbated by the hits the GPU industry has taken, first bitcoin, then covid, now AI, and the tariffs. Making GPUs that are good at running games just isn’t a priority like it used to be. Companies can make more money catering to other use cases. In fact, that’s why I think games are making more use of generated frames. Because even gaming cards will have these AI cores and the engine makers have a choice. Ignore the AI cores and run poorly because the card has less horsepower than a pre-AI one OR make use of the hardware the user has and figure out how to draw blood out of a stone.

  • save_vs_death [they/them]@hexbear.nettoGames@hexbear.net•2K confirms layoffs at Civilization developer FiraxisEnglish
    10·
    1 month ago

    Yeah Civ7 will never “get fixed”; a skeleton crew is not going to ship 2 banger DLCs to bring it up to par, hell the previous team barely shipped Civ7 as it is, and now they don’t even have that.

    The writing was on the wall since Midnight Suns bombed and Civ7 was supposed to save the studio. Except management forced dev to dig their own graves by following up the fucking XCOM series with a forgettable marvelslop tactics game they didn’t even market. Sure Firaxis is down but not out but execs have a bad habit of going “Oh, are the sure we want to make another Civ game? That last one didn’t sell so well.”