Quote:
Originally Posted by Bigbert
The Original EQ had a minimum specs of a P1-200 and pretty much ANY graphics card. When Vanguard can run on that you can use the graphics don't matter argument. They are asking a lot for hardware the graphics should at least be good or its just bad coding.

It may look like we're asking a lot, but we're really not too badly -- I posted recently a list of ATI cards and how much pricing has gone down. PCs have gone down too, also memory. Plus, we're not done optimizing. Our goal is to make it so lower end machines can run, that mid-to-high end machines can run with lots of graphics options on, and also that a cool computer in 2008 or 2009 will display Vanguard far better than any machine can now because we've architeched the engine looking backwards and forwards. (for example, we'll be taking advantage of sli/crossfire, 64 bit clients, vista, dx 10, physics cards, etc.)

Btw, the min specs of EQ 1 requires a 3d hardware card -- a 3dfx -- it was one of the first, if not the first games, that required a hardware card and it's what allowed us to make such an immersive world at the time. Of note is that while people were concerned by this, by the time the game came out, voodoo 1 cards were on the way out and very cheap and voodoo 2 cards (and remember the first SLI, where you could put 2 voodoo 2 cards together). So in the end, the worry about making EQ 1 a hardware only game turned out to not be an issue and the decision to make it hardware only is one of the reasons it's still around these days and we were able to make a world that, IMHO, was *much* more immservie and fun to explore than other games that used software renderers.

Oh, also, we started developing EQ 1 on pentium 133s with matrox video cards. Kinda funny that the machines we started development on wouldn't play the game that we launched with 3 years later. Man does tech move fast, both back then and it's still moving fast, maybe faster.


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