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forge · 05-26-2006, 06:21 AM

I might be majorly wrong here... BUT. I think people need to come up with a better way to code these games. I think the engine is at fault because they use fps engines which are designed well, for FPS games. Where you always have a certain amount of textures. They make those games and do pay attention to these issues so when you're playing with a decent machine you're not caching all over the place. Me and a friend were recently talking about VG, and how he was reading the boards and saw people with sli 7900s are getting like 30 fps. Sure that might improve, this isn't to hark on VG. However you'd fucken think that laying down 2x $650+? for some gpus that this shit should run 60+fps no problem. I mean if theres 30+ people on the screen like in a raid its understandable to drop. But to be in generic town03 and having a system which can hardly keep up and its top of the line. But its sorta the same for EQ2 and other games. I'm really with Kreugen on this. For me its what made Q1 such a hit for Id. Any smuck could install and play the game and have decent frames. It didn't take dropping 3k+ on a computer to even have a chance at enjoyment.

Currently I have no idea since I don't play EQ2. However I imagine its quite a big install. I'm not sure ram is going to scale fast enough with the texture content of games. Someones going to have to slow down for someone dealing with this. Currently the VG install is like 18gigs? This isn't first hand so I'm not sure but I don't think that even all the 3? continents are taken into account in that size. Even if they are, lets say 2 years from now VG Ruins of Kunark comes out. Stack another 12 gigs on to that. If you had 4gigs of ram thats a 1/7+ ratio of ram to content. However the average gamer is more likely to have 1gig of ram. You know the people who play WoW.. not the people paying $3k just to play VG/EQ2. Their going to still be at a 1/30th of Ram to content. Basically what I'm really saying here is that it seems games are growing far faster than the comp industry can even keep up at this point. It seems that were getting to the point where there will be infinitly more textures and models to load than ram. At some point we'll always be caching something because there are just to many resources to handle.

I've noticed this for a while and its odd. I don't know if its a oddity currently and its going to subside.. or its going to continue on a curve at the current state. However mostly FPS guys push the GPU industry say people like Carmack and Sweeny(engine guy for epic?). Hell, Carmack basically tells Nvidia I need this much GPU power for my game. Now we can see that sli 7900gtx's run most fps games with tons of frames to spare, even new ones. However if we look at games like Oblivion and VG they choke to death dealing with all the extras that get thrown in the mix. Be it grass, shader work, enormous clip planes, whatever the case. There's so much more overhead added to a engine which was supposed to run ok with graphics card xyz. MMO's are shaping up to always take far more requirements than their FPS friends. It should be the MMO's saying my games going to be 30gigs and I'm going to have 4gigs of character textures. Its these people who in the future need to be sitting down and saying you need your cards to be able to handle this amount of data and processing. Because MMO's are a completely different beast than FPS games.

05-26-2006, 06:21 AM	#60 (permalink)
forge CTW! Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: at work Posts: 444 +0 Internets	I might be majorly wrong here... BUT. I think people need to come up with a better way to code these games. I think the engine is at fault because they use fps engines which are designed well, for FPS games. Where you always have a certain amount of textures. They make those games and do pay attention to these issues so when you're playing with a decent machine you're not caching all over the place. Me and a friend were recently talking about VG, and how he was reading the boards and saw people with sli 7900s are getting like 30 fps. Sure that might improve, this isn't to hark on VG. However you'd fucken think that laying down 2x $650+? for some gpus that this shit should run 60+fps no problem. I mean if theres 30+ people on the screen like in a raid its understandable to drop. But to be in generic town03 and having a system which can hardly keep up and its top of the line. But its sorta the same for EQ2 and other games. I'm really with Kreugen on this. For me its what made Q1 such a hit for Id. Any smuck could install and play the game and have decent frames. It didn't take dropping 3k+ on a computer to even have a chance at enjoyment. Currently I have no idea since I don't play EQ2. However I imagine its quite a big install. I'm not sure ram is going to scale fast enough with the texture content of games. Someones going to have to slow down for someone dealing with this. Currently the VG install is like 18gigs? This isn't first hand so I'm not sure but I don't think that even all the 3? continents are taken into account in that size. Even if they are, lets say 2 years from now VG Ruins of Kunark comes out. Stack another 12 gigs on to that. If you had 4gigs of ram thats a 1/7+ ratio of ram to content. However the average gamer is more likely to have 1gig of ram. You know the people who play WoW.. not the people paying $3k just to play VG/EQ2. Their going to still be at a 1/30th of Ram to content. Basically what I'm really saying here is that it seems games are growing far faster than the comp industry can even keep up at this point. It seems that were getting to the point where there will be infinitly more textures and models to load than ram. At some point we'll always be caching something because there are just to many resources to handle. I've noticed this for a while and its odd. I don't know if its a oddity currently and its going to subside.. or its going to continue on a curve at the current state. However mostly FPS guys push the GPU industry say people like Carmack and Sweeny(engine guy for epic?). Hell, Carmack basically tells Nvidia I need this much GPU power for my game. Now we can see that sli 7900gtx's run most fps games with tons of frames to spare, even new ones. However if we look at games like Oblivion and VG they choke to death dealing with all the extras that get thrown in the mix. Be it grass, shader work, enormous clip planes, whatever the case. There's so much more overhead added to a engine which was supposed to run ok with graphics card xyz. MMO's are shaping up to always take far more requirements than their FPS friends. It should be the MMO's saying my games going to be 30gigs and I'm going to have 4gigs of character textures. Its these people who in the future need to be sitting down and saying you need your cards to be able to handle this amount of data and processing. Because MMO's are a completely different beast than FPS games.