alamanos opened this issue on Jan 29, 2007 · 127 posts
kawecki posted Sat, 10 February 2007 at 3:50 PM
Speaking about games, how much PC games have evolved?
If you look carefully you will find that most of PC games instead of have been improved they have degenerated.
If you look at some old DOS games and compare to today games you will find that the actual games looks very much better and the DOS game looks very primitive so you arrive to the conclusion that it was a great improvement, but in most cases is only an illusion.
If it is an illusion why it looks much better?, well if you look in detail you will find that the old game is using a 320x200 resolution with 256 colors. You cannot expect an image 320x200 be very good compared to a 800x600 or 1024x768 24 bit colors image!
If old games used 320x200 resolution used was not due a limit of the processor, game or rendering engine, it was due the fact that most computers had only a 256K VGA card!
You must remember that who makes a game must not design his game to be run in a top level computer (it would be a commercial fracass). He must design the game to be able to run in worst computer that is still common among users.
Most of who play games are teens or kids, you cannot expect them to have money to purchase a very expensive top level computer. Even the parents have money they will not purchase an expensive computer for they kids play games. In the best case they will purchase a new and top computer for themselves and give their old computer to the kids play games.
So in the end, most of who play games use old or very old computers and if the game maker doesn't support old computers his sales will be very little limited to only some adults that play games or some priviledged kids.
With time, video cards improved and you have a 1M SVGA card able to run at 640x480 of course at only 256 colors. The game looked much better than at 320x200, but it was not a improvement of the game or rendering engine.
Today at 800x600 with 24 bit looks much better that at 640x480 with 8 bits.
Another important point are the textures, as games use a lot of textures you cannot expect that a computer with only 4M memory would be able to load a lot of high resolution textures. With very low amount of available memory the textures used were very small, you cannot expect that a mesh textured with 100x50 pixels texture can look good and if you zoom or get near the mesh it becomes horrible.
With larger amount of memory available for computer it was possible to increase the size of textures used and so it were able to be more detailed.
In resume, what you see as an improvement is only result of the better capabilities of the new computers and not due the game itself. Take an old DOS game, you can try with DOOM or other where's the source code is available, create new larger size textures and compile the game to be run at 800x600 24 bit and compare it to the newest games with DX10 and an hyperexpensive video card.
If you compensate for the difference of video resolution and texture size you will find that most games had degenerated and are very much slower, so they need to be run in a several times faster computer with a 3D card to achieve to same overall speed.
The main reason of this is Windows, $$$$$ and profit over profit. There are several points:
1- Games doesn't need Windows, XP, XP64 or Vista to run. DOS32 is enough, don't know if someone did DOS64.
Very bad for Microsoft, no XP, no Vista and DOS32 was not made by Microsoft!!!
2- Games need only a normal 8M VESA 2 video card to be run at any current resolution.
Very bad for video card makers and Microsoft with his DirectX.
3- Games can be better with faster CPUs.
Excellent for Intel and AMD.
4- In the past each game maker had his own 3D rendering engine with much better performance that the current DX or OpenGL + 3D video card, but it had its $$$ drawbacks.
As any game maker must release games all the time and create new games he need people for the job. If the game maker use proprietary rendering engines, he need to hire people for making the games. So there's no way to find a person that knows how to use their engine, even he had worked in other game comapanies the rendering engines were different.
So the game maker needs to hire anyone that has no idea, train him and only after one year he will become able to be useful for making games. Also then the programmer becomes a specialised person and so, much expensive.
Many times is difficult to find the required people and so many games are not able to be released.
Here came Microsoft with the help, one hand wash the other. With DX was killed the better proprietary rendering engines and was created a standart engine that can be used by any game fabricant..
It is a win-win-lose solution.
And who lose?
Well....., the game player....
Stupidity also evolves!