PC hardware requirements

The speed in which PC hardware develops isn't constant. Two years ago or so we had reached a relatively slow phase, where processors didn't get much fasters because they had reached some physical limits, and graphics cards developed at a constant but modest pace. But then the pace picked up: On the CPU side the development of the Core 2 Duo and equivalent processors gave a big boost to processing speed. And by moving from AGP to PCIexpress the graphics cards developed at a breakneck speed as well.

Now for christmas 2006 there are a lot of games being released, like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, which take advantage of all that added processing and graphics power. If you have the latest computer, with a Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, and a 7900 generation Geforce, or X1900 Radeon, graphics card, these games deliver a graphical splendor like never before. If you happen to have a computer over 2 years old, with a single core processor without even hyperthreading, and still an AGP graphics card, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic will look really bad and run only choppy. Even on my Pentium 4 640 3.2 GHz, 2 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX machine I bought last year, which wasn't cheap, the game won't be running well with all the graphics options turned on.

Now I didn't even plan to buy Dark Messiah, but that is just one game of many coming out, and lots of games that *do* interest me coming out in 2007 will have similar hardware requirements. No problem for me, I buy a new desktop every two years, and 2007 the next PC is due. But obviously not everybody can afford changing his PC that often, especially since the hardware required to run at full graphical splendor isn't the cheapest.

Which makes me wonder how much of the success of World of Warcraft is simply due to the fact that it runs on an older or cheaper computer. A friend of mine bought a PC last year just to play WoW on it (replacing a really ancient machine), but for just $1000 he got a machine that ran WoW perfectly. Everquest 2, which came out in the same month as WoW, and is the same genre, wouldn't run that well on the same computer. And next years Vanguard would probably just stutter on it.

And from all I hear about Vanguard, and see in screenshots, Vanguard is a perfect example of what is wrong in computer graphics these days: The polygon count and shader effects and whatever is high, the artistic value is low. You get landscapes where the water has a perfectly photorealistic surface, but the beach is totally bland and boring. Meanwhile on a beach in World of Warcraft you can't see every sand grain, but there are interesting ship wrecks, murloc villages, and beached dead marine dinosaurs.

Game developers need to spend less time on high-end graphics effects, and more time on making their landscapes and scenery artistically pleasing and interesting. Because artistic value isn't that dependant on hardware, and scales down better. If your game only looks good on the latest and most expensive hardware, you won't find many people wanting to buy it.