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kalantir
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17 Feb 2009, 10:07 pm

Orwell wrote:
I begin to think most of our modern personal computers are way overpowered. I have 4 GB of RAM and a 2.2GHz 64-bit processor. I mostly use this machine for web browsing, e-mail, and word processing. The same tasks were completed just fine a decade ago with a fraction of the computing power.

From a game programming perspective though... It'd be cool if they were even more powerful yet. A lot of times decisions made have to be a tradeoff between memory usage or efficiency. A lot of "shortcuts" have to be taken(primarily with 3d games) and even though they try to do their best to hide it, sometimes it does show.


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lau
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18 Feb 2009, 7:20 am

kalantir wrote:
Orwell wrote:
I begin to think most of our modern personal computers are way overpowered. I have 4 GB of RAM and a 2.2GHz 64-bit processor. I mostly use this machine for web browsing, e-mail, and word processing. The same tasks were completed just fine a decade ago with a fraction of the computing power.

From a game programming perspective though... It'd be cool if they were even more powerful yet. A lot of times decisions made have to be a tradeoff between memory usage or efficiency. A lot of "shortcuts" have to be taken(primarily with 3d games) and even though they try to do their best to hide it, sometimes it does show.

I will throw in a comment here...

You say "From a game programming perspective", but I don't think this is true, in the slightest.

The quality of the "game" has changed a minuscule amount since Adventure.

The only reason for today's speed and power is the graphics, which have replaced any consideration of the game play itself with an obsession with what, to my mind, is essentially just "prettiness".

Maybe, now that systems can pretty much reproduce on-screen exactly what you would see from a camera viewing direct reality, we will see a trend back to providing genuinely innovative (as opposed to imitative) games.


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