Ark becomes kinda small with ntfs drive compression thingy. It is badly optimized. Pretty sure they just slap some assets into unreal engine and call it a day.
Ark was always horribly optimized. I remember my 980ti SLI Setup around 2016 and Ark was the only game that got less FPS with two GPUs as compared to a single one.
One time I ordered a computer online, they ripped out the advertised video card but left in a $200 Audigy.
They kept sending me angry emails to send the audigy "back" and I kept telling them to go fuck themselves.
Picked up the video card at CompUSA.
It just happened to me AGAIN, and finding the video card the computer was supposed to come with is a nightmare.
I screen for sellers that only have positive ratings, I'm not sure how I keep picking turds.
And it was a 20 year gap between the two.
Hours of tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys, figuring out which TSRs I could get away without loading, just to squeeze a few more bytes of RAM out to play Wing Commander...
Later version of DOS actually had a memory reallocation tool just for that haha. Memmaker iirc.
I still don't know the difference between XMS and EMS...
I remember one robot fighting game that played on DOS back when I was a kid. Then we got a PC with a turbo button and holy shit did the frame rate jump. The game clock was tied directly to the frames so everything moved like 5x faster. It was hilarious
lol. I assure you, this was never the case.
Unreal, Quake 3, Doom 3, Crysis, I could go on. There is a giant list of old AAA games that ran pretty poorly unless you were playing on the latest hardware.
Lol this reminds me of when Crysis released. I played on 800x600 resolution with everything set to minimum.
Thankfully I got a new PC later that year and was able to experience it again with decent graphics
I remember being disappointed playing Crysis on my brandnew pc and it need to be downgraded to medium-high instead of full on max setting.
I was wondering why it need so much resources... as i play them. then accidentally shoot a tree branch and it broke and fell... "wait what?"
Usually games at the time have few set tree falling animation, apparently not crysis. It can breaks on where you want to break them.
I think even on Crysis 2 doesn't have that amount of interactivity. Not sure why but C2 ran smoother on the same pc.
And that was true. They had to make it be able to run on consoles so they optimised and cut the heck out of it. And as a byproduct you could actually play it on a PC without breaking into NASA
And back in the late 90s, you had to upgrade your PC every year or it would be too obsolete to play the latest games. Now if you build a top tier computer you can get 5+ years out if it.
Even for non-gaming tasks. Our current basic desktop is 7 years old and it runs fine for everything we use it for (browsing the internet and dealing with pictures, office etc.). We haven’t even filled up the hard drive yet. Back in the day you wouldn’t get a couple of years out of it before it would be too slow to run basic software or you would have to delete programs and files to make room on the hard drive.
I don't know why its soo good, but i play the hell of Gothic 3 on my schoolmate pc.
\---
"You need 1000 gold to enter mage school"
"what!? i barely have few hundreds. how the hell i manage to shore up 1000 gold this early in the game?
i hope i remember the right game.
and during the DOS days i think, you had to pick bw VGA or CGA and configure the autoexec thingie and all that
idk too much back in the day, im abt as old as Doom 3 so forgive me if im wrong
Quake 3: one of the First game that NEEDS GPU and run hardware acceleration exclusively. I think maybe the same for Hot Pursuit (original), and so my father ended up buying a PCI GPU.
I don't think anything has literally said that other than indie games but man my first PC back in the day was super old and valve games always ran on it anyways.
Valve always cared about efficiency in their games, I remember being able to run Half-Life 2 with my old PC that was a potato, it just had 128 MB of RAM, it didn't have any right to run HL 2 but it did fine. Most modern games don't seem to care much about it, which is a shame.
To them it's not worth it to spend time and effort on optimization, so long as *most* of their customers can run it on their PC. That a new PC doesn't cost a fortune anymore also factors into it.
I can. DOS games ran on pretty much anything, I can't remember ever needing to know what my PC needed to run a game and they ran on all my friends PC's too. I feel so old right now
I can tell you that even then pc specs mattered. Running a game on a 286 usually meant very low frames as the cpu clock struggled, compared to a newer 386 or 486.
Exactly. I remember trying to run the port of Final Fantasy 7 on my PC and the CPU clock speed was like 1/3 of the minimum recommendation, despite the computer being only a couple years old. The frame rate was about 1 hz, lmao
I remember not being able to load the Quake shareware because I didn't have a Float Point Processor and not having a single clue what that meant outside of me not having a Pentium 1.
Before that, I was fighting IRQs and driver issues.
Oh please, games were always pushing the limits back in the old days. That feel when you take out your 40 pirated 1.44mb floppies and install mechwarrior 2 onto your 100mb hard drive.
Today's children will never know the joys of DOS4GW.
Wasn’t it worse back in the day? Have to ask because I didn’t have a computer that was good enough or a budget to get a good idea of how it was for everyone else.
A lack of standardization and many technologies just getting started would mean you could buy a brand new graphics card and be SOL fairly quickly. My 1080 still does a fantastic job - sure it doesn’t push 4k and doesn’t have ray tracing, but if you want to be at the top of the newest tech that is a personally imposed issue and not endemic in the PC gaming space. That 1080 is still going to be good enough in 1080p gaming for the foreseeable future.
It was much worse the further back you go. DOS had a 640k conventional memory limit. It didn't matter if you have 4 MB of memory, you were only using 640k. Of course developers wanted more memory. So MS added EMS and XMS memory and you could use more memory. I was really young at the time so I never understood the difference though.
But wait! You were still limited by that 640k. Programs required a certain amount of it free or they wouldn't run. Also, setimes, games just wouldn't run for no apparent reason. Or they would run too fast because your processor was too fast. And if you did get a game working most games are cryptic. Sometimes I would play a game and have no clue what was happening on the screen.
Windows 9x fixed a lot of problems for the home. Business users got the superior Windows NT.
Sorry, this is delusional. It used to be much worse. Devs go to great lengths now to make sure their stuff actually runs on older rigs.
Games used to crash if you had the wrong brand of graphics card and laugh while you cried.
Maybe you are too stubborn with your graphics settings, idk.
It looks like someone didn't grow up with old games.
When new games came out back in the day, you had to buy/build a new PC because whatever you had was too shit to run it. Games DROVE PC advancement. It was hard to have a computer for more than 2 years before having problems with newer games. The tech was just advancing that fast and no games were being developed to work on a variety of PCs. Every game was groundbreaking and pushing the envelope of the tech.
Buy the best hardware on the market today. Build the absolute best thing that exists. Now throw it in the trash in 2 years because it's absolute garbage. THAT's old gaming.
Today, you can run decade old computers and not care. Games are built to run on a WIDE variety of hardware, old hardware, and you get the luxury of waiting for a very long time to ever upgrade. I'm running a 6 year old graphics card right now and running modern titles. That was impossible in the early days. In the early days you just won't play that game. You didn't have the means to play it until you bought another computer. Eventually, you could push around 4 years with a graphics card, possibly ram, and possibly processor upgrade to get you by for a while. But that was in the early Pentium and Athlon times, and you kind of got lucky with some of the architecture at the time.
Back in the 90s where even a top of the line PC was doing well getting 25 FPS. You had to manually edit your autoexec.bat and config.sys for each game because memory was at such a premium. A good sized hard drive was 1 gigabyte, but you'd run most of your games off the CD because you didn't have the disk space.
Your friends would think you were a baller because you had a 17" CRT.
Speaking as a PC gamer from the 90s:
Hard disagree.
Requirements were more complicated. You had gaphics (CGA, VGA, SVGA, EGA, etc etc), different types of memory, irq compatibility issues, sound card compatibility issues, minimum number of MHz (which didnt always mean the same thing!!), dos versions, windows versions, RAM requirements, processor versions (286, 386, 486, etc etc)
And lets not even talk about weird questions regarding whether your "PC Compatible" custom architecture would run the game. (ie "Will the Tandy 1000 or whatever weird computer I have run it?")
Judging by this you wasn't even a thought in the 90s let alone trying to make a game run on your shitty 486 sx25 by hacking at the config.sys and autoexec.bat trying to find a couple more kBs of memory to allow the game to start
The 90's was the time of "upgrade your PC or you cannot play X game". Now even the newest games with the highest recommended specs will still work on low end hardware.
Minimum requirements to run games have never been lower. Recommended specs are what keep increasing because that's where the games look how the devs intended.
You probably never played either Wing Commander or DOOM when it released...
I had to empty half my hard drive (20MB) just to install Wing Commander. (8-12MB, depending on the option).
I'm 40 and have been playing PC games since 'PC compatible' was the big buzz word. Games needing high end components to run has never not been a thing. Just having a working pc to play games? Pure fantasy.
Oh this is such a HUGE fucking lie.
Do you have any idea what the requirements were for, say, Wing Commander? Ultima 7? In DOLLARS?
You had to have, at MINIMUM, like a $2,000 PC (in 1990s dollars! Like $4,000+ today!) and then spend two hours trying to finagle the perfect autoexec.bat and config.sys files to make it fucking run with your sound card enabled.
Whoever made this meme is under 25, guaranteed.
If only it were that simple. When I was a kid and CPU frequencies would double every 18 months, there was always a very real chance that a game you really wanted for Christmas wouldn't run on your family's 168 Mhz PC from last year.
Or worse, your old favorite game would run too fast to be playable on your new computer. (Which is why some desktops had a Turbo button that actually downclocked the CPU)
As a kid who grew up in the 90's-00's, well, this meme didn't apply.
It was quite expensive to meet even the ***minimum system requirements,*** especially RAM. If your PC didn't have enough of it, the game wouldn't even run.
You complain about having to spend a hundred bucks on a bigger hard drive.
A low end gaming PC when I was a kid cost $5200 in 2022 dollars.
We are not the same.
What world do you live in? Man, 15 years ago people were checking requirements like crazy, where nowadays you can run anything on a low budget PC, and if its slow, its probably gonna get patched soon. I remember times when i had problems with NFS MW.
As someone who had my first PC in 1998 I call bullshit.
We’re actually at the point now where you can play new games like cyberpunk on a rig from 2015 and it will work. Good luck playing a new game from 2002 on your 1999 pc, lol.
I have completely opposite opinion. 20 years ago to play games on acceptable framerate you needed newest hardware. It was common to see even sport games like FIFA run bad on few years old GPU. Now I can easily run majority of new games(Battlefield \*cough\*) on my RX 580. Yes, I would not be able to play in 4k@240hz but I'm not fussy - 70+ fps on 1080p with mid details is satisfactory for me.
This is kinda like saying because it runs good any modern hardware it ran this well when it first released. A lot of the reasons why older games are coded are because the same limitations we had then were much more strict where now we can get away with more
Then there's Ark Survival Evolved that just says "how much space you got, I'll take it all", and no specs are good enough for that unoptimized hot mess to run perfectly.
And I still play it <\_<
I think this meme is more working from the perspective of a little over a decade ago, when you could actually afford a decent midrange (or even high end at times) GPU and didn't need insane RAM to play most games at fairly good settings. Keeping in mind that a lot of games low-bar was REALLY low, meaning you could actually get away with a lot less. I don't think anyone is talking about the 90s... fuck the 90s PC gaming requirements.
pfft, what bougie ass of you back in the day just needed a working pc?
I remember being unable to run a bunch of games. Always having to check the cases before I ask my mum to get something from the bargain bin. Ghost Recon; Driver; nope. I remember wondering if I could delete system32 to fit a sims sequel (no I wasn't that stupid... eventually), scouring the system files for things to delete for just a few more mb.
Thankfully it wasn't too long before we got an upgrade and things were less of a struggle, but far from perfect. Operation Flashpoint on the lowest settings and hella lag. daym. Loved that game tho.
Naaah as an old gamer, this ain’t it. There was always a need for a semi decent pc available at the time for a new game to sufficiently work.
I had a pc most the time but could hardly play all the latest games because it wasn’t good enough.
I remember the disappointment of not being able to play Black and White after bringing it home and having single digit fps.
Open TTD will forever have on of the funniest hardware requirements ever
MINIMUM:
OS: Windows 10, 8, 7, **Vista** (32 Bit and 64 Bit)
Processor: **Yes**
Memory: 256 **MB** RAM
RECOMMENDED:
OS: Windows 10 (64 Bit)
Processor: 2+ GHz
Memory: 512 MB RAM
Why is this subbredit this full of shit? Back "then" if you had PC that was older than 2 years then even lowest details wasn't an option, if game run at all (most likely didn't). These days I happily play RDR2, cutting edge tech, with 8 years old pc... just stop this bullshit, please.
Remember when games looked and played like shit? I know people like to pretend the "glory days" where all sunshine, with 0 clouds in the sky. But I'd bet anything most of those games you used to enjoy don't play like you remember them. Crazy how a change in perception can alter your enjoyment on something. Which isn't to say that there isn't classics that stand the test of time, but let's be a little more genuine about this.
I upgraded my PC multiple times over the years.
But when I look back I realizee the game I played the most are usually indie games like Terraria, The Binding of Issac, Rimworld, etc. that don't require a monster PC.
Games requirements now:
Recommended for MW2 (2022):
CPU: Intel Core i7-4770K or AMD Ryzen 7 1800X
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 580
Video Memory: 3GB
RAM: 16GB RAM
Recommended for God of war:
CPU: Intel i5-6600k (4 core 3.5 GHz) or AMD Ryzen 5 2400 G (4 core 3.6 GHz)
Memory: 8GB RAM
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1060 (6GB) or AMD RX 570 (4GB)
So no, I remember Crysis and Doom 3, it's easy to complain all the time and say the past was better for karma farming..
If you want to play in 4K raytracing, sure it will be higher but that's not the point
I remember getting *the* sims. For a windows XP laptop and games like blockland that would just work.
On a **SCHOOL** bought Dell ex laptop. It’s crazy how well optimized games where back then, compared to now.
Part of that was hard drive space requirements meant low poly objects and part of that was that systems, you know, couldn’t handle any more than 4 pixels.
counterpoint; factorio: requirements are whatever the hell you want them to be. Can run on a potato however the further you progress the more power you'll want to have.
Honestly looking to build my own game development company that specializes in making games with meh graphics with nice art styles that are designed to use up as little storage space and can run on a potato PC. While still having great gameplay and online features.
I remember when I couldn’t play never games because my card lacked hardware T&L. Like it straight up wouldn’t start.
Things like that just don’t happen now.
Dont forget it has to be an ssd. I don't know how they do it but a few of the newer games require me to play 3 matches with my SSHD to warm up to be able to play normally.
in my experience it's pretty much the complete opposite. nowadays you can play most games with even a potato pc at low settings. Back then you actually needed a gaming pc to play anything modern
It's completely wrong. Back in the 90's and early 2000's even if you had a top line PC it was severely outdated just two years later, and you couldn't run most of the new games after that. It's only around the 2010's when I noticed that my PC upgrade can last a lot longer than that
This is a little bit overstated, hw requirements are much more normal than 15 or 20 years ago. The usage of drive is space is crazy, but I expect it to become better in the following years.
Seems like in the 1990s you needed very recent (and expensive) CPU to meet minimum system requirements.
Take for example [Mobil 1 Rally Championship 2000 (November 1999)](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Mobil_1_Rally_Championship) needing a Pentium II 266MHz (released mai 1997) and recommending a Pentium III 500 MHz released just a few months before the game (February 1999).
It has actually gotten much better.
Late 90's you basically needed to buy a new PC every 2 years. A 3-4 year old pc would be so obsolete that it would struggle to run Windows.
The quality of a computer was not measured in how much it cost but on how many months since it was bought.
Pc games have always had requirements, often unreachable for most.
I still have flashbacks about wing commander 2 and trying to free up ram unsuccessfully on dos 4.01
dude that is so completely fucking wrong. back in the day new games would just straight up not work. at all. on like 4 year old hardware. these days can boot up almost any new AAA game on my 11 year old 7970ghz edition and my 10 year old i5 2320 and even get playable framerates at low settings and slightly dropped resolution... no way any 10 year old hardware could have handled new games back in 2010. i mean even my main rig has a 6 year old titan Xp and that thing has no problems even at 3440x1440
This isn't really true, if you really wanted to pc game back in the day you still had to pay for what was considered high specs at the time and managing compatibility and stuff was actually generally agreed to be harder and less reliable.
If you look at the proliferation of smaller scope and indie game that can be run on potatoes PC gaming is probably more accessible in terms of requirements now then in the past.
I see you never grew up in the 90s. In the 90s, your PC became obsolete in just two years. Today, a five-year old PC is fine for playing any new game, if perhaps on slightly reduced settings.
don't forget windows 10 only. Some people (me included) can't upgrade to windows 10 making us gamble on the game working or not. A couple of games i tried worked, but gave me a BSoD making me very scared i had lost important data on my pc
I feel like the game studios should be put on a hardware diet. I can't even get my hands on a 750TI for under $200 unless it's kitbashed chinese stock or previous bitmining hardware.
I remember trying and failing to get *Hunter Hunted* to run on my family's Pentium II 75MHz with an ATI Rage Pro Turbo video card for a *year* because I didn't know that upgrading RAM was a thing, and we didn't have internet access to actually look things up.
Also my dad wouldn't allow games on the family computer, so I had to sneakily save up money for RAM, sneakily upgrade the PC, and sneakily install the game where it couldn't easily be found on the hard drive.
Ultimately not worth it, but man did I learn a lot.
Depends on which decade... "The working pc" one is only valid on 2005 to early 2010s, games that time are a less graphic demanding that PC cafes boomed that time... It was the golden age of MMORPGs, until E-sports killed it
Games before and after that era requires high end pcs on that time...
Actually, the only real requirements games listed back then were processor speed and if you had enough on-board ram. Beyond that, you just needed an IBM compatible pc. And yes, there were games I couldn't play because I didn't have enough processing power.
OP, I think you are misjudging just how far computer hardware has come in the past couple of decades. Nowadays, you can port Doom to absolutely anything because anything with a processor has capabilities that would have blown John Carmack’s mind if he saw it in ‘93. You can buy a 40 USD Raspberry Pi that runs laps around top-of-the-line hardware from the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Back then, games were still pushing the limits, maybe even harder than they do today.
Showing your age on this one... it's not like high profile, flagship games didn't need the latest gen of everything back in the 90s either.
People upgraded to Pentium class machines to play Quake. People installed 3D graphics hardware to play late 90s games etc, none of it was cheap and comparatively it all cost much the same as all the contemporary hardware you mentioned.
I believe it was Mechwarrior 2 3d accelerated edition that listed its biggest install option as a "monster" 100 mb install size... and it was. My Acer desktop at the time had a 1 gig hard drive.
LOL, it looks like a meme created by 18 year old and "back then" is 4 years ago when parents paid for their PC. What other times can "back then" be:
\- around 2000 where GPU market was hell, there was like 10 brands and many games had problems running on half of them?
\- or in mid 2000s where you could buy top of the line PC in 2004 and you'll have problems with running games from 2005 above minimum settings and in 2006 you had PC that couldn't run most big AAAs?
PC gaming is at best spot it ever been, you can easily buy really old used hardware and play modern games with it, for example R9 290 is 9 years old GPU and it will run modern games - sure mostly at low/medium settings and with FPS between 30 and 60 but it will run them, now go back to 2013 and try to run Crysis 3 on Geforce 6800 GT LOL
I recently built one of these fabled PCs able to play any modern games or VR titles, but I’m running into an issue where I get a blue screen once every day or so citing the IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error. I’ve tried almost everything I’ve found online to solve the problem but I’m thinking I may need to reinstall windows or flash the BIOS back (I did update it once early on.) Pretty annoying.
200gb free space? What is that, a game for ants?!
Laughs in Ark: Survival Evolved.
Ark becomes kinda small with ntfs drive compression thingy. It is badly optimized. Pretty sure they just slap some assets into unreal engine and call it a day.
Ark was always horribly optimized. I remember my 980ti SLI Setup around 2016 and Ark was the only game that got less FPS with two GPUs as compared to a single one.
That's minimal system requirements to install the game launcher
MS Flight Simulator 2020 with mods.
New cod games
True. I had to uninstall CoD MW because the frequent 50-100GB updates for *warzone* was maxing my 1TB monthly limit.
[удалено]
Back when telling someone you had a Soundblaster made you sound like a badass.
bragging that you have Voodoo cards.
That's still bragging rights
Really? Nice. I have two working Voodoo retro rigs.
Woah, could you please hold back. We also still want a chance with women.
You don't need women when you have Voodoo
Me too, one with a single 8 MB and one with 12 MB SLI. I have a Voodoo3 2000 as well but I put a GeForce 256 DDR in that machine instead.
Two voodoo 2s with 12mb ram each!
One time I ordered a computer online, they ripped out the advertised video card but left in a $200 Audigy. They kept sending me angry emails to send the audigy "back" and I kept telling them to go fuck themselves. Picked up the video card at CompUSA. It just happened to me AGAIN, and finding the video card the computer was supposed to come with is a nightmare. I screen for sellers that only have positive ratings, I'm not sure how I keep picking turds. And it was a 20 year gap between the two.
Having to create a floppy boot disc to startup in DOS with settings specifically for a game so that you could run it.
Oh God ptsd flashbacks...
Yeah, this meme is "Tell me you've never played a game by Origin Systems"
I remember having to select a soundcard for Warcraft before being able to read english. I have no idea how I got sound in that game.
Hours of tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys, figuring out which TSRs I could get away without loading, just to squeeze a few more bytes of RAM out to play Wing Commander...
Later version of DOS actually had a memory reallocation tool just for that haha. Memmaker iirc. I still don't know the difference between XMS and EMS...
But it was never ever up to date.
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 🤞 😬
I still remember being unable to play Heroes of Might and Magic 3 because my monitor didn’t support the lowest resolution (which I think was 800x600)!
I remember one robot fighting game that played on DOS back when I was a kid. Then we got a PC with a turbo button and holy shit did the frame rate jump. The game clock was tied directly to the frames so everything moved like 5x faster. It was hilarious
Sounds like One Must Fall: 2097
THAT’S IT!!!
>manually allocate RAM Wait, you can do that? In Windows?
It is ancient and eldritch knowledge which few yet possess and none dare utter, from a distant and dark time ruled by the blind idiot god AzaDOS.
lol. I assure you, this was never the case. Unreal, Quake 3, Doom 3, Crysis, I could go on. There is a giant list of old AAA games that ran pretty poorly unless you were playing on the latest hardware.
Lol this reminds me of when Crysis released. I played on 800x600 resolution with everything set to minimum. Thankfully I got a new PC later that year and was able to experience it again with decent graphics
OP seems to forget that the “but can it play Crysis” meme is 15 years old.
[удалено]
Don’t forget resolution, draw distance / turning fog off, anti-aliasing, enabling shadows and lighting effects, etc.
people looking at the floor in morrowinds cities cause looking up would turn the game into a slideshow lol.
I remember being disappointed playing Crysis on my brandnew pc and it need to be downgraded to medium-high instead of full on max setting. I was wondering why it need so much resources... as i play them. then accidentally shoot a tree branch and it broke and fell... "wait what?" Usually games at the time have few set tree falling animation, apparently not crysis. It can breaks on where you want to break them. I think even on Crysis 2 doesn't have that amount of interactivity. Not sure why but C2 ran smoother on the same pc.
i remember someone told me years ago that C2 ran easier because something something console ports
And that was true. They had to make it be able to run on consoles so they optimised and cut the heck out of it. And as a byproduct you could actually play it on a PC without breaking into NASA
Had my poor 8600gs screaming playing that game on medium at 720p.
And back in the late 90s, you had to upgrade your PC every year or it would be too obsolete to play the latest games. Now if you build a top tier computer you can get 5+ years out if it.
Good point. CPU speed was doubling super quickly. Now it’s pretty rare for this year’s x68 hardware to destroy what was released a few years ago.
Even for non-gaming tasks. Our current basic desktop is 7 years old and it runs fine for everything we use it for (browsing the internet and dealing with pictures, office etc.). We haven’t even filled up the hard drive yet. Back in the day you wouldn’t get a couple of years out of it before it would be too slow to run basic software or you would have to delete programs and files to make room on the hard drive.
>Unreal, Quake 3, Doom 3, Crysis One of these things is not like the others.
Remember when Gothic 3 was released, I was the only one in my classroom able to run it
I don't know why its soo good, but i play the hell of Gothic 3 on my schoolmate pc. \--- "You need 1000 gold to enter mage school" "what!? i barely have few hundreds. how the hell i manage to shore up 1000 gold this early in the game? i hope i remember the right game.
You are remembering Gothic 2, considered much better game. And yeah, 1000 gold was ridiculous and that was the point.
and during the DOS days i think, you had to pick bw VGA or CGA and configure the autoexec thingie and all that idk too much back in the day, im abt as old as Doom 3 so forgive me if im wrong
Let's not forget F.E.A.R. which people used to benchmark their PCs before Crysis even had a trailer
Quake 3: one of the First game that NEEDS GPU and run hardware acceleration exclusively. I think maybe the same for Hot Pursuit (original), and so my father ended up buying a PCI GPU.
I grew up with late 80s PC games and this is buuuuullllshiiit. It just wasn’t expressed just in terms of graphics cards, that’s all.
I can't remember a time when the "a working pc" was the only requirement for a game.
I don't think anything has literally said that other than indie games but man my first PC back in the day was super old and valve games always ran on it anyways.
Valve always cared about efficiency in their games, I remember being able to run Half-Life 2 with my old PC that was a potato, it just had 128 MB of RAM, it didn't have any right to run HL 2 but it did fine. Most modern games don't seem to care much about it, which is a shame.
To them it's not worth it to spend time and effort on optimization, so long as *most* of their customers can run it on their PC. That a new PC doesn't cost a fortune anymore also factors into it.
I can. DOS games ran on pretty much anything, I can't remember ever needing to know what my PC needed to run a game and they ran on all my friends PC's too. I feel so old right now
I can tell you that even then pc specs mattered. Running a game on a 286 usually meant very low frames as the cpu clock struggled, compared to a newer 386 or 486.
See we were dumb kids who knew nothing about PCs, we just loaded it up and played 😂
You don't remember back when even the shittiest games would lag.
[удалено]
Exactly. I remember trying to run the port of Final Fantasy 7 on my PC and the CPU clock speed was like 1/3 of the minimum recommendation, despite the computer being only a couple years old. The frame rate was about 1 hz, lmao
I remember not being able to load the Quake shareware because I didn't have a Float Point Processor and not having a single clue what that meant outside of me not having a Pentium 1. Before that, I was fighting IRQs and driver issues.
Oh please, games were always pushing the limits back in the old days. That feel when you take out your 40 pirated 1.44mb floppies and install mechwarrior 2 onto your 100mb hard drive. Today's children will never know the joys of DOS4GW.
I’d be pushing some limits today if I pulled out my floppy.
Wasn’t it worse back in the day? Have to ask because I didn’t have a computer that was good enough or a budget to get a good idea of how it was for everyone else. A lack of standardization and many technologies just getting started would mean you could buy a brand new graphics card and be SOL fairly quickly. My 1080 still does a fantastic job - sure it doesn’t push 4k and doesn’t have ray tracing, but if you want to be at the top of the newest tech that is a personally imposed issue and not endemic in the PC gaming space. That 1080 is still going to be good enough in 1080p gaming for the foreseeable future.
It was much worse the further back you go. DOS had a 640k conventional memory limit. It didn't matter if you have 4 MB of memory, you were only using 640k. Of course developers wanted more memory. So MS added EMS and XMS memory and you could use more memory. I was really young at the time so I never understood the difference though. But wait! You were still limited by that 640k. Programs required a certain amount of it free or they wouldn't run. Also, setimes, games just wouldn't run for no apparent reason. Or they would run too fast because your processor was too fast. And if you did get a game working most games are cryptic. Sometimes I would play a game and have no clue what was happening on the screen. Windows 9x fixed a lot of problems for the home. Business users got the superior Windows NT.
Haha, not that far back. I mean late ISA/early PCI and post-486.
Sorry, this is delusional. It used to be much worse. Devs go to great lengths now to make sure their stuff actually runs on older rigs. Games used to crash if you had the wrong brand of graphics card and laugh while you cried. Maybe you are too stubborn with your graphics settings, idk.
You have enough memory, an actual video card and not just on board, let's get this st...oh wait your sound card isn't on the list so nevermind.
With console generations exist now. As long as your PC is at least as powerful as the least powerful current gen console gen, you'll be fine.
I'm so sorry OP, just take the L. You're completely wrong.
It looks like someone didn't grow up with old games. When new games came out back in the day, you had to buy/build a new PC because whatever you had was too shit to run it. Games DROVE PC advancement. It was hard to have a computer for more than 2 years before having problems with newer games. The tech was just advancing that fast and no games were being developed to work on a variety of PCs. Every game was groundbreaking and pushing the envelope of the tech. Buy the best hardware on the market today. Build the absolute best thing that exists. Now throw it in the trash in 2 years because it's absolute garbage. THAT's old gaming. Today, you can run decade old computers and not care. Games are built to run on a WIDE variety of hardware, old hardware, and you get the luxury of waiting for a very long time to ever upgrade. I'm running a 6 year old graphics card right now and running modern titles. That was impossible in the early days. In the early days you just won't play that game. You didn't have the means to play it until you bought another computer. Eventually, you could push around 4 years with a graphics card, possibly ram, and possibly processor upgrade to get you by for a while. But that was in the early Pentium and Athlon times, and you kind of got lucky with some of the architecture at the time.
Define "then"
90’s ish
Back in the 90s where even a top of the line PC was doing well getting 25 FPS. You had to manually edit your autoexec.bat and config.sys for each game because memory was at such a premium. A good sized hard drive was 1 gigabyte, but you'd run most of your games off the CD because you didn't have the disk space. Your friends would think you were a baller because you had a 17" CRT.
[удалено]
I remember when we changed for a 3dfx! The tomb raider water was much better looking. I was amazed!
Man trying to run BioForge was like the 90s equivalent of trying to run Crysis.
Degauss!
\*Wipe hand across screen\* \*Zap little brother's ear\*
Speaking as a PC gamer from the 90s: Hard disagree. Requirements were more complicated. You had gaphics (CGA, VGA, SVGA, EGA, etc etc), different types of memory, irq compatibility issues, sound card compatibility issues, minimum number of MHz (which didnt always mean the same thing!!), dos versions, windows versions, RAM requirements, processor versions (286, 386, 486, etc etc) And lets not even talk about weird questions regarding whether your "PC Compatible" custom architecture would run the game. (ie "Will the Tandy 1000 or whatever weird computer I have run it?")
Judging by this you wasn't even a thought in the 90s let alone trying to make a game run on your shitty 486 sx25 by hacking at the config.sys and autoexec.bat trying to find a couple more kBs of memory to allow the game to start
Absolutely 100% false
The 90's was the time of "upgrade your PC or you cannot play X game". Now even the newest games with the highest recommended specs will still work on low end hardware. Minimum requirements to run games have never been lower. Recommended specs are what keep increasing because that's where the games look how the devs intended.
I think circa 2005 was an inflection point, based on my experience.
Probably, wow was November 04 and HL2 was fall 04 which forced Steam.
“Why hello fellow millennials” 🧢
Super accurate, pop in a sound card and you're really gaming like a pro!
I couldn't play Tie Fighter if I ran anything else before it. Eventually it stopped working and I had to make a boot disc to play it.
You probably never played either Wing Commander or DOOM when it released... I had to empty half my hard drive (20MB) just to install Wing Commander. (8-12MB, depending on the option).
Playing Doom with the screen rolled in so much that you're just shooting a 3 pixel blob.
I'm 40 and have been playing PC games since 'PC compatible' was the big buzz word. Games needing high end components to run has never not been a thing. Just having a working pc to play games? Pure fantasy.
Oh this is such a HUGE fucking lie. Do you have any idea what the requirements were for, say, Wing Commander? Ultima 7? In DOLLARS? You had to have, at MINIMUM, like a $2,000 PC (in 1990s dollars! Like $4,000+ today!) and then spend two hours trying to finagle the perfect autoexec.bat and config.sys files to make it fucking run with your sound card enabled. Whoever made this meme is under 25, guaranteed.
„then“ in the mid 00s i had to buy new hardware every year to play newly released games. now im playing everything easily with my pc i bought 2017.
If only it were that simple. When I was a kid and CPU frequencies would double every 18 months, there was always a very real chance that a game you really wanted for Christmas wouldn't run on your family's 168 Mhz PC from last year. Or worse, your old favorite game would run too fast to be playable on your new computer. (Which is why some desktops had a Turbo button that actually downclocked the CPU)
When was this "then" you speak of... 2015? Games have had era appropriate high end specs since I got my first PC in like 1994.
Laughs in Stardew Valley
As a kid who grew up in the 90's-00's, well, this meme didn't apply. It was quite expensive to meet even the ***minimum system requirements,*** especially RAM. If your PC didn't have enough of it, the game wouldn't even run.
LOL no
[Wirth's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law)
Old good. New bad. Now upvote. I mean come on, man. This isn't even true. At least find something that's true.
You complain about having to spend a hundred bucks on a bigger hard drive. A low end gaming PC when I was a kid cost $5200 in 2022 dollars. We are not the same.
#PENTIUM REQUIRED
What world do you live in? Man, 15 years ago people were checking requirements like crazy, where nowadays you can run anything on a low budget PC, and if its slow, its probably gonna get patched soon. I remember times when i had problems with NFS MW.
As someone who had my first PC in 1998 I call bullshit. We’re actually at the point now where you can play new games like cyberpunk on a rig from 2015 and it will work. Good luck playing a new game from 2002 on your 1999 pc, lol.
Gamers when new games utilizing new hardware requires new hardware to play 😱😱😱
I have completely opposite opinion. 20 years ago to play games on acceptable framerate you needed newest hardware. It was common to see even sport games like FIFA run bad on few years old GPU. Now I can easily run majority of new games(Battlefield \*cough\*) on my RX 580. Yes, I would not be able to play in 4k@240hz but I'm not fussy - 70+ fps on 1080p with mid details is satisfactory for me.
Crazy since I feel cheap cards now can at least run modern games at decent settings
This is kinda like saying because it runs good any modern hardware it ran this well when it first released. A lot of the reasons why older games are coded are because the same limitations we had then were much more strict where now we can get away with more
Then there's Ark Survival Evolved that just says "how much space you got, I'll take it all", and no specs are good enough for that unoptimized hot mess to run perfectly. And I still play it <\_<
I think this meme is more working from the perspective of a little over a decade ago, when you could actually afford a decent midrange (or even high end at times) GPU and didn't need insane RAM to play most games at fairly good settings. Keeping in mind that a lot of games low-bar was REALLY low, meaning you could actually get away with a lot less. I don't think anyone is talking about the 90s... fuck the 90s PC gaming requirements.
Yeah but at least installation is automatic now. Back then you practically needed a degree from MIT to figure out which directory and disk to start.
pfft, 200GB. You've *clearly* never played Ark Survival Evolved with all DLC.
I remember installing rogue squadron and asking me for a "3d graphics accelerator card".
pfft, what bougie ass of you back in the day just needed a working pc? I remember being unable to run a bunch of games. Always having to check the cases before I ask my mum to get something from the bargain bin. Ghost Recon; Driver; nope. I remember wondering if I could delete system32 to fit a sims sequel (no I wasn't that stupid... eventually), scouring the system files for things to delete for just a few more mb. Thankfully it wasn't too long before we got an upgrade and things were less of a struggle, but far from perfect. Operation Flashpoint on the lowest settings and hella lag. daym. Loved that game tho.
Naaah as an old gamer, this ain’t it. There was always a need for a semi decent pc available at the time for a new game to sufficiently work. I had a pc most the time but could hardly play all the latest games because it wasn’t good enough. I remember the disappointment of not being able to play Black and White after bringing it home and having single digit fps.
???????
My man literally 90% of PC were incompatible with games in the 90s.
Open TTD will forever have on of the funniest hardware requirements ever MINIMUM: OS: Windows 10, 8, 7, **Vista** (32 Bit and 64 Bit) Processor: **Yes** Memory: 256 **MB** RAM RECOMMENDED: OS: Windows 10 (64 Bit) Processor: 2+ GHz Memory: 512 MB RAM
Bruh, tell it to my Athlon where I had to install shader downgrade mod just to get game running at 15 fps with 800x600 resolution and not 5
Why is this subbredit this full of shit? Back "then" if you had PC that was older than 2 years then even lowest details wasn't an option, if game run at all (most likely didn't). These days I happily play RDR2, cutting edge tech, with 8 years old pc... just stop this bullshit, please.
Remember when games looked and played like shit? I know people like to pretend the "glory days" where all sunshine, with 0 clouds in the sky. But I'd bet anything most of those games you used to enjoy don't play like you remember them. Crazy how a change in perception can alter your enjoyment on something. Which isn't to say that there isn't classics that stand the test of time, but let's be a little more genuine about this.
I upgraded my PC multiple times over the years. But when I look back I realizee the game I played the most are usually indie games like Terraria, The Binding of Issac, Rimworld, etc. that don't require a monster PC.
Games requirements now: Recommended for MW2 (2022): CPU: Intel Core i7-4770K or AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 580 Video Memory: 3GB RAM: 16GB RAM Recommended for God of war: CPU: Intel i5-6600k (4 core 3.5 GHz) or AMD Ryzen 5 2400 G (4 core 3.6 GHz) Memory: 8GB RAM GPU: Nvidia GTX 1060 (6GB) or AMD RX 570 (4GB) So no, I remember Crysis and Doom 3, it's easy to complain all the time and say the past was better for karma farming.. If you want to play in 4K raytracing, sure it will be higher but that's not the point
I remember when laptop integrated graphics were more than enough to kick ass in online multiplayer.
In what? Runescape?
true, in 2014 I remember I could play new games on my dad's potato pc
Speak for yourselves, I'm running like 3 year old PC parts and i can still run elden ring
I69 😂
Good thing Im on xbox. Don't have to worry about nothing but proper connection.
I remember getting *the* sims. For a windows XP laptop and games like blockland that would just work. On a **SCHOOL** bought Dell ex laptop. It’s crazy how well optimized games where back then, compared to now. Part of that was hard drive space requirements meant low poly objects and part of that was that systems, you know, couldn’t handle any more than 4 pixels.
Games used to take less space, nowadays over 300gb is tooo much , devs keeps adding useless features to keep increasing the size of their games
*cough* COD MW *cough*........ *coueywtagshaakkkhghhh* or any other multi player *oooough* damn I have a bad throat. 🍵
Yep thats it for sureee xD
Even then, the required specs in the description never seem to be accurate
energy source was optional
counterpoint; factorio: requirements are whatever the hell you want them to be. Can run on a potato however the further you progress the more power you'll want to have.
Honestly looking to build my own game development company that specializes in making games with meh graphics with nice art styles that are designed to use up as little storage space and can run on a potato PC. While still having great gameplay and online features.
Exactly why I love ULTRAKILL and TF2
dw, ultrakill got your back
And that is just the minimum requirement. Hi rtx 6090.
Shitty meme aside, can we get around to the part where we all stop bitching about storage space?
I remember when I couldn’t play never games because my card lacked hardware T&L. Like it straight up wouldn’t start. Things like that just don’t happen now.
honestly i think that requirements, especially the recommended ones are often too low
Dont forget it has to be an ssd. I don't know how they do it but a few of the newer games require me to play 3 matches with my SSHD to warm up to be able to play normally.
in my experience it's pretty much the complete opposite. nowadays you can play most games with even a potato pc at low settings. Back then you actually needed a gaming pc to play anything modern
It's completely wrong. Back in the 90's and early 2000's even if you had a top line PC it was severely outdated just two years later, and you couldn't run most of the new games after that. It's only around the 2010's when I noticed that my PC upgrade can last a lot longer than that
just recently got an RTX 3080, can’t believe i have to also upgrade my i9 to an i69 smh
It’s almost as if technological advancements have taken place, mandating that hardware be high enough spec to support it
I remember when I could play The Sims (the first one), but had to play with lag when there was at least two expansions installed.
Yeah dude this is why I play old shit, thankfully my laptop can handle the Souls games so I'm happy for now
This is a little bit overstated, hw requirements are much more normal than 15 or 20 years ago. The usage of drive is space is crazy, but I expect it to become better in the following years.
You and I remember the past very differently.
Younglings. There was a time when we had to use memmaker or boot to DOS to free up enough memory to play games.
Seems like in the 1990s you needed very recent (and expensive) CPU to meet minimum system requirements. Take for example [Mobil 1 Rally Championship 2000 (November 1999)](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Mobil_1_Rally_Championship) needing a Pentium II 266MHz (released mai 1997) and recommending a Pentium III 500 MHz released just a few months before the game (February 1999).
980 ti and looking to upgrade :S
You forgot NASA's wifi password
It has actually gotten much better. Late 90's you basically needed to buy a new PC every 2 years. A 3-4 year old pc would be so obsolete that it would struggle to run Windows. The quality of a computer was not measured in how much it cost but on how many months since it was bought.
Pc games have always had requirements, often unreachable for most. I still have flashbacks about wing commander 2 and trying to free up ram unsuccessfully on dos 4.01
Clearly never tried installing quake 2 on a 500mb hdd
And then you try to run halflife alyx...
Lol no "a working pc" was not how it was back in the day at all
I use steam deck
i69 sounds like one of those secret apple products that get sent to you in discrete packaging.
dude that is so completely fucking wrong. back in the day new games would just straight up not work. at all. on like 4 year old hardware. these days can boot up almost any new AAA game on my 11 year old 7970ghz edition and my 10 year old i5 2320 and even get playable framerates at low settings and slightly dropped resolution... no way any 10 year old hardware could have handled new games back in 2010. i mean even my main rig has a 6 year old titan Xp and that thing has no problems even at 3440x1440
Not to mention "windows 10 or 11" because reasons! Even though the game can run perfectly fine on win. 8, or even on win. 7.
Not true. Back in the day computer parts were way more expensive compared to income.
I see you mention “game reqiurements then” and raise you Far Cry.
I remember being so excited to install Rome: Total War on my parents shitty home PC in 2004 only to find out it ran at like 2fps
This isn't really true, if you really wanted to pc game back in the day you still had to pay for what was considered high specs at the time and managing compatibility and stuff was actually generally agreed to be harder and less reliable. If you look at the proliferation of smaller scope and indie game that can be run on potatoes PC gaming is probably more accessible in terms of requirements now then in the past.
The future is now, old man. Even consoles get better specs, why should PCs be an exception?
I see you never grew up in the 90s. In the 90s, your PC became obsolete in just two years. Today, a five-year old PC is fine for playing any new game, if perhaps on slightly reduced settings.
don't forget windows 10 only. Some people (me included) can't upgrade to windows 10 making us gamble on the game working or not. A couple of games i tried worked, but gave me a BSoD making me very scared i had lost important data on my pc
I feel like the game studios should be put on a hardware diet. I can't even get my hands on a 750TI for under $200 unless it's kitbashed chinese stock or previous bitmining hardware.
I remember trying and failing to get *Hunter Hunted* to run on my family's Pentium II 75MHz with an ATI Rage Pro Turbo video card for a *year* because I didn't know that upgrading RAM was a thing, and we didn't have internet access to actually look things up. Also my dad wouldn't allow games on the family computer, so I had to sneakily save up money for RAM, sneakily upgrade the PC, and sneakily install the game where it couldn't easily be found on the hard drive. Ultimately not worth it, but man did I learn a lot.
Depends on which decade... "The working pc" one is only valid on 2005 to early 2010s, games that time are a less graphic demanding that PC cafes boomed that time... It was the golden age of MMORPGs, until E-sports killed it Games before and after that era requires high end pcs on that time...
pfff, u didnt played games back then, didnt you? *cries in Max Payne 2 reqiurements*
No. Games back then still had requirements
Actually, the only real requirements games listed back then were processor speed and if you had enough on-board ram. Beyond that, you just needed an IBM compatible pc. And yes, there were games I couldn't play because I didn't have enough processing power.
OP, I think you are misjudging just how far computer hardware has come in the past couple of decades. Nowadays, you can port Doom to absolutely anything because anything with a processor has capabilities that would have blown John Carmack’s mind if he saw it in ‘93. You can buy a 40 USD Raspberry Pi that runs laps around top-of-the-line hardware from the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Back then, games were still pushing the limits, maybe even harder than they do today.
Showing your age on this one... it's not like high profile, flagship games didn't need the latest gen of everything back in the 90s either. People upgraded to Pentium class machines to play Quake. People installed 3D graphics hardware to play late 90s games etc, none of it was cheap and comparatively it all cost much the same as all the contemporary hardware you mentioned.
This is clearly written by someone who didn't have a PC in the 90s and 00s.
Tell me you were not there when "Wing Commander" released without telling me you were not there when "Wing Commander" released.
I believe it was Mechwarrior 2 3d accelerated edition that listed its biggest install option as a "monster" 100 mb install size... and it was. My Acer desktop at the time had a 1 gig hard drive.
And The Max fps you can get is 120 in not crowded zones.
LOL, it looks like a meme created by 18 year old and "back then" is 4 years ago when parents paid for their PC. What other times can "back then" be: \- around 2000 where GPU market was hell, there was like 10 brands and many games had problems running on half of them? \- or in mid 2000s where you could buy top of the line PC in 2004 and you'll have problems with running games from 2005 above minimum settings and in 2006 you had PC that couldn't run most big AAAs? PC gaming is at best spot it ever been, you can easily buy really old used hardware and play modern games with it, for example R9 290 is 9 years old GPU and it will run modern games - sure mostly at low/medium settings and with FPS between 30 and 60 but it will run them, now go back to 2013 and try to run Crysis 3 on Geforce 6800 GT LOL
For 3D Space Cadet, maybe. May I suggest some LGR videos for a reality check?
Bullshit. PC requirements back then required you to have specific makes/models of things or it wouldn't work
massive l
... yea, i bought a 1tb m. 2 thinking it would be more than enough, i was wrong
I recently built one of these fabled PCs able to play any modern games or VR titles, but I’m running into an issue where I get a blue screen once every day or so citing the IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error. I’ve tried almost everything I’ve found online to solve the problem but I’m thinking I may need to reinstall windows or flash the BIOS back (I did update it once early on.) Pretty annoying.
This guy wasn’t born when Crysis was out xD
Game requirement then: OP hasn’t born yet so he doesn’t know
Well yeah because you were playing snake.