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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

Obsolete in that you’d probably not BUY it if building new, and in that you’d probably be able to get a noticeably better one, but even then games were made to run in a wide gamut of hardware.

For awhile there you did have noticeable gameplay differences- those with GL quake could play better kind of thing.

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The GP was talking about Unreal Engine 5 as if that engine doesn't optimize for low end. That's a wild take, I've been playing Arc Raiders with a group of friends in the past month, and one of them hadn't upgraded their PC in 10 years, and it still ran fine (20+ fps) on their machine. When we grew up it would be absolutely unbelievable that a game would run on a 10 year old machine, let alone at bearable FPS. And the game is even on an off-the-shelf game engine, they possibly don't even employ game engine experts at Embark Studios.

>And the game is even on an off-the-shelf game engine, they possibly don't even employ game engine experts at Embark Studios.

Perhaps, but they also turned off Nanite, Lumen and virtual shadow maps. I'm not a UE5 hater but using its main features does currently come at a cost. I think these issues will eventually be fixed in newer versions and with better hardware, and at that point Nanite and VSM will become a no-brainer as they do solve real problems in game development.

> it still ran fine (20+ fps)

20 fps is not fine. I would consider that unplayable.

I expect at least 60, ideally 120 or more, as that's where the diminishing returns really start to kick in.

I could tolerate as low as 30 fps on a game that did not require precise aiming or reaction times, which basically eliminates all shooters.

On 10 years old hardware?

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