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Comment by iberator | Hacker News Reader

nope. 14fps on pentium 200mhz with 32mb ram in 512x400 or similar mode (640x480 was too much)

Yeah, I remember playing it on a P233MHz without a 3D graphics card... It was sort of playable, but any alpha-blended effects like muzzle flashes or explosions slowed it to single-digit FPS for a second :D Still, I played it through like that. Today's gamers complain if a game momentarily drops below 60fps or whatever.

Yeah, I get why people want it to be smooth but when you hear somethings I do wonder if folks could be a little more patient.

"My game froze for 100ms on a one time shader compilation dropping... totally unplayable!"

I get it, shader compilation is a little pain point but it isn't that bad. Some compilation times are less than the frame times we used to play at in the 80's/90's.

If you condition yourself to be OK with 15-25 fps, it's almost fine. If you run a game at 60FPS generally, then an occasional hiccup of 100ms will really throw you off. Similarly, the gameplay must be designed differently between low and high FPS games - you don't want the player to feel like they'd have been able to play the game differently if it was running smoother.

Didn't you have a Voodoo-card or something? I'm quite sure I could run HL1 on a P166 with a Voodoo-card with ok frame rate.

With a Voodoo I assume you could get it up to 30fps fairly comfortably but they still weren't the most common back then.

Still remember the concern when Quake 3 would require a GPU as they were not entirely ubiquitous then. It was the right more and it helped the industry forward but it was a little pain point at that time.

Nope . Software renderer.

Quake 2 and Half life had pure software renderer for people who didn't have 3D acceleration cards such as Voodoo.

It was slow but worked on ANY graphical card :)

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