I want to ask the older PC gamers of Yea Forums. What was considered a demanding game back then...

Doom 3.

In the 90s 3D Accelerator cards really started pushing next generation graphics forward. There was a time you had to have them installed aftermarket to get certain games to run.

I remember using the Bleem emulator to run and upscale Ps1 games like Syphon Filter and being very impressed

I also remember Star Wars Racer (podracing) being an eye popping game graphically at the time

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i ran a website with diablo hack programs on my friends server who lived in california

it got 81,000 hits in one day, and at the time things were veeeeeery different on the internet. his ISP handed him a bill for $460

so if you ever got ganked by finger of god in diablo, well, now you know one of the people you can thank ;)

Early 90s, Doom was basically the first instance I remember where people were actually upgrading PCs to play games, since literally everything ran at 4MB of RAM and Doom was better suited for 8MB

I would benchmark UT2k3 and compare with friends

In general it was less consumerist oriented and more hobbyist. People were less interested in raw horsepower to fit more pixels on the screen and more interested in things like casemods.

another game people upgraded pcs for was Rise of the Robots which only required modest upgrades but i still knew a guy

youtube.com/watch?v=gDvQgkExpKM

at the time people often had 2d video cards with very low VRAM and low transformation capabilities. so to run this game you needed a card with more VRAM

it would still be a couple years until 3d accelerators hit it big. This game was the first ever game I remember that was really a strong selling point for controllers on PC. The gravis gamepad pictured in OP was used to play this game.

If it's the early 90's then Doom.
The reason Doom got so many crappy console ports (except Playstation Doom, which came out when a computer that could Doom was affordable anyway) was because there was no such thing as buying a $300 dell and a graphics card back then, even a cheap computer was in the thousands.
And if you had a lower end one you were stuck playing Doom like this
youtu.be/9_2qGaIOvjs

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>stuck playing Doom like this

being "stuck" playing doom like that was more exciting than just about anything else to ever happen in video games.

Also 486 had been out for a while when doom came out and was soooo much ridiculously faster. 386 was actually like a "console generation" behind at that time and its still playing doom well in that video, considering.

I learned everything about computers back then from leo laporte......

For me, it's Computer Chronicles

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>What was considered a demanding game back then?
I got a hot wheels car that came with a hot wheels game on a floppy disk. The intro screen played at one frame every 8-10 seconds. I couldn't play the game until we got a new computer in '93.

After that, my next blazing fast upgrade was a used computer discarded by the school with it's 64mb of RAM. Dropped another 64mb of RAM and an 80gb hard drive in it. That beast was capable of loading most Warcraft III maps in under 60 seconds. Most.

I had 80mb ram in 1996, the most of anyone I know. I was trying to load quake into ramdisk! I couldn't get it to work.

Basically every new shooter that came out, for a good fifteen years at least.
To make up for lack of memory, games would come on 12+ 3.5" discs. It's amazing to me that now there's simply a lack of patience.

same
Screen Savers was the shit back in the early 2000s

Ultima ascension was the first game any of us had to upgrade our hardware to run.

hell is playing where in the world is carmen san diego on apple ][e

I believe it had 12 fucking disks or something, but it didnt install you had to swap them, and of course its 5.25 disks so they can be right side up or upside down. lol

>What were the "benchmark games" of back then?
how much fun you had. not logging into a second fucking job.

it felt like i had to upgrade every fucking 2 years for a while, it was dumb as hell but also very exciting because the jumps in technology were very noticeable. it's unreal that people can get 8-10 years out of their pc these days.

>it's unreal that people can get 8-10 years out of their pc these days
when you know how to build a PC proper, that is expected. if you are upgrading every two years stick to consoles.
you exposed yourself, not me.

Phil's Computer Lab is a good resource on vintage video and sound cards. He goes through all of that history and I love watching his videos.
youtu.be/VkzO2w6EqK4
He actually got me into collecting old graphics cards.

Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 were hugely demanding games. DirectX 9 demanded a lot from cards at the time.

Quake was also really demanding but having a dedicated 3d accelerator was rare at the time. And do note that I said 3d accelerator, not a gpu. You typically had a dedicated 2d video card alongside a 3d card that was solely used to play games. 3dfx Voodoo cards were the top cards for some time. Until Nvidia unseated them.

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Back when? Doom had trouble running at full speeds on some computers.

Wasn't Unreal Tournament THE benchmark game of 1999/2000?

i'm talking about in the 90's and the very start of the 00's. i should have clarified.

Unreal was pretty heavy as far as I remember. It looked fucking amazing. Not so sure about UT, it ran pretty well on my average computer. I remember having to upgrade for Unreal 2 but that game wasn't very good.

yeah in the 90's i paid 5k for my PC.
i wasn't upgrading it every two years.
not many others were either.
now, 5k nets you a fucking MONSTER (aside from the lol gpu, now)

Doom, then Quake, then Quake 2, and then Unreal fucking destroyed what we had at the time. A few years later Q3/RTCW was one we used.

Later it was Farcry, Fear, HL2 and DOOM 3 and by that time 3dmark was being used everywhere.

what even is technology

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Zork. If you think hardware is expensive now, you'd be shocked at how much it cost to have a setup to play Zork back when it came out.

>$5k
yeah mine were a lot less, my shit $1200 pcs only lasted a couple of years before i had to start swapping out the graphics card and cpu or get more ram. now even a $1200 pc will probably last 8-10 years.

remember though, that was PC, as in personal computer. not gaming shit. it was nothing like it is now.

>my first jumpdrive from staples was 64MB
>paid $45+
yeah

Technology isn't real. It's all a government hoax. Screens are just television broadcasts that are perfectly timed to make it seem like people are interacting with it. This all started back in the cold war when the US had to make itself seem technologically superior to the soviet union, however it has kept going because the illusion of technology is a great way to control people. It's the perfect MK Ultra mind control brainwashing device. Notice how people were more sane when they played outside and didn't spend all day on their phones and computers? The CIA is using this illusion to turn everyone into mindless slaves.

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big if true

Coming here to say this. Been a PC/Comp gamer since the C64 and this was the first game I came across that the system I had wouldn't run.

Prior to that, there was a point in the late 80's to early 90's when an HDD was not that common but games, usually from Sierra, required HDD install.

I remember when I couldn't play Oblivion because my gpu wasn't good enough. Sad times

I remember Doom 3 being the game that made my dreams of power PCs a thing

I have a Mac 128k. Its older then I am and I think its cool as hell.
I pulled it from an ewaste site but it doesn't work so I've been trying to figure it out how to fix it.

I couldn't run NOLF2 after I bought it. When I finally got a stronger PC, I lost the CD. very sad.

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My £349 PC has lasted me since 2012, the only upgrade being a 750 Ti 2GB.
It's a far cry from the way it used to be in the Amiga days, when a megabyte of RAM would cost you a leg.
I suppose that's why I can't help but laugh at people who just NEED to have the latest thing. No, you don't! The best games have already been made, and there's more than enough to keep you busy 'til doomsday.

Pretty much this. It was a definitely golden age of PC gaming.

youtube.com/watch?v=1NWUqIhB04I

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there were so many different 3d cards at the time. Half of them were absolute trash, but on certain games they were actually pretty good. This was before OpenGL and DirectX. So card makers had to make their own APIs for separate games. The only exception was 3dfx's glide api, which every game dev took into consideration.

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I remember Battlefield 1942 being a power hungry game. Just looking at screenshots doesn't convey just how 'heavy' that game felt at the time. I remember constantly fiddling with the settings trying to get better performance and just starting the game and loading the map look like 15 mins.

Doom 3 was another one but that game sucked so I didn't care.

oblivion was the benchmark for about a year

youtu.be/MHH1zu_ZAec?t=104
There was a time when getting a computer to render this was considered incredible

EverQuest
Unreal Tourny
Crysis

I had to run a memory optimization script any time i wanted to boot doom.
I also upgraded a GPU for Lego Star Wars.

>throw crysis on the shitbox laptop as a joke
>actually runs pretty alright
holy shit im getting old

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Crashing this thread.

>The best games have already been made, and there's more than enough to keep you busy 'til doomsday.
yep, I have a 970 and the only thing that will ever make me upgrade is when i finally decide to try out vr which i really want to do but can't justify the cost atm
aside from that, there are no good games that don't run on a 970

I still never played it because the last time I built a budget box it ran fine graphically but the sound card just made angry buzzing noises.
Fuck my PC is already old and it was already budget when it was new.

Yea, got a friend who keeps upgrading his pc about 1 or 2 years. Mostly because they keep breaking their PC or want to play the latest games.

>never sent me back my blankie
consolebros I'm so cold

Crysis is a weird because it's optimized like shit, so Even modern hardware won't give You fully-locked 60FPS, but Even potatoes can run it decently if You put everything on low

I remember Ultima IX being especially demanding.

Before Crysis, it was F.E.A.R.

The mindset of 3D cards ended up being "3DFX or nothing" with PowerVR a close second at that time, but no one really supported PowerVR unfortunately.

never thought of BF1942 being power hungry other than RAM usage.
Battlefield 2 otoh... well, I remember having to upgrade my rig multiple times to get it to play ok on high settings.