The phenomenon of hardware falling out of requirements due to lack of support for newer features instead of due to insufficient compute power is nothing new. We have seen it before with stuff like that awkward shader model change in early ps360 era or more recently with CPU instructions.
I understand it stings because I had it happen to me too in the past, but that’s why it is important to have realistic expectations about hardware longevity when deciding a purchase, especially in the uncertain times of the late years of a generation, when you don’t know where things might go in the next one.
Shout out to Hardware TnL 2.0 feature rendering older cards like the Nvidia Riva TNT2 useless for most games it would have otherwise run fine, like KOTOR. Extra shout out to Max Payne 2 for supporting software TnL at a time when most games did not, preserving the longevity of that card.
That goes to show, that the last ~decade from 2011/12 to 2021/22 has been an outlier in that regard. It used to be that every 4/5 years there was a paradigm change that left any non-recent hardware completely behind, but in 2022 you had people running Elden Ring in almost 8 year old 970s. So I can’t help but find this recent development in requirements acceptable… It has been due for quite a bit of time.
The phenomenon of hardware falling out of requirements due to lack of support for newer features instead of due to insufficient compute power is nothing new. We have seen it before with stuff like that awkward shader model change in early ps360 era or more recently with CPU instructions.
I understand it stings because I had it happen to me too in the past, but that’s why it is important to have realistic expectations about hardware longevity when deciding a purchase, especially in the uncertain times of the late years of a generation, when you don’t know where things might go in the next one.
Shout out to Hardware TnL 2.0 feature rendering older cards like the Nvidia Riva TNT2 useless for most games it would have otherwise run fine, like KOTOR. Extra shout out to Max Payne 2 for supporting software TnL at a time when most games did not, preserving the longevity of that card.
Oh damn, thankfully that was before my time lol.
That goes to show, that the last ~decade from 2011/12 to 2021/22 has been an outlier in that regard. It used to be that every 4/5 years there was a paradigm change that left any non-recent hardware completely behind, but in 2022 you had people running Elden Ring in almost 8 year old 970s. So I can’t help but find this recent development in requirements acceptable… It has been due for quite a bit of time.