Blue Mars as rendered on a Dell Inspiron 530, Dual Core, E6550 @ 2.33 GHz, 3.0 GB of Memory, NVIDIA GeForce 8300 GS. Will Blue Mars be accessible and enjoyable for the average user, or will it require gaming computers that only a few can afford in the current economy?
2 comments:
Great little video! It looks like you're above 1 fps at least. :)
The thing that seems to matter most with Blue Mars is the video card; they must be offloading lots of the work to the GPU. Your 8300 is off the bottom of the official Blue Mars video list. The 8200 that I first tried it on (and got even worse performance than you show here) is even further off the bottom.
The fancy new computer that I got for my birthday has a GTS 160M, which is at or a bit above the middle of the range of supported cards, and I get a very respectable fps. People have pointed out on the Blue Mars forums that a decent video card for Blue Mars would be only ("only") US$100 or so, and that a full desktop system capable of running Blue Mars well might be only about US$600 (monitor not included).
Which might not be all that much if (a) the economy were healthy, and (b) one was willing to buy a new computer for the sake of using Blue Mars. The latter is not going to be true of many people until there's some actual content in the world. :)
Dale, that has exactly been one of my contentions. I knew that due to it running the CryEngine, it would be a graphics intensive world. Acc. to the specs, I'm surprised my computer even runs Blue Mars at all. I'm laggy, not as fast and I can't see shadows or the nice water effects.
I noted in a past post how if you aren't a power user, how can one justify upgrading or buying a new machine--especially in this current economy. I know that I can't justify it right now--especially as my computer works just fine for everything else. Given the nature of Blue Mars, what would constitute being a "power user" anyway? Usability can truly be a barrier to folks.
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