Battlefield 3 no XP support

What the XP supporters don't realise is how much extra work it is to support XP if you don't do it from the start, you need to write an entire new render path, new shaders for DX 9, plus all the testing and troubleshooting, all to support a minority of customers on an OS that isn't even fully supported by Microsoft any more.

Windows 8 is out next year, seriously it's time to drop XP.

It's true that only 20% of people on the Steam surveys are on XP so cutting them off isn't a disastrous decision but where it has wound up pretty much is. Fewer than 10% of users have a card capable of running Battlefield 3. Supporting DX9 from the off is still the only decision that makes sense because there are still just so few cards capable of pulling significant DX10/11 effects at anything resembling playable speeds.
 
Let's be honest, this is not a representative forum so will absolutely be skewed towards people that are happy to upgrade their system every 18 months.

No... It's representative of the Steam stats. A wide range of gamers that are after different things from games. It is completely representative of the Market today.

XP is a minority, as are machines with 2gb ram or less.

Fewer than 10% of users have a card capable of running Battlefield 3.

Made up statistic is made up. What are the minimum specs for BF3?
 
Fewer than 10% of users have a card capable of running Battlefield 3.

Steam stats have 56% of users with DX10 cards and almost 6% of users with DX11 cards, since PC games have the ability to be run at medium or low settings, plenty of people will be able to play BF3.
 
For those whining about 2GB vs 4GB of RAM making no difference try running GTA4 on a Q6600 with 2GB of RAM.....truly awful!

Add 2GB more and it's playable. Literally a night and day thing! :o
 
For those whining about 2GB vs 4GB of RAM making no difference try running GTA4 on a Q6600 with 2GB of RAM.....truly awful!

Add 2GB more and it's playable. Literally a night and day thing! :o

Not to mention alt tabbing out of a game is painful with only 2GB of RAM, I don't know how anyone can still be gaming with 2GB of RAM these days.
 
Steam stats have 56% of users with DX10 cards and almost 6% of users with DX11 cards, since PC games have the ability to be run at medium or low settings, plenty of people will be able to play BF3.

If by "play" you mean "see the menu screen and get like, 10fps on minimum at most" then yeah they've only senselessly cut off 38% of users. If you mean get an acceptable framerate with settings that look better than Quake III then you're pushing close to that 10% figure, I'm sure some people can scrape by with just slightly less than recommended settings but that's not, well, recommended. But if they'd put even the least effort into optimising it they could have made it playable to at least 90% of users.
 
If by "play" you mean "see the menu screen and get like, 10fps on minimum at most" then yeah they've only senselessly cut off 38% of users. If you mean get an acceptable framerate with settings that look better than Quake III then you're pushing close to that 10% figure, I'm sure some people can scrape by with just slightly less than recommended settings but that's not, well, recommended. But if they'd put even the least effort into optimising it they could have made it playable to at least 90% of users.

No, they couldn't, stop living in the past.
 
If by "play" you mean "see the menu screen and get like, 10fps on minimum at most" then yeah they've only senselessly cut off 38% of users. If you mean get an acceptable framerate with settings that look better than Quake III then you're pushing close to that 10% figure, I'm sure some people can scrape by with just slightly less than recommended settings but that's not, well, recommended. But if they'd put even the least effort into optimising it they could have made it playable to at least 90% of users.

If everyone's computer hardware was exactly the same and fixed like the 360 sure, but it's not and PC's aren't quite so easy to optimize for with lesser hardware.
 
Much like Crysis when it came out, if you couldn't run it, tough ****, upgrade, or whine about how the game should run on your outdated machine.
 
Much like Crysis when it came out, if you couldn't run it, tough ****, upgrade, or whine about how the game should run on your outdated machine.

I paid £400 for this 8800GTX, Crysis is badly optimised because I can't max it out at 1920x1200.
 
No, they couldn't, stop living in the past.

Why is the past more technically advanced than the future? I suppose it could be down to sales, the declining role of the PC and so on meaning games that once would run smoothly on a 1gig machine with a 7900 and a Pentium 4 3ghz now need a quad core 4 gig 6850 but there's no technical reason why they couldn't get the technical efficiencies of the past back, merely economic ones.
 
Why is the past more technically advanced than the future? I suppose it could be down to sales, the declining role of the PC and so on meaning games that once would run smoothly on a 1gig machine with a 7900 and a Pentium 4 3ghz now need a quad core 4 gig 6850 but there's no technical reason why they couldn't get the technical efficiencies of the past back, merely economic ones.
Because people want all these fancy effects that are taking up more and more of developer's time, time which they could have spent making the game for DX9 (lol). Because we're not all prepared to wait 12 years for a video game (look at how well that turned out) I'm happy with this.
 
You may as well ask why not throw that money into a big fire. Next year I can get something twice as powerful for the same price and something that will take another year before I have to upgrade it. I'll also get the option of Win8 so I don't have to worry about upgrading OS in 2014 when people ask me why I'm using a 4 year old OS and shouldn't expect to be able to run 360 ports on less than a 16gig oct core with a 4gig graphics card.

If you have that attitude about upgrading your PC, you will never upgrade.

Because next year when you go to buy, you could get something twice as powerful for the same money the year after, so you might as well wait another year to upgrade right?

We aren't getting screwed over this, since they KNOW that most PC gamers use Vista/7. Not a big deal to upgrade now is it...It's a much better OS for one. And Windows 7 x64 is stable as a rock, not like dodgy XP x64.
 
Last edited:
Steam stats have 56% of users with DX10 cards and almost 6% of users with DX11 cards, since PC games have the ability to be run at medium or low settings, plenty of people will be able to play BF3.

can people not read graphs or statistics any more? Do they not teach this in schools nowadays?



67% of steam users have a dx10 card

and a further 24.47% have a dx 11 card


only 8.5% of steam users don't have a dx 10 + card.
 
Back
Top Bottom