Whats the most Hardware demanding game to date?

From what I'm led to believe, both EQ2 and FS:X are very demanding, but unfortunately one rarely gets to see benches for those titles.

Crysis and Lost Planet are both pretty brutal when maxed out.

I wouldnt say crysis is demanding - its just horrendously coded, which to me isnt the same thing ;)

To me, the reason behind poor performance is irrelevant. You could have a really average looking game, say something like Deus Ex, which would still be the most demanding game if the framerate was low enough. Very often I see comments like "why do people care about how a card performs in Crysis, it's just a poorly coded game, it's rubbish on all hardware". Yet if you actually look at the numbers, it still scales with hardware. If I had to sit down today and play Crysis, I'd choose a 9800GTX over a 9600GT. I'd choose a GTX260 over the 9800GTX. And I'd take GTX280-SLI over the GTX260. Simple fact is, GPU power is arguably even MORE important for Crysis than less demanding titles such as COD4. The difference between 20fps and 30fps will likely be far more noticeable than the difference between 70fps and 100fps. So when contemplating an upgrade, Crysis would be one of the main benchmarks I'd consider (along with everything else, of course).

Can I throw a new direction into the mix?

What's the most demanding game to date, considering the hardware available at the time of release??

I dunno if I'm alone in saying so, But I remember when Vampire Masquerade: Bloodlines was released, no one on the planet could get it running smooth :D

Carmageddon 2 was pretty horrendous, I remember that running at approx 5fps in some places on my PR200+/48meg/Voodoo1 rig. Obviously P2s and V2s were out by then but it was certainly the most demanding game I came across in 1998 (whereas the likes of say Unreal ran OK).

Serious Sam co-op was a bit of a weird one, worst case in some fights it would drop to like 1fps but I have a suspicion that framerate must have been somehow tied up with the networking causing that to happen, as it was never as bad in singleplayer. I think either the listen server wouldn't be able to cope, or the link got saturated.
 
Even though crysis is the most demanding at the moment, its not impressive, even the graphics on high are nothing to write home about now.
 
Even though crysis is the most demanding at the moment, its not impressive, even the graphics on high are nothing to write home about now.

Yup, crysis only looks worthy of its performance at very high, which nobody can run it at on a decent monitor - on high it looks nice but i think COD4 looks nicer in its own way (prob because it runs at a decent framerate)
 
I can't believe people don't think Crysis looks amazing, I played it on High and it was still leagues above anything I've seen on PC.

The problem is with crysis on high or very high it still doesn't look the same as what they showed in the dx9/10 jungle fight vid. The lighting in game seems incredibly dumbed down compared to what they showed in those vids.]

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/screenshots/original/2007/11/Crysis_Ultra_neu_00.jpg#

Only way to get it looking that way is mods, who would expect to have to mod the game after the vids they released which basically said thhe game will look like this out of the box.
 
quake....the first one
i didnt even have a pentium cpu back then (poor poor me :p) it was a cyrix.
did anybody else try running that game with that type of cpu ?
i remember a good while later i got my first pentium 200...wow that was so much better in 3d games.
 
quake....the first one
i didnt even have a pentium cpu back then (poor poor me :p) it was a cyrix.
did anybody else try running that game with that type of cpu ?
i remember a good while later i got my first pentium 200...wow that was so much better in 3d games.

I remember it being really playable on my mates 486 and easily playable on my p133.
 
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quake....the first one
i didnt even have a pentium cpu back then (poor poor me :p) it was a cyrix.
did anybody else try running that game with that type of cpu ?
i remember a good while later i got my first pentium 200...wow that was so much better in 3d games.

lmao. Remember having a Cyrix 200 as our first ever PC. God it was rubbish.
 
anyone got any tips on tweaking crysis for smoothest play, whilst keeping it looking good?

i played through it at 1280x1024 at mostly High, in dx9, (8gb, q6600@3ghz, 8800gt superclocked)

was 'ok' i'd say, being smoother in some scenarios would have been nicer though :)
 
anyone got any tips on tweaking crysis for smoothest play, whilst keeping it looking good?

i played through it at 1280x1024 at mostly High, in dx9, (8gb, q6600@3ghz, 8800gt superclocked)

was 'ok' i'd say, being smoother in some scenarios would have been nicer though :)

post processing and shadows make a big hit...putting them on medium should make it a fair bit smoother
 
what fps did u get and what resolution ?
i only had the shareware version and only really played it in really low res.

FPS, are you kidding? That was 12 years ago.

I do remember the res being 320 x 240, which was perfectly acceptable at the time I might add! Was even the default res iirc. I remember things becoming significantly more sexy when I stuck my PowerVR card in though.
 
I think the problem is, as you say, 12 years ago people didn't really pay much attention to framerate (heck, Doom was capped at 35fps!). Quake helped to change that as it was one of the first FPS games to introduce stuff like timedemo benchmarking, console, advanced graphics tweaking options etc.

Quake performs really badly by modern standards on old cpus even in 320x200. I used to use reduced viewsize on a p166mmx to get better performance. On a 486 DX4-100 you're probably talking 15fps average at best.
 
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