Splinter Cell Double Agent and UBI's policy
 

I'm asking for your oppinion with this.........

Splinter Cell Double Agent is out, I found out by chance in my local store, took the opportunity and bought it 2 Days ago.
Now with my system, I never had to worry about system specs, hell, with 2 GB of RAM even Flight Simulator X runs on my Computer with decent performance....after a few tweaks ;-)

But what I encountered now really puts me in the mood to smash things apart. :damn:

SC Double Agent ONLY supports Pixel Shader 3.0 or better, since I have a Radeon X800 GTO, this is the end for me. Only 9 GC's are listed as "supported" on the cover, and....accidently 6 of them are Nvidia Cards :x
Additionally: there are NO technical reasons for this, the differences between 2.0 and 3.0 are minimal, if any.....

After searching for a patch in the Web, the only thing I found were forum topic's where you are being told by Ubisoft-Employees that there will NEVER be a patch, that system specs ARE high and they don't give a sh*t on those who don't fulfill these specs. They also state clearly that there ARE donations to their company made by hardware industry influencing which hardware a game does support. I'll post the links here if I find them again.

To me, it seems the days where Gaming Industry listens to players and customers are definitely over :nope: I'm really upset by this since I wanted to play this game without buying a new computer. Now they really want us to be their money-making-machines without taking care of what kind of people we are and that not everyone is a millionaire who can afford a new computer every 6 months.

I now really think about launching an online protest campaign of some kind :down:

I`m sorry, but they are listening to the consumers. Consumers want better graphics and at some point what you have is obsolete.

I understand your frustration, but at some point games can not support all older cards.

I think the same thing also will hapen witn silent hunter 4, suporting shaders 3.0 only.

I also think that the primer reason is MONEY a companny like Nvidia or Radeon probably pay a good price to Ubisoft. The primer objective - make gamers buy a new video card.:(

Hmm. I have PS 3.0, so I am good to go!

-S

That ll makes me like the work of the GW-Dev-Team even more, those guys are almost about to release a new game for free.......there should be medals to award for such work......

That´s not the reason, they could have made SM3.0 optional. In "Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory" you had the choice between SM1.1 and SM2.0, Halflife 2 supports DirectX7-DirectX9 cards, Oblivion supports SM2.0 and SM3.0, Crysis will run on DirectX9 and DirectX10 cards and will also support both SM2.0 and 3.0!

The ATI X800 series is two years old, that´s not old enough to be obsolete.

Thats where the problem is: I bought that X800 about one Year ago, because it was affordable to me then (with around 250 €). I simply can't buy a new VC by now.

Now what kind of plan is it, if you NEED to buy one of the newest Video Cards for about 500 € here in Germany (its around 600 $) ONLY because you dont want to have obsolete hardware one year after. Is this really the graphics improvement customers want? As I said and read before, the difference between SM 2.0 and 3.0 is virtually non-existant.
That just isnt customer friendly, it's forcing people to spend money!