pc upgrade for patch 1.3

[btaft]

It drives me nuts that programmers today waste so much memory and power producing their stuff that in order to play with it you have to go and buy a new computer. Microsoft are the worst for this, but UbiSoft are busy catching them. In effect, you are spending $1000 to play a game costing less than $50 and all because the early ethic of careful programming has been done away with.

So much of what is "added" to games today really does not need to be there and the consequences are as described. What is there is, is written in wasteful code. Remember the old spectrum computer? In those days we thought 56k was blisteringly fast and some incredible things were done by programmers to bring amazing programs to us with such slow processors. Now, we have vast amounts of memory (by comparison), massive hard drives and super fast cpu's and the stuff being produced will hardly run at all. Something has gone very squiffy and I am sure its because programmers have grown lazy and no longer try and save either memory or space.

Although I don't doubt there are some lazy programmers out there, computers are also being asked to do a lot more than ever before

16 Colors vs. 32 bit color
320x240 resolution vs. 1600 x 1200
plain color vs. shading, texturing, fog, antiaising etc
static environment vs dynamic environment
2d simulation vs full 3d simulation
monotone sound vs multi-channel surround sound

You start to add up all of these order of magnitude changes/improvements and you quickly start to eat up memory, bandwidth, cpu cycles, etc. regardless of how efficient the code may be