Aranis Nax
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Posted - 2009.01.15 06:31:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Lady Lard
Edited by: Lady Lard on 15/01/2009 05:58:49
CCP, ask your CFO if making 18.91% of your current subscribers unable to use your product is a good idea.
Source: Steam Hardware Survey
Looking at that survey I'd rather say it looks like it's closer to half, if you watch the top right graph it says 14.1% are using sub DX9 sm 2 hardware, 7.83% is using sm2 and 29.3% is 2.0b and 3.0(looking at the detail list below it's a significant portion of them only sm 2b).
Though the trend appears to be moving towards 3.0+ it would appear that it won't be a significant portion of the market in less then a year.
I can understand the dropping of classic, it doubles the workload(and it looks aged after 6+ years). But if what you, CCP Explorer, said is true that the 2.0 shaders are automatically generated based on 3.0 shaders, then I would think dropping the 2.0 support is unnecesary and would prevent Eve online from alienating more players then dropping classic is already doing(though if the hardware someone is using is that old, I don't see why they could not spend some money on a budget build that can run the premium Lite easily).
One final point, and I hate to say it, but look at World of Warcraft. Their game is from 2004(right?) and part of their success is that their hardware requirements are pretty low even for when they launched.
Originally by: Wow system reqs.
PC System Requirements OS: Windows XP / Windows Vista (with latest Service Packs)
Processor: Minimum: Intel Pentium 4 1.3 GHz or AMD Athlon XP 1500+
Recommended: Dual-core processor, such as the Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2
Memory: Minimum: 512 MB RAM (1GB for Vista users)
Recommended: 1 GB RAM (2 GB for Vista users)
Video: Minimum: 3D graphics processor with Hardware Transform and Lighting with 32 MB VRAM Such as an ATI Radeon 7200 or NVIDIA GeForce 2 class card or better
Recommended: 3D graphics processor with Vertex and Pixel Shader capability with 128 MB VRAM Such as an ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT class card or better
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