[batiudrami]

Crazy take, in the late 90s/early 00s your GPU could be obsolete 9 months after buying. The “optimisation” you talk about was the CPU in the ps4 generation was so weak and tech was moving so fast that any pc bought in 2015 onwards would easily brute force overpower anything that had been built for that generation.

[ronsor]

> Crazy take, in the late 90s/early 00s your GPU could be obsolete 9 months after buying.

Not because the developers were lazy, but because newer GPUs were that much better.

[rasz]

Because GPU developers started to be less lazy :)

No T&L meant everything was culled, clipped, transformed and per-vertex divided (perspective, lighting) on CPU.

Then you have brute force approach. Voodoo 1/2/3 doesnt employ any obvious speedup tricks in its pipeline. Every single triangle pushed into it is going to get textured (bilinear filtering, per pixel divide), shaded (lighting, blending, FOG applied) and then in the last step the card finally checks Z-buffer to decide between writing all this computed data to buffer or simply throwing it away.

It took a while before GPU devs started implementing low-hanging fruit optimizations https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/to-earlyz-or-not-to-early...

Hierarchical-Z, Fast Z clearing, Compressed Z buffer, Compressed Textures, Tiled shading. It all got added slowly one step at a time in early 2000.

[jeltz]

There were lazy devs back then too but I feel lazy devs have become the norm now.

[bombcar]

Obsolete in that you’d probably not BUY it if building new, and in that you’d probably be able to get a noticeably better one, but even then games were made to run in a wide gamut of hardware.

For awhile there you did have noticeable gameplay differences- those with GL quake could play better kind of thing.

[tinco]

The GP was talking about Unreal Engine 5 as if that engine doesn't optimize for low end. That's a wild take, I've been playing Arc Raiders with a group of friends in the past month, and one of them hadn't upgraded their PC in 10 years, and it still ran fine (20+ fps) on their machine. When we grew up it would be absolutely unbelievable that a game would run on a 10 year old machine, let alone at bearable FPS. And the game is even on an off-the-shelf game engine, they possibly don't even employ game engine experts at Embark Studios.

[justsomehnguy]

> your GPU could be obsolete 9 months after buying

Or even before hitting the shelves, cue Trio3D and Mystique, but tha's another story.