This is a witty title for these comparison shots.
By
Arcanaville,
Posted on: 2012-06-13 22:55 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Wow.
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With high end graphics, the surfaces become *so reflective* that they can reflect buildings from other dimensions!
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Pretty sure those reflections are from the correct dimension, even if they're not obeying the physics of *any* dimension.
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Originally Posted by Zombie Man
With high end graphics, the surfaces become *so reflective* that they can reflect buildings from other dimensions!
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Where to now?
Check out all my guides and fiction pieces on my blog.
The MFing Warshade | The Last Rule of Tanking | The Got Dam Mastermind
Everything Dark Armor | The Softcap
don'T attempt to read tHis mEssaGe, And believe Me, it is not a codE.
Clearly, the Magistratium plaza leads to a mirror universe to Praetoria where Emperor Cole is a ruthless dictator instead of a benevolent emperor alongside with goatee wearing versions of all of the praetors!
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I'm impressed by how well the low end blurs stuff and otherwise compensates so it doesn't just look horrible. It isn't great, but it isn't just flat surfaces with solid colors
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You forgot 3D Resolution Scaling. (-:|
Originally Posted by DLancer
[...] and at the absolute minimum settings.
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Originally Posted by DLancer
I took these shots in Nova Praetoria as that is the newest zone and therefore should have the greatest difference in the high and low end.
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Who smeared petroleum jelly on your screenshots?
@bpphantom
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Low-end graphics in Praetoria and the new Atlas Park are horrendous enough that I wish Atlas had never been changed. It's uglier now than it was before, unless you pony up for a computer that can render fancy graphics settings.
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To get the true low end experience you really need a low end computer.. or in my case a Dead End computer. You can lower the graphics but you still have some bells and whistles going on.. so for those here I present..
CoH from a Dead End system
World texture is very low, character Texture very high (I like to at least have MY character look decent). World detail is 50%, character detail is 30% (lowest as they can go).
Imperial City
This was taken from the orange building near the TPN building. The picture is darker then it looks in game sorry about that. Notice though the invisible aspects of the building's windows.
Clockwork cleaning streets
Here we have some photos take in AP.
Atlas Park's invisible building The building isn't always invisible, before my memory upgrade that is basically what I saw all the time in first ward from most of the buildings.
Near Liberty
Looking at the Tram
and we shall round it out with a few King's Row pictures.
KR one
KR two
KR three
So ends a quick view of a dead end system. 
I'm actually impressed that the game holds up as well as it does on a system like mine. And for those wondering yes I am as up to date as I can be on my drivers... and by dead end I mean there is literally nothing more I can do for my system in terms of upgrades to hardware or drivers.
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They can't let old computers hold them back fom developing better graphics |
Originally Posted by FlashToo
Low-end graphics in Praetoria and the new Atlas Park are horrendous enough that I wish Atlas had never been changed. It's uglier now than it was before, unless you pony up for a computer that can render fancy graphics settings.
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@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
ive been playing on minimal graphics for years cause thats about all my comp can handle when im also doing web browsing lol
when i get a better computer i plan on turning settings up
I have an old putersaurus that still has an agp card. (Nvidia 7900GS.) My res is 1680 X 1050. I play in windowed mode. I have water set at medium, and it is beautiful. All in all my game looks awesome, considering the age of my old tower-of-power. Here is the mansion from Night Ward.
and here is one of my characters, Beast Whisperer Dara.
�Many things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.�
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Huh. I'm running a 7900 GS too, but I've got things cracked way down. I only play in 1280 x 768. Turning on water effects was an absolute frame rate killer. Even with minimum graphic setting certain things, like the Dream Doctor's little dimension before the Magisterium trial, grind my frame rate to the teens.
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Originally Posted by Healix
I have an old putersaurus that still has an agp card. (Nvidia 7900GS.) My res is 1680 X 1050. I play in windowed mode. I have water set at medium, and it is beautiful. All in all my game looks awesome, considering the age of my old tower-of-power. Here is the mansion from Night Ward.
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Hmm... I guess that depends on what you expect out of the game. I've run a 7900GS, and this only works if I'm OK playing at 10-15 FPS in most places, around 8 in Grandville and around 1 in Atlas Park. It really wasn't until I got a GeForce 285 that I finally started seeing framerates in the 50s and 60s and I never looked back. I'd sooner have an uglier game that runs smoothly than a very pretty PowerPoint presentation masquerading as a game.|
Originally Posted by ketch
Huh. I'm running a 7900 GS too, but I've got things cracked way down. I only play in 1280 x 768. Turning on water effects was an absolute frame rate killer. Even with minimum graphic setting certain things, like the Dream Doctor's little dimension before the Magisterium trial, grind my frame rate to the teens.
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Incidentally, those "dead end" screenshots are quite interesting. The ones from Praetoria and the new Atlas Park look almost like they came right out of Homeworld 2, and they're just HORRID. Kings' Row, by contrast, looks pretty much like it does now, and looks considerably better at those very low settings.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Even if you're rendering in-game stuffs on the low-end with a kick-awesome computer, you're still using a kick-awesome computer to render in-game stuff.
I appreciate the use of the term "putersaurus." I'm going to have to use that, thanks!
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or have computer geek friends willing to sell you parts for cheap |
Originally Posted by FlashToo
Low-end graphics in Praetoria and the new Atlas Park are horrendous enough that I wish Atlas had never been changed. It's uglier now than it was before, unless you pony up for a computer that can render fancy graphics settings.
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Looking at these pictures, I wonder where the 'average' PC falls now in terms of graphics and processing performance? I know that the 7 and 8 series of Nvidia cards are no longer sold (my last card was a 8600 and I couldn't find a replacement anywhere, necessitating a complete system upgrade in the end) and that base requirement alone (if you want a video card that's available, you nearly have to buy at the least a dual-core system because of the dedicated video card slots most motherboards have post say about 2006) just puts you well above the minimum specs for the game.
I'm on a reasonably tight budget, but I got a good system (admittedly the labor for building was paid for but the parts were selected by a friend of mine with good PC knowledge) for around 700 dollars AU.
Are we now approaching the end of this minimum requirement era, perhaps?
S.
Part of Sister Flame's Clickey-Clack Posse
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Isn't that what new games are for?|
Originally Posted by Golden Girl
They can't let old computers hold them back fom developing better graphics
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I run on low settings but I get about 30-35 fps normal content which includes up to team of 8. It drops by half in incarnate content which is tolerable considering I don't grind the stupid things repeatedly. But the new atlas park I go near liberty it drops to like 5 fps or less. It and the Preatoria zones are the worse. I don't get this frame rate drop in new dark Astoria or first ward and night ward.
IDK what else to say e/shrugs I just stay the heck out atlas as much as possible.
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They just buy them at NewEgg anyway. (-:
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Originally Posted by Mr. DJ
or have computer geek friends willing to sell you parts for cheap
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Hi, my name is Damz and i play on low/medium graphics!
Yes it was months before i knew that some parts of my costume was glowing and it was only because of a passing comment from a random player!
Edit:
6 weeks until i can get a new computer anyway so woop! 
@Damz Find me on the global channel Union Chat. One of the best "chat channels" ingame!
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I think this is completely to do with the differences in how shader tech is utilized these days verses a time when shader tech was used back in the early 2000's when they were working on the game. |
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Incidentally, those "dead end" screenshots are quite interesting. The ones from Praetoria and the new Atlas Park look almost like they came right out of Homeworld 2, and they're just HORRID. Kings' Row, by contrast, looks pretty much like it does now, and looks considerably better at those very low settings.
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AP, Preatoria really heavily upon the shaders to fill in detail on the buildings. A system like mine has no hardware T&L(standard on all cards these days), nor do I have vertex shaders. Look at Lancer's low end images and high end.. the buildings are very well shaded in both. On my dead end system the images buildings looks horrid and plain because there is nothing to actually shade in the building details so I basically get rendered blocks with no textures. A very flat dated look.
KR and other older zones though all had building textures and do not rely upon shadows to give them all the details that they do. This causes them to look great on a low end system and very much the same on a higher end system but I imagine that they also look dated on upper end systems where the actual details could all rendered and shaded realtime verses just loading a textured picture.
I think eventually the Devs are going to have to bite the bullet and raise the system requirements sometime soon. The truly scary thing about the requirements for CoH is that they are BELOW my computer. I know how poorly CoH played on my computer when I had 1gig of memory.. I can't even conceive of the game even running at all with 512mb ram and a Gforce 2 era card.
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They can, and they do, and they should. They can continue to improve things, but they have to be aware of the limits of their existing playerbase while they do.
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Originally Posted by Golden Girl
They can't let old computers hold them back fom developing better graphics
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They can, and they do, and they should within reason. Unless they have a disproportionate number of players on systems olde and broked, I'd think they probably have a moving target time window that they aim for with their minimum system requirements; e.g. "a mid-range system as of four years ago".|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
They can, and they do, and they should. They can continue to improve things, but they have to be aware of the limits of their existing playerbase while they do.
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Most of the nitty-gritty details of the graphics were developed sometime between 2001 and 2003, and probably more parts of the code than people realize are now a decade old, when an average system had maybe 1 GB of RAM, a single core processor running between 1 GHz and 2 GHz, a 200 or 300 GB hard drive, an on-board crappy video adapter or maybe a dedicated AGP video adapter with 64 MB or 128 MB RAM, ran video at around 1024x768, and were probably running Windows 98 or Windows 2000 (or *gag* Windows ME) with DirectX 8.
It's not unreasonable to not continue to support such a setup, especially since probably less than 0.5% of the players have a system less than twice those specs today. At some point, folks really are going to have to upgrade their systems. I'd be tickled pink if every five years or so, the game has an engine upgrade significant enough to basically raise the minimum specs up to what the average was when the last engine upgrade was.
We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.
(If you love this game as much as I do, please read that post.)
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I haven't seen any statistics in a while for something like this, but I seem to recall that Blizzard's research indicated that the percentage of their MMO's population that lagged behind in system specs was higher than one might expect.
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Originally Posted by TonyV
It's not unreasonable to not continue to support such a setup, especially since probably less than 0.5% of the players have a system less than twice those specs today. At some point, folks really are going to have to upgrade their systems. I'd be tickled pink if every five years or so, the game has an engine upgrade significant enough to basically raise the minimum specs up to what the average was when the last engine upgrade was.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.
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So, on a lark I decided to take some comparison shots between CoH with all the graphical bells and whistles and at the absolute minimum settings. The difference was quite a bit bigger than I thought it'd be. I took these shots in Nova Praetoria as that is the newest zone and therefore should have the greatest difference in the high and low end.
High End:
Low End:
High End:
Low End:
High End (The water looks much better in motion):
Low End:
Current Published Arcs
#1 "Too Drunk to be Alcoholic" Arc #48942
#2 "To Slay Sleeping Dragons" Arc #111486
#3 "Stop Calling Me"