PC Games’ Graphics Settings - Toning them Down Before the Dogs of War get Unleashed
Pushing the Envelope
Games nowadays are mostly all about eye candy — they are about blinding the consumers with bleeding edge graphics that most of the time their background stories have been all but left out.
My article for today however, is not about the debatable intricacies of eye-candy vs. plots but by how developers have so blatantly neglected to provide gamers with internal benchmarks. (Benchmarks, for those not familiar with personal computing jargon, are software that measure how a given PC performs, usually in terms of frames per second (FPS) — a measure of how many “pictures” a system can render per second. Low FPS means the game would be nauseating to look at for long.)
Why are they handy?
In any video game, beautiful women always are haha! Back to the topic at hand…
Given that today’s developers seem to be focusing on pushing the available graphics technologies, it is a small surprise that gamers themselves are pushing their computers to their limits too; they turn on all the graphical features of their games, hoping to get maximized graphics to get that immersive experience they so long for. And herein lies the problem: when they turn on all that bump mapping, gloss, shadows and whatnot, they’re effectively giving their gaming rigs more information to process. Sometimes when there’s just too many explosions, enemies, and moving objects on the screen, the processing units simply cannot handle the load. This results in what is commonly — and mistakenly — known as “lag.”
Still, gamers are compelled to turn on all these settings. And who can blame them? For a comparison of graphics quality, see these screenshots.
There are many instances however, that games can “fool” gamers into believing their PCs can handle higher graphics settings than what they can truly deliver. Usually in the opening levels of a game, all is quiet, there are no enemies, no activity, nothing. So the gamer thinks, “H*ll yeah, this baby can do it!” He turns on all the settings and happily slugs his way through the first simple levels, admiring all the eye-candy along the way. There will of course, come a point, where there’s just so much flak happening in the screen, that the gamer’s PC, having been pushed to its limit, can’t render all those objects. The action then bogs down and the player is forced to tone down his settings. The result?
Disgruntlement.
Now he learns that his system can’t handle the level of graphics he initially set. This AFTER having been spoiled by several hours of quality gaming in terms of graphics. Now he has to play with dumbed down eye-candy. If that’s not a major pain and a harsh reality check, I don’t know what is.
What I have been longing for is to have developers bundle built-in benchmarks with their games that test the capability of the PC they are going to be installed in utilizing the most graphically demanding scene in the game. This way, users can know what settings can be activated without compromising stability and gameplay long before the game’s flak hit the fan.
Way back in 2005, though developer Monolith did this. Here’s a sample screenshot of the ingame benchmark utility of F.E.A.R., their award-winning game:
I hope some developer reads this and implements it into whatever game they are programming. This feature is VERY much important for us gamers.
