Playing on low(est) settings

[sser]

Played Might & Magic X on the lowest setting with my laptop. Looked like TOTAL SHIT. Everything was varying shades of mud. That said, still had a lot of fun and dumped 50+ hours into, twice as much as the framerate I was getting...

 

[Obsequious Approbation]

Gothic 3 at release, unpatched. Completed two-thirds of Myrtana aiming my character's head at the ground all the while for that extra fps. Ah, good times, even if the textures failed to load quite often. Music played nice, though.

 

[Carrion]

I remember playing Giants: Citizen Kabuto on a PC that went far above the recommended settings, and at the start the game ran fine and looked good. Towards the end of the game things got much worse, though (might have been a memory leak or something), and it became nearly unplayable with even passable-looking settings. I lowered the settings so that the game looked terrible, with buildings that looked like they were made from four polygons if you got more than ten feet away from them. It was especially jarring when some other parts of the game were much more detailed so that the shittiness stood out even more. The game was still funny as hell despite the fact that the endgame kind of sucked, but I doubt I would've got very far in it had it looked like that from the start.

GTA3 also ran like shit on that same computer, as its framerate was barely in the two digits. At least it was consistent enough that it was somewhat playable. Before that, Escape From Monkey Island was even worse without a proper GPU, but again playable because adventure game. Rogue Spear suffered from horrible framerate to a point where it became simply unplayable without autoaim or other such faggotry, but I still got halfway through it before giving up. I could list plenty of other games that ran like shit but which I still wanted to play, but those are the first ones that came to mind. Nowadays I probably wouldn't bother with such games, but at one point my endurance level was much higher.

I do think some games look a bit better on lower settings. Higher resolution sometimes makes things look too sharp, sterile and somewhat unnatural whereas a lower resolution gives a bit of warmth to it. This especially applies to many first-person games from around 2000. I also generally dislike high-res patches for isometric games. I'll join the motion blur / bloom / depth of field hate squad as well, save for some exceptions here and there (like Dark Souls that's really meant to be played with DoF enabled). Can't really think of an example where turning everything to low would make the game look better, though, and you'd probably need to have serious problems or a pretty horrible art direction for that to happen (like this becoming this when turning everything from low to high).

 

[BLOBERT]

BROS PRECURSORS ISD GIVING ME FITS AND STILL RUNS CRAPPY SOMETIMES ON LOWEST SETTING FOR ME

 

[Gregz]

And here I was, expecting a juicy tell-all confession from our prestigious members who use the lowest difficulty settings.



seriously though, somebody should make that thread

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I tend to turn off antialiasing, bloom, shadows, depth of field and other such niceties when possible. The performance hit is not worth it for me unless it's an ancient game. Sometimes the game even looks better. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[pippin]

I also turn off cosmetic stuff and lower shadow quality when it feels it will hinder my pc's performance. my laptop is supposed to be weak, but the only game i've really struggled with in terms of graphics is the witcher 2.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

I played Deus Ex with an onborad graphics card, the game lagged as hell, even with 8 bit textures. The solution for avoiding low FPS was playong constantly looking to the ground or to the sky. Can't remember my PC config from that time, but i believe it was an AMD K6-2 with ~300Mhz.

 

[Shaewaroz]

My PC in the late 1990s ran everything like shit. FF7 lagged especially during cutscenes and the game even crashed during particularly intensive cinematics. BG2 also lagged especially during the dragon fights and for some reason in the Underdark.

Actually I think I grew more attached to these games because my 266Mhz MMX could just barely run them, it added a completely new difficulty to the gameplay experience - the shitty PC difficulty. I remember literally praying while playing FF7 that the game wouldn't freeze during a particular cutscene, and more often than not it did freeze and sometimes I had to copy the game save file on a flippy disk and take it to my friend - he would then play through the part with the intensive cutscene and bring the new save file to school in a floppy disk so that I could continue playing the game. As a result I really grew to appreciate being able to proceed in the game and felt heavily invested in the story. I wouldn't change my experiences playing with my shitty computer for anything.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

The solution for avoiding low FPS was playong constantly looking to the ground or to the sky.

You could have LARPed JC as an introverted savant.

 

[kingcomrade]

I recently got Crysis 3. That game looks fucking amazing. After the intro cutscene and playing part of the first level I had to admit I had like a 20 framerate and had to turn it down. I turned it down and it still somehow looked awesome.
I should upgrade my computer. I could certainly afford it but...all the new stuff like the new RAM type and the processor after Haswell comes out next year, so I have to wait.

 

[Turrul]

I played Mount&Blade on the lowest settings possible (DX7!)back then, for smooth fps and full battle size.

 

[IDtenT]

I used to play Morrowind at less than 5 frames a second.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Most of modern shooterz look better with blur turned off.

Brofisted for this one line.

Most modern games look better with stuff turned off.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

They should add blinking in shooters for even more "realism".

 

[DwarvenFood]

I mostly play on laptops, so it's kind of mandatory to play on lower settings while playing 3D games. I can easily play stuff like Shadowrun in full mode, but Original Sin has serious issues and Wasteland 2 I don't even want to try before getting better hardware.

I do agree that lower resolution has preference over lower settings, and overall I do always turn off anti alias and motion blur because of aesthetic preference.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

You prefer jagged edges everywhere?

 

[DwarvenFood]

Possibly I use 2x if it looks better than none, but I don't really recall..

 

[DraQ]

I don't turn AA off for aesthetic reasons but there was the time it was always the first casualty of low framerate.
Reason? It nommed a lot of processing power for near-negligible effect.
Yeah, I know, jaggies.
Didn't move me in 90s, no reason it should suddenly start to.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Didn't give a shit in the 90s, do give a shit now. But it doesn't need to be Ultra settings, Very High or at least High with constant 60fps is what I expect though.

 

[Astral Rag]

Q2 on 486? I though it would not even start without Pentium

Quake 1 runs on a 486 but a Pentium is required for playable framerates

http://web.archive.org/web/19961223112037/www.cam.org/~agena/quake.html

 

[Dr Skeleton]

I remember playing Sacrifice on a PC that just barely met the minimum requirements. Had very long loading times, weird draw distance and terrain disappearing sometime, but the game run smooth even with a lot of units and effects on screen.

More recently, when I first played New Vegas it was on a shitty laptop on low/medium settings with shadows and water effects disabled. A few areas (the NCR airport base in particular) run choppy, but it was playable. I got used to it, so when I played it on ultra with graphics mods it did look kinda wrong, the only significant improvement was lightning and darker nights mods, the difference between vanilla low/medium and ultra is not that big, it's just an ugly game.

 

[Akratus]

The Witcher 2 performs terribly on my computer, but I finished that.

 

[I'm Big Into Anal]

Ad 1.

Ad 2.

still trying to figure out what this is short for...

 

[Wintermute]

Civ4 - huge maps - on a below specs PC. Perfect for catching up on your reading in between turns.