Doom and Wolfenstein is more a problem of our servers sitting in Germany - and these games are banned here ;-)

But thanks again for the useful addendum.

One of the first DX10 games released was Call of Juarez. It was virtually unplayable in DX10 mode with all the options turned on. Of course, Crysis got all the attention but Crysis came like 1 year later. Call of Juarez really made DX10 look bad compared to DX9 (due to horrible performance) that it made many of us just hold off on upgrading.

Quake1 was probably the biggest video card "killer app" of all time..., only to be intensified with Quake2 (with its native OpenGL support).

How can we not mention Doom? And Wolfenstein 3D?!? Doom 1 was the reason that many people did a complete overhaul of their mobo's/CPU's, in order to turn it from a slide-show to a fluid experience. Basically, Doom is what started it all. Then we were able to play Sim City 2000, etc.. all thanks to Doom.. LOL!

Given the huge popularity of Half Life and its Counter Strike, everybody were quickly ditching their computers from the K6/Pentium1 era to the Pentium3/Athlon era. Right around the year 2000 was the probably the biggest and most rapid change in the computer hardware requirements. Most games started requiring 64MB instead of 8MB memory--an 8x increase within 1 year! Now, we're not seeing anything that rapid in computer tech... not even Crysis is increasing the memory requirements any more than 2x than what a 2+ year old game needed.

Some great ideas for part 2, thanks a lot!

Thanks for the great feedback. We're doing our best.

Nice list, I remember I had to play Morrowind (2002) at a lower resolution on 6800 @16 Pipelines (1152*864 IIRC). At this time I played other games always at 1600*1200. Even with 7800GT I had to balance AA+AF, but with 7950GX2 (released 2006, four years later ) everything was fine then.
But one game is missing: Grand Prix 2, released 1996. That one was for high-end-PCs only and this was ugly, because my father and I wanted to play this via LAN like Grand Prix 1, but then you had to have two high-end-PCs.

Even earlier than the games mentioned here were some of the Sierra On-line games of the mid 1980's. They ushered in more than a simple hardware upgrade, but a complete change in the thought about PC gaming hardware! King's Quest (PC version of 1985) made people consider a sound card (vs. none) and lead people to abandon MGA or CGA graphics in favor of EGA and then VGA.

Nice list! Thanks!

You are missing one of the all-time hardware beasts!

Rollercoaster Tycoon 3.

When this came out, I started my park, and had to stop after a dozen or so rides, because the framerate dropped so low. Each upgrade or new system I've gotten since then has allowed me to add a little more each time, but I still can't use all of the space available to me, since the framerate is still low. At night it cuts to 1/3 of its daytime level. Currently I'm running a Core 2 Duo E6750 @3.0Ghz, with 2GB of ram, and a 8800GT video card. I can't wait to upgrade again to add more to my park!!

Great article though, I was there for many of these games. I can clearly recall trying to play Forsaken at about 4 FPS, that made it tough. Getting that extra 32MB of ram and upgrading to an ATI Graphics Expression with 2MB of ram made all the difference!

I remember that game. You had to use the mouse to control your hands and pick stuff up. It was nearly impossible to find weapons so I had to use paint buckets or a 2x4 to kill a raptor. I ran it on my 200mhz MMX Pentium I processor. The computer would overheat and beep at me for 10 minutes after every 5 minutes of slow gameplay. My computer ended up popping, sizzling and sending thick black smoke into the air. Good times.

Great article.

Really interesting (and sad) to see that Gothic and Flight Simulator always did **** on system requirements

Still though, it used to be much less demanding years ago than now. Now Minimum Requirements most of the time means Slide-show gaming! :/



I second that.

Nice retrospect, though I can't feel as nostalgic, as some of you: I only started playing games since 1999 -- such luxurious entertainment was too expensive back then.
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