Smoothness Matters

Smoothness matters, well, at least for me.

Through the course of time, somehow, my taste for PC gaming makes higher and higher standards in term of smoothness aka frame per second (fps). Every PC gamer is like that, or it's probably just my feeling.

It doesn't mean that 90 fps is always better than 60 fps, but 60 fps with vsync (or 70, depending on monitor frequency) is always better than 90 fps without vsync, again, at least for me (I'm undebatable this way) haha

In the past, in my early age of PC gaming (era of Age of Empires II & Warcraft III), I haven't thought that that a game should run smoothly as I think now. On my old PC, at that time, it was not strange that my games ran choppy. I thought all games were like that. But when I learned how smooth Playstation and Xbox runs their games, I told myself "Man, that's definitely how a game should run!".

Then I started to feel ridiculous to play choppy games, up to now.

I started to upgrade my PC to follow the development of hardware tech occasionally, and I always enjoy it! It always feels great to have a better VGA card hehe

I still stick to my PC right now, but, you don't need to tell me, I will buy PS3 and Xbox360 (someday, when I've got the money haha). After all, PC can do so many things that PS and Xbox can't. Playing games in highest resolution with vsync and antialias is also what's good to be a PC gamer.

So, after all this years, I've come to a general technical expectation for a PC game: it should run efficiently, have options for resolution + antialias + vsync, and be playable on 60 fps (it's not impossible that a game is sooo buggy that it becomes incapable of running more than 30-40 fps even on the most powerful PC to date, usually due to bad porting from consoles). Deep options (esp visual) that may reduce hardware demand to run the game on 60 fps is a truly a great bonus.

I say deep options is a bonus because I don't play demanding photo-realistic games. My favorite games are cute and imaginary games, but with high level gameplay, like RPGs (e.g. Deathspank, Torchlight, Fable) and action games (e.g. Devil May Cry 4, X-Men Legends II, Shank, Samurai II Vengeance). If a game itself has effective engine, my hardware should be able to run it real smooth.

Oh, and technically, Devil May Cry 4 deserves a special mention. This game is a true masterpiece of game technical engineering (on PC), imo (safe again). I don't know much about game programming (I'm just a gamer, but without people like me all game developers will die haha) but what I can notice is this: the game uses two visual layers on it's character and objects, the first is basic texture (but hi res) layer with basic lighting (imagine the ol' Counter Strike), the second is a layer of advanced shader effects located above the first layer. When the game is set to low quality, it only show its basic layer and be extremely light to run. When it is high quality, the game shows both layers and goes significantly heavier. On the low quality, I got meta-smoother (I totally made up that word myself, in English: awesomely smooth ) 60 fps with vsync and 2x antialias on my ol' Winfast Geforce 7600GT. And this game is still fantastic on that visual level.

If I were a developer, I will DEFINITELY check out this game and take all its good technical aspect and apply it on my game. It's not plagiarizing a technical concept, but learning from a senior HAHAHA #cunninglaugh