[for all you gamers out there. link to forum:
<http://games.slashdot.org/games/04/03/14/2213236.shtml?tid=
126&tid=127&tid=156&tid=186&tid=206>]


Posted by michael on Sunday March 14, @06:57PM
from the debian-still-compiling-for-386 dept.

CowboyRobot writes "Intel engineer Dean Macri has an article at
ACM Queue listing the challenges in designing PC games that
will run on very different processors. PCs vary widely in their
performance, and if game developers design only for the
high-end, they limit their market. The article lists specific tips on
how to guarantee that even old slow machine can run new
games, such as 'the number of triangles used to create the
trunks and branches could vary based on the available
processor and graphics hardware performance', 'replace the
clothing on characters in a game with actual geometry that
separates the clothes from the underlying character model', and
for simulating ocean waves, having low-end systems rely on
basic sine waves while higher-end machines use more
sophisticated methods."