Thank you for saying this, as someone that’s been putting their own rigs together for 15+ years, the emphasis on having the absolute bleeding edge GPUs to run games at 1080p has gotten waaaaaay out of hand.
The irony being, most of the individuals buying these cards are scalpers for resell or worse, customers who don’t realize they have a 30% bottleneck because their CPU / RAM isn’t keeping up.
There are a slew of capable, reasonably priced video cards that will get you by just fine at 1080p for D2R. Now if you’re stuck with an old laptop, I feel for you, truly. That’s a tight spot.
TLDR - Don’t be intimidated by flashy graphics, a lot of the time the rendering has just been so optimized (DX11 vs DX12 Asynchronous Compute and better engines for example) that normal mid / low range card from the last 5 years can still get you 60fps at 1080p.
This is assuming you’re not running huge bottlenecks elsewhere, but that’s another issue entirely.
You need to remember that GFX drivers were not included with the alpha DL. It was operating solely on the host systems OS.
It remains to be seen what sort of driver’s they decide to add during beta which will probably end up being the final release unless a game breaking bug is found.
Graphics drivers are not part of the games we install. They are the responsibility of the user to install.
If you meant that the D2:R alpha may not have been fully optimized for graphics performance, or the latest graphics drivers themselves weren’t optimized for D2:R, then yes, absolutely.
Yeah, I scored a used GTX 1080 Ti for $300 back in October of 2019. Even back then it was still a deal, because they were going used for ~$450 at the time. Now they are selling used for $700 to $1100 on eBay depending on their make and how ‘used’ the sellers claim they are. Crazy.
I ain’t selling it though, it’s a good card. Plus I don’t have anything decent to hold me over until the pricing goes down/availability goes up for the newer cards.
That’s definitely a component of it, but getting processors, mobos, RAM isn’t all that difficult to be honest.
The cryptocurrency is largely to blame if we’re going to be obnoxiously nuanced here. I mean, I’m getting VISA Bitcoin card advertisements regularly on YouTube. The second most talked about “get rich quick” after Gamestonks and AMC is cryptocurrency.
My Cpu RAM and mobo are all still selling within 50 bucks of the MSRP. Meanwhile my 2 year old 5700XT is selling for $1000 to $1200 … it was 400 bucks when I got it.
TLDR
If Covid-19 is the spiritual pressure from Aizen on global foundries, then cryptocurrency for GPUs is like getting hit with a Hogyoku infused full incantation Hado #90.
I honestly think it will be cool if you can play the game without the new graphics being rendered.
And if they can make it without completely rewriting everything I think they should, not because I say so, but because there are actually many players around the world that will benefit from it.
The cost of new GPUs isn’t relevant. This game can be played on a 10 year old GPU that costs under USD $100. The point I’m trying to make is that there is not a large player-base as a % of the total, that can’t run the game and need a Lite version. Dev time shouldn’t go to this pre-launch.
I’m all for it after launch.
And consider this. You are dropping $100 on a GPU for the ability to play D2R, you’re upgrading your PC component to play all games. If your PC cant play D2R at 1080p 30fps, you’re about 15 years behind in PC upgrades and shouldn’t be catered to.
From a technical development perspective, I wonder how they developed the new resolution vs legacy mode. To allow for instantaneous switching, do we think the PC is running the updated graphics behind the scenes, as to not cause instantaneous stress on the GPU? Or when you swap to the new graphics, is it then straining your GPU to produce the enhanced resolution/textures? If the later, then the game certainly can run on a potato, just never swap to the new resolution, or your PC will stutter.
You can and have been able to for 20+ years its called D2:LOD.
Not to mention you can toggle back and forth between the original and the overlay engine . The only thing you are missing out on is the shared stash space with the remaster.
I don’t think you get the point of being able to play with the rest of the community on your crappy pc.
But that’s alright, you can keep your ignorance.
I personally won’t ever use such an option, but yet again, i know that a lot of people will benefit from it as you will be able to play without a dedicated gpu, you know, these are a bit hard to find nowadays.
For some reason I get the impression you are not really understanding just how D2:R works. They DID NOT RECODE THE ORIGINAL GAME .THEY CREATED AN OVERLAY ENGINE TO ENHANCE THE OLD GFX. YOU DO NOT NEED TO RUN THE OVER LAY ENGINE TO PLAY WITH EVERYONE ELSE. Just a "New " copy for use on the new updated BNet .The game NEEDS a copy of D2 to be running over. You have the option to NOT run the over lay engine ever and just play the old version right along side others running the new version . That has already been discussed and rehashed many times you are a bit late to the party and or missed that info. They did not recode the original version is still all the same. The new code is in the overlay engine that tweaked the things like shared stash. That is why people playing on classic only do not have the shared stash option.
I would assume that D2:R in legacy graphics mode would function very similar to how Sven’s Glide Wrapper is with the original game. Hopefully the performance hit while running D2:R in legacy mode is just as negligible as running Sven’s with the original game.
I have a 6th gen i7 ultra low power laptop with Intel HD graphics, which runs D2 with Sven’s flawlessly. I will be testing D2:R beta on it to see if/how it runs.
Now IF it does run fine on that laptop with legacy graphics, then it would be nice to have a Lite version of the game so I don’t have to eat up an additional 15ish gigabytes of my SSD storing graphical engine resources that I’m not going to use on that particular system.
I remember someone claiming that the performance in legacy mode didn’t change when switching back to legacy mode. If that’s incorrect my posts are useless.
Since I haven’t been invited in the alpha i do not know if that is true or not.
If you take your head out of your … you can understand what I mean.
I’m uncertain how much experience you have had with Blizzard games, but let me assure you that I’ve played just about every single one since the late 1990’s up till now and none were known to have outrageously high graphical requirements to play.
The option to beef up the games and make them look insanely pretty are there but as are the “potato” settings. Starcraft 2 is a good example; you can make it look amazing, basic, or in between, with lots of tweaks and settings available from the menu UI.
It’s one of the things Blizzard are good at - providing that technical flexibility.
I wouldn’t worry.
EDIT: I just saw this so I thought I’d chime in. The expectation to run new generation games – even remakes of old games – on an integrated HD graphics chip is unreasonable. They’re not designed for gaming; just general Operating System UI output and basic video playback.
I’ve been building computers for over 20 years. There are only so many concessions you can make before you simply must make a hardware change.
