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I've noticed an irritating trend amongst gamers; far too many of us judge a games graphics not just on how pretty things are, rather we modify our perception of the game based on the range of graphical options that we're exposed to through the game video option menu.
How many times have you heard this phrase, or something similar "Crysis is an unoptimized piece of shit, I can only run it in medium settings!" But is Crysis really unoptimized? Optimization in terms of computers and maths means to alter some function so it still produces the same output while taking less computational effort to run. So when angry gamers moan about games being slow are they talking about "optimization", or do they really mean that they can't run in "max settings" with their brand new Geforce GTX 780 Yo-Momma edition?
But what are max settings? Some graphical features are simply toggles which turn on/off some particular type of technology such as normal mapping. But a great many of them are actually LOD (Level of Detail) ranges, these are usually measured as a distance from the player where objects get swapped out for less detailed copies, or where objects fade from view entirely.
The problem with these LOD graphical settings is that they are not upper limit bound (technically they are, but the limit is usually far greater than what is possible to use) so the developers are left translating sensible values for things like view and flora distance into a sliding scale or some low/med/high value in their graphics options.
Take Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion as an example, it has a grass distance slider in the options menu, and when you move this slider and save the settings it writes a value to the games oblivion.ini settings file. You can open up this file and see what that value is, you should find:
fGrassEndDistance= 8000
The developers of Oblivion decided that 8000 game units was enough distance for grass, but why that value, why not twice that at 16,000 game units, or half that at 4000 game units? The point is 8000 units is not the max setting for this particular option, far from it, you can edit that value to be a lot bigger than 8000 and it will display more grass in game.
Now we understand these concepts a little better let's go back and look at the original point again, the fabled max settings. People who moan a game is unoptimized because they cannot run max settings smoothly is being a bit of an idiot, if Oblivion runs badly at max settings which includes 8000 game units worth of grass, and then the developers release a patch for the game which sets the maximum slider value for grass to 4000 game units and now it runs well, does it mean the game is suddenly optimized? No of course not.
Instead why can't we simply judge how visually appealing the game is compared to how well in runs without it being effect by what options we're presented with, lets face it Crysis still looks really nice in "medium settings". Next time someone presents the argument that game X is unoptimized; ask them what evidence they have for this.
-Princess_Frosty
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