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does this situation when my PC can run NFS:Carbon smoothly, but can't run a simple Demo Scene even with the lowest settings, seem normal to you???

makes sense to me. NFS:Carbon, like broozar said, has plenty of fallback options for bad cards (9200 is a bad card. in fact, even when it first came out it was the slowest of its generation) and is designed to run on weak systems (like the PS2). the demos from this season's contest weren't designed to run on such old and slow systems, and wouldn't have been optimised to the extent that Carbon was.

also, do you have ogg installed? i heard there were serious framerate issues in Rudi if you didn't install ogg. aside from that, it runs smoothly on max settings on my crappy laptop.

which demo scene is giving you trouble? i know at least one of those was made specifically to show off flashy effects (which was really the purpose of the contest), and it is difficult to support weak systems at the same time as keeping the download size small.

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i am more concerned about notebook graphics cards. a 8600 in a notebook is damn hot and eats ridiculously much power. so, designing a casual game, i'd take notebook GPUs like Intel x3100 or radeon x1250 as reference.

that's an interesting thought. my notebook is a couple of years old and was really cheap and dodgy at the time we bought it, and it doesn't have a graphics card, but it supports shader version 2.0.

still, there are plenty out there who almost never buy new computers. my girlfriend's computer is an absolute fossil. mind you, she only got broadband last week thanks to me. before that she was on dial-up. she spends almost no time on the computer, which impresses me considering how many people we know who live on myspace sending out bulletins titled "i'm bored" all the time. her brother wasn't too happy when he found out he couldn't run AOE3 at a reasonable speed though.

@outcast: wow. 1999? i just looked it up because i was stunned by how smooth the terrain is, but as suspected it's not polygonal.

great graphics for those days.

julz

Formerly known as JulzMighty.
I made KarBOOM!