Lower end video options

[Darkworth]

Hello, we were evaluating Leadwerks Engine for a work project and it was looking to be the perfect find, when we realized that it did not seem to support any kind of backwards scaling for video requirements. Is there any way to get leadwerks to run on a system with a shader model 1.0 - 2.0 card? Or does perhaps, an older version of the engine have lesser requirements? Regardless of how well suited the engine seems to be for our needs, a shader model 3.0 requirement is a no questions asked deal breaker. We simply cannot impose that kind of system requirements for our project.

 

If there is an older version that will run on lesser cards or a way to "fall back" to lower shader models then I think Leadwerks would be at the top of our choice list... others wise, I am afraid it will fall comletely off of that list. :/

 

Thanks in advance for any info.

[carlb]

the answer at the moment is no

But i would recheck as i think you find steam shows that most cards are shader model 3.0 and higher

 

josh did say at a later date he will add lower spec in but the question is if a machine can play crysis then it can run le.

 

so why you need to run on slow low a spec and what you trying to do

[VeTaL]

Josh, now i see that people really always ask about lower-end

[Josh]

In many cases, once they saw what the low-end version would look like, they would suddenly lose interest.

 

Version 3.0 will run on all computers. The reason for this is the prevalence of netbooks and cheap laptops. Although high-end hardware is getting better and better, average computer speeds are actually getting slower. In three years, the average computer will be a $99 netbook bought at Wal-mart. It seems Moore's Law is a normal curve.

 

[Joh]

We simply cannot impose that kind of system requirements for our project.

I can understand your feeling but how many time your project will take to get out? Consider that hardware improve day by day, even in 3 months you will have a big improve on graphic card. So probably in a few months low hardware could be a shader 3.0 ...

 

I had this type of complaint too when i bought the engine 1 year ago, also i bought an expensive nvidia 8800 10 months ago..

Now i can see the same card at really low price.

Just think about it.

[Darkworth]

But i would recheck as i think you find steam shows that most cards are shader model 3.0 and higher

 

on modern hardware yes... i think anything back as far as nvidia's 7800 class will support SM3.0 (might be off on the card version but think that was the first?) However unfortunately a large percentile of the people who use our software do not even come close to that for system specs.

 

The company I work for creates a 2D sketching application that is used to draw floorplans and calculate building area. One of the "visions" they had in mind when hiring me was to give their application 3D visualization capability, however that project never actually made it onto the "TO DO List". They have found themselves in a position where, in order to add the newest functionality they want, they need to upgrade their drawing engine as the original is too slow for the new functionality's performance requirement. Since they have always wanted 3D capability in the application they have taksed me to research the pheasability of using game engine technology to replace the "rendering surface" and provide both 2d drawing capability and very light weight 3D rendering capability without high sys requirements and better rendering performance then the old CAD engine they are currently using for drawing.

 

One thing that made leadwerks absolutely shine was that not only does it have both 2d drawing and 3d rendering methods exposed out of the box, but it also has the ability to create and texture 3D geometry on the fly programatically. Having that capability "out of the box" put Leadwerks miles ahead of any other package I have looked at so far as every other one I've seen up until now would require source code changes to have that ability.

 

However due to the age range and computer literacy of a large portion of our customer base we cannot replace our drawing surface with any rendering technology that "Requires" advanced hardware to run. Normally this would not be an issue with most engines since our actual use of the 3D rendering will be so basic that it will not use any advanced feauters whatsoever and therefore even engines with higher specs have shown to run it at our usage levels adequately on the lower end machines we need to support. The killer for leadworks is that it doesnt seem to have the capability to use anything other then SM3.0, which I believe you just confirmed. Which is a sad day for us, because Leadwerks is the only engine I have found so far that supports all of our drawing / rendering needs "out of the box". It would have made a perfect candidate for using a game engine as a base rendering replacement.

[Darkworth]

I can understand your feeling but how many time your project will take to get out? Consider that hardware improve day by day, even in 3 months you will have a big improve on graphic card. So probably in a few months low hardware could be a shader 3.0 ...

 

Agreed, and if our intentions had anything to do with gameing or even a younger, less stubborn user base, I would not even be worrying about this... but 50-60 yr old men who have been using the same machine for 12 years to do thier work, and don't know how to use that computer for anything other then email and sketching, are not going to go buy new hardware to run their suddenly more advanced sketching application. lol

 

As for "how much time will it take to develop the project" - we have just under 2 months to find and implement a suitable replacement for our current CAD based drawing engine.

 

I am thinking that the best bet might be to just replace the CAD engine with directX use D2D for the 2D drawing to meet this next feature dev time frame, and when time allows, build our own 3D renderer using D3D. I was just hopeful of Leadwerks due to its "out of the box capabilities" and the fact that the engine was encompassed in a dll that could potentially be utilyzed by another application, making it a fairly striaght forward deal to replace our rendering surface with it.

[Pixel Perfect]

It's a shame but of course Leadwerks was never designed with this market place in mind but rather as a high end 3D graphics game and architectural visualisation engine.

[Josh]

They have found themselves in a position where, in order to add the newest functionality they want, they need to upgrade their drawing engine as the original is too slow for the new functionality's performance requirement. Since they have always wanted 3D capability in the application they have taksed me to research the pheasability of using game engine technology to replace the "rendering surface" and provide both 2d drawing capability and very light weight 3D rendering capability without high sys requirements and better rendering performance then the old CAD engine they are currently using for drawing.

Agreed, and if our intentions had anything to do with gameing or even a younger, less stubborn user base, I would not even be worrying about this... but 50-60 yr old men who have been using the same machine for 12 years to do thier work

It sounds like they want two contradictory things. Leadwerks running on an Intel integrated chip isn't going to look any better than whatever you are using now. Why bother upgrading to anything?

[Rick]

In three years, the average computer will be a $99 netbook bought at Wal-mart.

 

The problem is the average PC user doesn't care much about about PC games. The average PC users play their games on handhelds and consoles.

[Darkworth]

It sounds like they want two contradictory things. Leadwerks running on an Intel integrated chip isn't going to look any better than whatever you are using now. Why bother upgrading to anything?

 

Afraid you are not understanding what I am saying completely Josh. We do not "have anything now". We have an outdated 2D CAD engine and the 2D drawing functionality we are wanting to add in, is choppy on the old engine. We want to switch to a DirectX or OpenGl base for rendering, both 2D and eventually very simple 3D... ie. no advanced lighting or effects of any kind.... 3D visualization of the 2D floorplans... thats it. But right now the main concern is a faster, smoother drawing engine for the 2D (IE no flickering when dragging the lines out etc). I was simply looking at Leadwerks due to it being contained within a dll and the out of the box capability to draw 2D on the screen, render 3D and create 3D meshes and texture them on the fly programatically. (amazing how many engines seem to be 100%, totaly reliant on pre-created geometery)

 

However the point is moot since it has already been verified that the current release will not run on the older hardware that I have to support. (Not by choice mind you.)

 

Thanks for the replies everyone, the results are what I assumed but now I at least know for sure.

[Josh]

It's a chicken and egg problem. I think it's unrealistic to think that the market is driven entirely by consumer choices. Proprietary platforms are profitable, and people aren't usually given a choice to get a computer with decent hardware at a reasonable price. The hardware manufacturers have also done a really good job of obsfucating their specs so that no one even knows which CPU or GPU is faster. In a market where consumers make choices by comparing clock speed or RAM amount to make choices, hiding the hardware specs is the worst thing they could do.

 

There's no reason Fry's can't put a four year old GEForce 8800 in every mid-range computer they sell. They could probably get them at a really cheap price, but instead they use a low-end GEForce 200 which might cost the same or even more.