thegreyshadow: While my paltry Intel UHD 620 onboard GPU can play some very good games with great results, there are others which make it struggle (such as The Witcher 2, a game already 10 years old!).
Making games which are unplayable (at least on the lowest end) on systems without discrete GPUs is counterproductive to game companies.
First of all, GPU production is experiencing (and has experienced since the global cryptocurrency explosion) chronic shortages and problems in availability.
Secondly, there is an absurdly large market of PCs with onboard GPUs.
Excluding such a computer base from your latest game simply impose an unreasonable limit on your potential audience.
Games should have Crysis-like and ray-tracing GPU consumption levels on their highest tiers, I can get that. But they should also ensure that their games should be playable on the lowest setting with onboard GPUs such as Intel UHD chipsets.
What do you think?
W3irdN3rd: I think you'll like LowSpecGamer.
It's technically complicated. A game is designed to target some system, often a console. With a UHD 620 (which is 5 years old btw) you can generally play games that target PS3 and Xbox 360. If I'm not mistaken (I could be), The Witcher 2 was famed for it's graphics because it initially didn't target those consoles but just the PC instead. (an Xbox 360 version was released later though)
Some graphical options can lower the system requirements: disable special FX, lower texture resolution, lower screen resolution, reduce draw distance, lower detail for models. But at some point that becomes unacceptable. If the game has a rich environment, you may have to lower the draw distance to run it on your UHD 620. But then, the next checkpoint could be beyond your draw distance. Or a character tells you to visit the blacksmith "over there" which you can't see because he's too far away.
And model detail (including the environment) can't be adjusted easily I think. There are usually at least two models: a high quality model and an LOD (Low Object Detail) version. The game switches to the LOD version when something is further away. In some games you can hack something to use LOD always regardless of distance, a common feature of "potato mode".
To make any game run on your UHD 620, developers would have to create lower quality models that sit in between LOD and the regular models (some games do this anyway), have options to disable special FX (and test if they don't break anything), create simplified versions of animations and take care not to include too many active elements in any given scene. That'll likely affect gameplay. And this isn't even all they would have to do.
They absolutely would do that if game consoles didn't exist. Many potential customers either have a console or a dedicated GPU.
Some recommendations: Far Cry 3 takes some tinkering but can be made quite playable. Something similar for GTA IV and GTA V. Other titles with relatively good graphics that should run reasonably well: Skyrim, Risen, Driver: San Francisco, Mafia II, Test Drive Unlimited 2, Portal 2, Just Cause 2, Saints Row The Third, NFS: Most Wanted. And just check out LowSpecGamer.
Exactly: most games, they are targeted for consoles. They're often targeted for THOSE boxes, as this is often where many gamers do play games. It's simply - this is the box for their games and dev's built around one (or two) sets of hardware (as consoles often just have one box or say one better Pro Edition box - like PS4 Pro or X Box One X).
Often, games are built around those systems (their original version), for the bare minimum. When they do that, then often the console's power/specs and those (or very similar stuff on PC) become the bare minimum and base-line for PC; especially since now XBox's architecture has usually been x86-based or x64-based.
They want their games to look and play a certain way - so if they require certain systems, toolsets, features - it's b/c they are trying to make their game look amazing (let's be real, great graphics sell; especially technically or artistically) and have a certain vision in mind of how they want it to look, as its their vision.
Finally, since PS4 is on that architecture and now Sony's playing ball here and not their own stuff like the Cell Tech and other stuff - it's probably tons easier to port this stuff to PC. Besides trying to keep up w/ Microsoft's doing now (i.e. bring their games to both PC and Xbox platform), Sony has to compete and probably also why we're finally getting PC ports of some recent Playstation games like Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, Detroit: Beyond Human, Days Gone, possibly Uncharted series, and more are supposedly planned - even if they come 6 months to a few years later here.
For PC - eh, they can just aim to the moon, if they want. Often, they go somewhere in the middle in the AA and AAA space - and those are the requirements. Sure, might not sell tons of copies if they push stuff to the moon on Day 1 release like Crysis 1 did (as you'd really have to convince gamers to upgrade their stuff ASAP) - but likely, at some point, hardware and software will catch up.
