Zero Pike said:
No, I have every reason to feel burned. Whenever I bought a game it ran, ether it ran choppy or it looked ugly, or it hardly ran at all. If my system did not meet the specs it requires.
At no time have I ever seen a game which did not give me a software mode or some sort of comprimise for such a thing like a missing pixel shader component.
Since 1996 or so I've seen that constantly. Software mode has been non-existent for the past, well, almost a decade now.
The difference for you is that in this case, you get burned by it.
Zero Pike said:
This is the developers being just lazy. Or meeting a deadline and not attempting to cover all bases.
Horseshit. They decided to develop, from the beginning, for SM 3.0. SM 3.0 is *not* backwards compatible. And frankly, the reason they're not making it backwards compatible is that most cards that cannot run SM 3.0 aren't powerful enough to properly run Bioshock anyway.
Shader Model 3.0 means they get to use vertices to a much greater degree, which can be a humongous advantage. But when they decide to fully utilise that, they cannot support SM2.0 at the same time, without spending a very large amount of time on it, even though only a small percentage of people will actually be using SM2.0.
They could've chosen to stick with SM2.0, but then everyone else would've gone 'Why didn't they go with SM3.0?? Those bastards!'
They chose one way, they clearly told you, but you failed to pick up on it due to your *own* ignorance. You simply can't rightfully fault them for that.
Zero Pixer said:
And NO it does not say one damn thing about pixel shader 3.0 on the box. I dunno what your version of everywhere is, but its definitly not infront of anything I could see.
I never felt I needed to do any fact checking online. Nor did I need to even read the box. Even when I did rea d the box which ONLY says this for the graphics card requirements:
Minimum: yadda yadda: Video Card: Direct X 9.0c complient videocard with 128MB RAM (NVIDIA 6600 or better/ATI X1300 or better, excluding ATIX1550
Ok so reading that, that means to me: hmm I got DX9 just fine, but my cards a little older. its prolly gonna not be so pretty running on my machine.
It did not say on the box Unless your card supports Pixel shader 3.0 your totally fucked. If that were more of a prudent requirement listing. Then I'd maybe give them credit here. But it did not, did it? It may have said it somewhere in a forum or somewhere in a listing. But again it boils down to the idea "ohh my system will run it it just will not look as pretty as they intended." As was my thinking.
Directx 9.0c *compatible* means that it must support SM3.0. NVidia did this from the 6600 series onward, ATI from the X1300 series onward. You did not meet the *required* system specs, took the risk of buying the game anyway and then complained when it didn't work. There's a reason those minimum system requirements exist. 2K games can't do anything about your past experiences with minimum system requirements, and past saying 'this game *requires* x', they can't do much more.