I've been wondering something for ages... how much does the hardware that you use affect your playing skill?

As an example, let's say that you take the same person and put him on a high-end gaming rig with all the right accessories and let him play a few matches against some people, then you put him on a low-end rig that barely runs the game (30-50 fps) with standard accessories, against the same people.

How much of a difference do you think you would see?

Assume that the connection doesn't change (same bandwidth, ping, etc.).

I would go from pro to noob without a doubt. I can barely frag at all with default nexuiz settings

I always play with lowest settings though my computer could run nexuiz with highest settings too. So i guess that i would become much worse if i would play with higher settings.

If you have at least 60 fps, your skill shouldn't be affected.

Musicians muse the same.

Would a master guitarist be hampered at all on a piece o crap instrument? He might think so, but your ears would still be amazed.

Concerning the VGAs, hardware is generally overrated. If your box provides you steady 40fps in a game, you should be as fine as with 400fps. graphics effects wont help you very much, except some light effects, for example if you can see the reflections of a rocket on a wall and recognize the direction it comes from. Or like Utze with his rudimentary settings who can't see his opponents when not fullbright skinned. In most other cases eye candy will just confuse you.

Well, hardware is more than just CPU and GPU. Take a cordless desktop and feel the unresponsiveness of keaboard and mouse. Use a crappy display and 'enjoy' its low contrasts or the slow responsiveness of a cheap TFT.

On the other side, watch Dave's outstanding skills, playing on a (sorry) peace of shit, and he'd even defeat you with a bokken he carved from his wooden leg, and I don't think kojn uses much better hardware

It's all about adjusting to the pattern... it's like playing on a laggy server, once you get used to the ping, you're good. There's a few occasions where you flip the hell out because ~if there wasn't so much packet loss~ I would have nexed that bitch in the head and he wouldn't have rocketed me... but overall, your skill isn't affected.

Well i would say it depends on the kind of hardware.. having LOW fps is something really bad. Keyboards can also be bad. Some just register a limited number of keys pressed at a time. So sometimes you can't switch weapons or stuff like that. Or i would also have some problems using a mouse with less then 5 buttons.
But other then that i think the hardware is not that important. The rest is personal settings like keyboard layout, fov, mouse speed or brightness settings. And well.. experiance

esteel wrote:Keyboards can also be bad. Some just register a limited number of keys pressed at a time. So sometimes you can't switch weapons or stuff like that.

My doesn't register more than 2 keys at a time... so if I want to run up and to the left and say 'i need help' at the same time, I have to let go of one of the movement keys O.o

Two things matter, as long as you have no response lag in keyboard and screen:
FPS: always needs to be above 30, or you can't aim accurately, you're likely to get lag-compensation that causes you to fire a hagar 10+ times into a wall in front of you after clicking once.
Lighting: Real-time-dynamic-lights are pretty important. Without the lights, you can be narrowly missed by a rocket and not know someone's behind you. You can also use the light to track projectiles, or see the explosion from a position that you can't see the player firing it, which gives you an advatage.
Everything else is just nice to have, It's fun to have bump-maps on everything, and to make things reflect light specularly, and to have coronas and bloom around everything to make it look more occularly correct, but those things don't improve, and could even hinder your performance.

The two things i came to realize matters the most fo rme are: steady framerate (id rather play with steady 30 then 20-200 pingpong anyday) and good networking (usualy that means ~50 or less ping and no packetloss.) if thise two are there i usualy do fairly well. that said a decent mouse, screen, gpu... and so on never hurts Oh one thing i recently became aware of: crappy lcd panels can *really* hurt your game..

that said i usualy play @ normal.cfg (sometimes low depending on map) with a more or less constant 120 fps.

Tip: Having some hardware makes you a better player. After all, you couldn't play very well with no hardware.

I would say that so long as the computer is somewhere >1GHz and the settings have been adjusted to suit then it should make little difference.

Edit: Other than having a good printer of course. My Deskjet 3550 really does hold me back and it annoys me when I'm getting fragged by someone with a big OfficeJet.

i noticed i play way better with a low ping. or let me rephrase that: if everyone else is lagging.
does that make me a good player?

yes.

XD

John Galt wrote:Musicians muse the same.

Would a master guitarist be hampered at all on a piece o crap instrument? He might think so, but your ears would still be amazed.

What if it's missing strings and constantly detuning? hmmmmmm

Xeno The Blind wrote:What if it's missing strings and constantly detuning?

Watch Jimi Hendrix Vids, that was back in the times when all guitars were constantly detuning. And the time of great guitar players. Missing strings are not such a big problem for guitar players ^^

Yeah, my hardware definitely holds me back a bit. Half my posts on the forum are probably whining about it, or asking what's wrong with it. But I don't have time to play much Nexuiz these days anyways .

The last time I was playing Nexuiz, I was also having some mouse problems. My old school ball mouse is wearing out, and it doesn't always register when I try to aim up or down.

I have odd issues, On linux with really high settings I can only get roughly 20 fps max. and on windows i can get 70fps jumping to 60, It should really be a lot higher on my Nvidia card, I have no idea whats in the PC all I know is it was bought for a huge amount from Alienware.
then again I get 7 fps on my other pc with the ATI card stuck in it which I kinda expected.

Are Alienware pc's not compatible with linux?

It should really be a lot higher on my Nvidia card

I assume you are comparing

It sounds like a simple driver problem, but I thought Nvidia produced good Linux drivers. Maybe the Nvidia drivers don't fully implement all the hardware features of your card.

Try disabling some of the Nexuiz bling, with my ATI card I had to disable Vertex Buffer Object, this gave a dramtic improvement in FPS. I had very pretty effects but when a bot or another player came on screen my FPS dropped to 1 or 2.

Try another game like Urban Terror or Open Arena and see if they have significant FPS differences.