In an interview with Eurogamer on Thursday, July 17, Frontier Developments founder David Braben has revealed that the studio’s space combat simulator Elite: Dangerous will launch with graphical options that current PC gaming hardware won’t be able to run.
” We’re going through some wonderful effects internally that look truly beautiful, and we’re saying, that slows the frame-rate a bit, doesn’t it? ” Braben told Eurogamer at this year’s Develop Conference. ” And we say yes, but we don’t mind, because it looks so beautiful. But what we’re going to do is attach it to this part of the detail slider. Or we’ll call it out as a tick box. ”
Braben hopes to future proof Elite: Dangerous by banking on Moore’s Law, which is the observation that computing technology will increase significantly approximately every two years. With this, Elite: Dangerous is said to continue to impress on a graphical level for years to come.
” Moore’s law is our friend, ” Braben added. ” Even if your PC of today can’t run with all the features on, your PC of tomorrow might. ”
” That’s great because you start to see the richness. All our models are so detailed. We’ve got 4K coming now. It pushes today’s graphics card to do 4K. I’m not pretending we’re there yet, ” Braben continued.
“ There’s 8K in the wings. You can’t buy 8K TVs yet, but you can buy 8K cameras. 8K TVs can’t be that far away. It’s just thinking, actually, that’s going to traumatise today’s PCs, even the top end workstations with things like Titan Blacks in them. But, that hardware will go on getting better and cheaper.
And so I love the idea of being pretty future proofed. ”
We’ve established that Braben recently teased that Elite: Dangerous may also release on consoles. We’ve also established that Elite: Dangerous entered its fourth Alpha phase back in May, which featured 400 billion star systems and 200 cubic light-years of space to travel around in.
Elite: Dangerous is slated to release worldwide on PC at the end of 2014, with a Mac release following three months later. We’ll bring you more on Elite: Dangerous’ development should further information reach our ears. You can read Eurogamer’s full interview with David Braben via the source link below.
[ Eurogamer ]