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Recently, 0 A.D. developers have been making strides in improving the game's graphics quality. We have added normal maps, parallax, ambient occlusion, trees that sway gently in the wind - all of which were included in Alpha 11. For Alpha 12, we have added waterfalls (animated textures), post processing effects like bloom and distance fog, and some nice water improvements like realistic water color, waves, and foam along the coastlines. These new features have been added mostly thanks to the hard work of two new developers: myconid and wraitii. We have ideas for further improvements we want to make, both new graphics features as well as improving performance along the way. However there are some shortcomings in how the game's graphics engine is structured, which could make further improvements very difficult or impossible. We have always considered it important to support as many users as possible. For that reason, as we've added these shiny new features, we have been careful not to break old hardware that uses something called the fixed function pipeline. That was what graphics cards used before shaders, which are a much more flexible and powerful technique. Many features of the game are significantly harder or impossible to implement with fixed functions, including shadows and particles, so it has remained a relatively low quality view of the game. Even though fixed render path looks simpler, it actually has worse performance on most shader-capable hardware (2003-04's GeForce FX series being a rare exception). Since about 2003, there has been growing support for shaders in new computers and graphics cards. When 0 A.D. first started, shaders were not planned and only a few users could boast such high-end graphics cards. But over time, fewer and fewer of our users have the old pre-shader hardware, while we've added better and newer graphics features. It has gotten to the point (since 2008) where on newer computers and drivers, the old fixed function pipeline is deprecated or removed. It has been proposed that maintaining the old fixed function support is too much work going forward, for too little benefit. There has been serious discussion of heavily updating the graphics engine, which will require pulling out all the fixed function code. If we choose to continue supporting old ~2003 hardware, it means we have to add another layer which complicates the design and maintenance of the game. It has become difficult to justify this extra work, given how few of our users play the game with such old hardware. Our best estimate is only a few percent of them would find the game playable, of all users since we began collecting user report data in early 2011. Keep in mind that fixed render path has no benefit to "new" computers, while the tradeoffs of keeping it are: less progress in improving how the game looks, increased maintenance of the game going forward, and potentially less performance enhancements. The only reason to keep fixed function support is for the few users who benefit from it. The affected graphics hardware would mostly be: GeForce FX/5000 or older (including GeForce2, 3, 4 series), GeForce FX Go 5 or earlier [1] ATI Radeon R200 or older (2003's Radeon 9250 or earlier), any ATI Rage cards, Mobility Radeon 9500 or older [2] Intel GMA 900/950 or Extreme Graphics [3] Low-end cards from other vendors (SiS, S3, etc.) Possibly newer cards with buggy or missing drivers So we'd like to hear from the community. Do you play 0 A.D. with one of those old pre-shader graphics cards? Are you using fixed render path by choice? Do you feel it's important that 0 A.D. support very old (10 years) hardware, why or why not?