There is honestly no purpose for ULQ anymore

Game Discussion General Discussion
1

I understand people may complain with just the title, however it has been 13 years since WT started and in that same year the Nvidia Geforce GTX 600 series came out (4GB VRAM on the GTX690), now you can find a 1080 or equivalent for less than 100 euro if you are looking hard enough, and a lot of places are now throwing away their windows 10 PCs because of EOL for that OS so you can snag a decent base for a PC.

I get that when the game was very early it was important to have so a larger playerbase can be create, however the latest premiums cost as much as that used 1080.

I used to run this game in an i5-6400 ,GTX1060 6GB and 16GB of RAM at a rather high FPS, before that I used a laptop with a GT630M (a laptop GPU from 2012) and that ran the game fine at medium settings, turned off some effects that I didn’t need and boom a playable experience. I used that laptop until 2020 and upgraded to that old desktop, then in 2023 and 2024 I upgraded to a Ryzen 5 5600 and 4070S.

Supporting hardware that needs ULQ to run is honestly keeping the potential of the game engine back, working around the cheapest oldest components does limit what can be implemented, a decent chunk of devs are ditching even the previous console generation.

With War Thunder being a live service game it has to move with the times.

I know already that a lot of people that want to keep it will only say that due to losing their advantage over other players.

  • ULQ is not needed anymore
  • ULQ is still needed
0 voters

My stance is that with ending ULQ support, will be beneficial in the long run.
Coming from a business perspective if a user is unable to upgrade their system to be above ULQ and run at 60fps at 1080p, then they most likely lack the buying power for any premium content and if you are buying premium content over upgrading your aging PC, shame on you. (yeah this ended up sounding more harsh and heartless than I meant it, but will keep it cause I don’t wish to hide that mistake)

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Warthunder is quite popular in Eastern Europe, Balkans (Russia, especially) and also SEA region.

This fact alone justifies the need for ULQ. While I live in the cited EE region and have relatively good hardware (1050Ti, Ryzen 5 5500, DDR4 16GB) many do not.

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“I finally upgraded now no-one else should be allowed to use ULQ”

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imagine asking Gaijin to willingfully reduce their playerbase out of “potential” LOL.

The game is sitting comfortably at the top of its niche genre without needing to exploit an alleged potential that sounds more like an elitist emotion after upgrading than anything else.

I may argue and even sometimes, engage with other players on this forum about game balance, but I think everyone here follows and gladly complies to one non-spoken rule, no matter the subject if its a premium or a ridiculously expensive event vehicle, and it is to not talk about other people’s wallets or personal lives.
If the game embraces ULQ to stretch its playerbase as much as possible, then stop bitching and complaining over other people’s setups like you’re playing an UE5-based game requiring more than 4GB of VRAM as an arbitrary standard.

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ULQ is still needed though, many people play on laptops with say, Intel Integrated - as I was up until the start of this year. I was using ULQ just to hit an unstable 60FPS at 720p. “Just buy better gear lol” is not the answer to a lot of people. Why shouldn’t we keep ULQ

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Some people can’t as used goods are still extremely overpriced in their countries.
Also, giving triple digit sums for a nearly decade old card is cringe.

No it doesn’t.

Fine/playable is subjective.

Free to play games often have much lower system requirements, I wonder why.
WT is working on graphical enhancements of maps, so people with worse PCs definitely take a hit with every visual rework of a map.

People do weird things, so someone with a bad PC giving 30-ish euros for a premium vehicle on sale isn’t that far fetched.

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I use the ULQ mode to lower my temperature. It’s hot in pacific.

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Components from 2016 which you can get for rather cheap can run this game at rather high settings, I am from eastern europe and the 1060 in 2020 cost me 160 euro (right before 30 series got announced, if I waited a month I would have had a 2060 for the same price, still hurts to think about), that was when I was a student, now you can buy a whole PC for that price with nearly the same specs I had back then.

I understand not everyone can upgrade and may not be in the best financial position, especially right now, if you can try and look at computer recycling places if one is near, maybe they have something you can get.

However supporting older hardware does limit what Gaijin can do with Dagor. One issue that has remained since the game came out is the limit to 128x128km maps and with more and more advanced systems being added to game that is a limiting factor, sure right now you only really get those maps in SIM or top tier air. Do I think that this is purely due to older hardware, not really, but it could be a part of it.

When I was on my old laptop with custom settings the game ran better than on actual ULQ, when I did try to see if the graphics going down was worth a higher framerate.

Maybe my statement of completely removing ULQ was rather harsh, maybe they just need to overhaul it in a way that improves performance and graphical quality. One issue that has existed for years is people using ULQ specifically so certain things don’t render so they have an unfair advantage (track and terrain deformation still has this small bit of ground that is not actually there on lowest settings), this could prob be partially fixed by blacklisting newer hardware from ULQ.

And right now there are 14 packs that cost 80 euro and with PC upgrades it is not just this game, but others as well that both look and play worse on old hardware.

The topic of ending support for older hardware will always be a touchy subject for people, while yes having a larger playerbase is good, that can come at a cost of what is actually possible.

One example of hardware keeping back a game is GTA 5, look at old beta screenshots of the game and you will see a lot more trees and bushes and other details, but due to having to run on that eras consoles which had 256MB of VRAM, that got cut and that has remained to this day. This is not an apples to apples comparison, but it is an example of hardware keeping a game from its actual potential.

And yeah cooling is an issue, honestly the only thing I can say is underclocking often does deliver nearly the same performance for lower temps, but that is not for everyone it is fine if you don’t want to mess with voltages and clock speeds.

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Why

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It’s impossible for them to remove ulq imo, it is a must for this game. My main pc has a 5070ti, which I can run full ray tracing and get more than 200 fps at 1080p.
But on my living room tv, where I play wt sim on my Xbox, I have to run quality upscaling at 1080 p to get 50 fps at low settings. Only reason why I don’t run ulq is because upscaling is no longer available using ulq. So for people using lower end hardware, ulq is a must especially if their gpu doesn’t support upscaling.
Why should i have to upgrade from my Xbox that literally released last month? It’s perfectly new hardware that still runs mediocrely.

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I have yet to find a PC with 1060 in it that cost 160 euros.

Where I live even 15 year old Pentiums have a price tag on them, so not everyone is able to do something like this.

You worry too much about a game that isn’t competitive at all.

Really depends on the generation.

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If you’re willing to pay millions of people for a entire new computer or for a new part, I’d agree, if you’re not going to so I’ll disagree; from my experience, even newer laptops can’t run smoothly at low quality, so ultra low is needed in these cases, War Thunder is a free-to-play game and should be kept as such. In other hand high quality is something completely useless for the average player: most of the time you don’t have the time to admire the graphics and most of the time these graphics just makes your performance in-game and your machine’s worse, I have myself a decent computer but even so I play at medium quality just to have some shadows here and there to not feels entirely on low quality.

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And most of the time, I admire the graphics. So don’t say that as if it’s an absolute truth. Some people also play for the immersion and atmosphere. Your case isn’t the norm.

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Take that to yourself as well, some people just play not because of graphics, if it was the case I would’ve bought a better computer very early just to look at the map in replay or custon matches, hell even, searching in YouTube for landscapes, your case also isn’t the norm.

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I play on ULQ to get an advantage because I am a scumbag not because I need the performance

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BTW what is there to gain by removing ULQ except stopping the abuse? Saying ULQ is holding the engine back doesn’t really make much sense. Gaijin has already implemented modern graphics tech like PT/RT, Framegen, Magic AI upscalers and so on while still keeping ULQ. Those things can coexist.

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This game has been designed to be abused by tryhards, so don’t expect ULQ to be removed until the game dies…
ULQ, no grass in gunners view, separate volume levels for your and enemy engines…
It’s all there for a purpose and that purpose is not to help players with potato PCs…

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The minimum specifications of Linux distros and Windows 11 is still below that of low settings.
That and ULQ does not offer the advantages it use to and hasn’t for years.

There is no reason to unoptimize War Thunder, nor should it ever be encouraged for War Thunder to become less optimized.

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btw that new xbox costs 1500 bucks with tax and runs war thunder at 60 fps with 1080 UPSCALING at low settings. i sincerely doubt its a money issue.

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Had to use ULQ for a while on integrated graphics when my GPU died and was waiting on a replacement being delivered.

No reason to remove it

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