Just to clearify one thing about 'newer' vs. 'older' computers.
The cube engine is not a 64 bit application, therefore it doesn't take advantage of the 4 cores of a i5, for example, but only of one. Taken away some general enhancements on this technology, you basicaly will have the same performance on a pentium II. At this point you've got to know that one of the major bottlenecks of cube is located on CPU-side, insofar it doesn't matter what great graphics card you might have.
There might be similiar issues on the GPU-end of things. I do not know which version of OpenGL cube actually uses, but in case it is outdated some vital processions, which used to be hardware accelerated, could only be emulated on modern systems today. In other words, you'll get some extra load on the CPU, while this only can rely on one core as mentioned above.
I personally experienced this kind of issues with some DirectX-based games already, which will perform worse on my current system ( i5, Nvidia GTX 560 ti), than they ever did in the past. In fact, some of those AC maps in question did actually kill my performance (FPS < 30) on the beforementioned rig. I'm serious. Leave alone the render glitches, like disappearing faces on far distances , which will happen on any system as long as the responsible code doesn't change.
Finally, I'm not saying the current values are perfectly well evaluated and technically backed and sure this isn't the optimum-compromise. However, in general I still don't get the big deal about them and if you really wanted to have huger maps, you've got to dig deep into this very engine and find ways to optimise its rendering code, rather than complaining again and again.
The cube engine is not a 64 bit application, therefore it doesn't take advantage of the 4 cores of a i5, for example, but only of one. Taken away some general enhancements on this technology, you basicaly will have the same performance on a pentium II. At this point you've got to know that one of the major bottlenecks of cube is located on CPU-side, insofar it doesn't matter what great graphics card you might have.
There might be similiar issues on the GPU-end of things. I do not know which version of OpenGL cube actually uses, but in case it is outdated some vital processions, which used to be hardware accelerated, could only be emulated on modern systems today. In other words, you'll get some extra load on the CPU, while this only can rely on one core as mentioned above.
I personally experienced this kind of issues with some DirectX-based games already, which will perform worse on my current system ( i5, Nvidia GTX 560 ti), than they ever did in the past. In fact, some of those AC maps in question did actually kill my performance (FPS < 30) on the beforementioned rig. I'm serious. Leave alone the render glitches, like disappearing faces on far distances , which will happen on any system as long as the responsible code doesn't change.
Finally, I'm not saying the current values are perfectly well evaluated and technically backed and sure this isn't the optimum-compromise. However, in general I still don't get the big deal about them and if you really wanted to have huger maps, you've got to dig deep into this very engine and find ways to optimise its rendering code, rather than complaining again and again.