I was NOT saying that 1.0 was a better game than 2.0. 2.0 is FAR superior in 98% of things.

I was asking a technical question. What the actual difference was in model design between the two.

Of course 1.0 was very resource intense. But not as much as people make it out to be. I built a custom machine for the 1.0 launch with hardware that by now is quite old (AMD PhenomII x6 and AMD 6870) and it ran at about 40fps on max. More than playable.

But that resource hunger was because as a few have stated, and i agree, that the graphics were prioritized over play-ability. But with todays hardware on high-end systems the original graphics quality could probably be ran just fine. My 8-core 4.7GHz, AMD7970 machine doesn't even max out usage at 60fps.

I was merely curious if it was simply a higher degree of detail that the current engine could scale up to, or if it was accomplished by some other means.