Clock speed can make up for loss of performance by having more/less efficient instructions.
It’s not a question of whether or not it’s possible to replace the AVX instructions with other ones and still have playable performance on any random system, it’s whether or not the low end specs have to be increased to compensate for the lack of AVX instructions.
We don’t know and nothing about the other guy’s post indicates that removing support won’t hurt a lot of players, nor do we have any indication that it would actually benefit any significant number of people.
No, it really isn’t. I don’t think you understand the benefits of doing work in hardware when possible.
No one said it was impossible to play without it, it requires a higher end CPU without it and nothing about the posts so far have refuted this.
That requires compiling out a different client with different instructions which is more work and cost for unknown return (possibly a loss).
Because if you can make up for having more/less efficient instructions by having a higher clock speed, at least to some degree.
If you don’t understand how the number and type of instructions interacts with clock speed, go look up some videos on how different architectures work. Frankly I think it’s super interesting.
Again, that depends on how strong the CPU is. AVX very likely allows lower end systems to play the game when they otherwise wouldn’t so the fact that a high end CPU can handle the game without it is not the point.
If you spend more for a faster CPU, yes. Of course if you want to require people to buy faster CPUs then you’re falling into that elitist camp of people who think only folks who can afford high end CPUs should be allowed to play the game.
That would be nice, but again that’s not some trivial matter as you seem to think it is; if it was cross-platform development would be trivial.
Very few things have to mandatory, but if the number of people without AVX support is negligible then it isn’t going to be worth the cost to the company to support two concurrent Windows builds for a few people who opted for clock speeds over functionality.