Please define "high end". Also, you might be surprised how many people out there use computers that are not cutting edge. I'm guessing C2 users would like to target more than hardcore gamers.
Well, there's no shortage of "8-bit" games out there either in development or uploaded to the arcade, and each one of them appears to have issues with framerates on a Windows 7, 2GB Memory Celeron-D (I think it's called) system. By comparison, the same machine is good to go for casual games like Zuma, Diner Dash, and thing of that sort.
I'm speaking of my mother's computer... she likes those games, and on lesser specs, even those simple titles can get bogged down in the framerate department.
Me personally, I have a PC at home that's powered by a Quad Core Phenom Black Edition processor, 4GB of RAM, and an Nvidia graphics card considered high end four years ago. It's suitable for editing/rendering high definition video with Adobe Premiere, including post-processing coloring and effects on the timeline with Magic Bullet/Colorista plug-ins. If you weren't aware, video editing is some of THE hardest things for a computer to do, often times maxing out all four cores while encoding particularly.
Now, I don't have any framerate issues when playing the Scirra arcade games, but I use Firefox. I refuse Internet Explorer, I refuse Google Chrome (Google can't take over my WHOLE life, though I do use Gmail and Android mobile phone, as well as own a Tegra 3-powered Nexus 7 tablet). See, the thing is, "That's a lot of hardware for what's basically going to be Donkey Kong Country running in 1080p... and not everyone's going to have it."
The trick is to make a game that'd be as widely accessible as possible, while simultaneously fulfilling the "graphics whore" demands that modern gamers desire.
"Skullgirls" was nice because it was all hand-drawn sprites, backgrounds and the like. "Street Fighter II HD Remix" was nice because of the same reasons. Now go and download the "Mark of the Wolves" demo and see what a game made in "less than" 480p graphics looks like scaled up to your 1080p display. Blurry, that's for sure. The crispness of running a 1080p native game on a 1080p game is undisputedly better than mastering a game on a smaller resolution and upscaling... and that was the original point of me starting this thread.
Best I could tell, nobody has even set out to try and do a 1080p-native title in Construct. Sure it's "theoretically possible", but not by linking to any web-hosted 720x480 game and asking me to "Enable full screen mode". It's simply "Not the same", and if I'm looking at spending $120 for a license of Construct, $2900 for a license of software to EXPORT to a stand-alone .exe (as I was reading about in older forum threads... remember, this is would in fact be a game for profit), in addition to spending a budget of perhaps $10,000 to acquire/create unique game assets (which I would need SOME way of hiding as to prevent other people from outright stealing our sprites, background, music and the like), you begin to realize that "Theoretically" isn't as comforting as "Officially supported".
It's easy to ridicule this as "nit-picking, be happy with what's already in the engine", but if it's not enough then it's not enough... there's no hard feelings, but my mission is NOT to create the world's most expensive HTML 5 experiment... it's to make a game that makes some money. I would have artists to pay, developers to pay, and so on. If Construct 2's mission is to create an easy-to-create platform, then they've already done it... but for people with thousands of dollars ready to invest, they're going to put that money down on what works -best- for -THEIR- needs.
It may end up that I just use Construct 2 to create a standard definition 480P-native demonstration with all the proposed bells and whistles for the purpose of attracting developers and so on for a larger project, and that's ALSO okay. But that's rather limiting, it doesn't achieve the scale of what I'm looking to create, and therefore it may be in my best interest to look at a more capable (even if more complicated) development environment such as Unity 4. That's a bucket of cash alone for a pro license, but it's proven to thrive in an Android environment, proven to export native to Ouya, to PC, and yes, even to web. But the cost goes up dramatically, and it's something that I couldn't personally tackle without taking years and years of time.
The middle ground, I'm hoping, is Construct 2. Construct 2 needs native .exe exporting, native android exporting, native Ouya/whatever else support. I can appreciate that HTML 5 -should- be supported by everyone, but the more wrappers, money, and crap you have to tack onto the HTML 5 groundwork just to get it to work... then tweak it to get it all running as desired raises so many questions for so many support sites on the web, that at times, if you're "dreaming big" with Construct 2, you're "spending big" to get there... if "there" is even possible in reality. Remember, so much of this is "in theory".
Who wants to be the guy holding the bag on that pricetag with a game that runs well in one browser on one website for 18% of PCs in the world?