Minimum Machine Specifications

What minimum machine specifications would people recommend targeting? Moreover, what framerate should be expected on a minimum machine?

Please note that this is not a question about timing, I understanding that you can use the interval timer as a multipler to make the game run at the same speed on most machines. However, below a certain frame rate the game becomes unplayable.

i won't play anything under 30fps, theres no excuse with current hardware to be under that.

Sean: This depends on the type of game you do. With a simple game thats more focused on fun etc than on "professional", I would target the lowest possible specs I can to make it accessable to more people.

Any estimations about the GPU I need, if I have around 400 Verticies and 15 Textures drawn every frame?

And another thing, why the hell is the DrawText-Command so damn slow?

So, for a Space Shooeter, should I be targeting 30 FPS on a machine around 1 GHZ with a G-Force video card? Or is that still to high?

I'd target 30 FPS on 350 Mhz with Onboard-Graphics

DrawText is not slow. It does just the same as a regular DrawImage command which with true 3D is just slower than the commands in B3D.

Something like my TabletPC - specs in sig - I've found is a good benchmark for minimum requirements.

Fetze,

Are you sure you are not loading the font over interval?

I'm loading the font once. But I can draw around 5 times more Images than Texts at the same time.

I avoid most of this wrangling by doing all my primary development on a 2 1/2-year-old laptop. If it runs on my dev box, it'll run on pretty much anything out there...

How much text are we taking about here? Full sentences, or short words?
From what I gather, text gets generated & drawn as an image.
Images get stored in your video memory as a (square?) power-of-two texture, which means that they may be a lot 'bigger' than they seem.
Are you still getting the same performance difference when drawing small bits of text?

Ah, that's the point. Okay, thanks.