[Indies] System requirements

Don't you ever find that the supposed minimum system requirements on portals are a complete joke?

I've been checking this out a lot lately on an Athlon XP1700+ CPU, 512MB RAM, 16MB graphics (AGP), WinXP. I consider this to be a system approximating what Average Joe will have, plus I have an even lower spec one for compat testing. I'm currently testing Reflexive games but I suspect other portals are just as economical with the truth.

A lot of games that are alleged to work on a far less powerful system than I'm using, run so slowly they're unplayable, do not work at all, or crash randomly/repeatedly - Dream Chronicles being only one of many recent examples.

Given that my site is full of Reflexive games, I'm currently considering ditching the lot, since their minimum system recommendations appear to be complete crap in many cases.

Thoughts?

I've read the min requirements are to get the game working, not playable. Though if the game is crashing because of the these requirements then they're talking crap.

But it goes both ways -- for example, Peggle (popcap games) states the following:



But it works just fine on my sons machine (400MHz CPU, 128MB RAM) which is about half the listed minimum specs. (although it does have a Voodoo3 video adapter, which is decent for a PC of that vintage)

Most likely the limiting factor in your case is the low video memory, more so than the CPU or RAM speed. Unfortunately there are so many video cards out there, with huge performance differences and no 'easy' universal rating system. Partly because of that, the whole minimum system requirements thing is not an exact science, so they have to come up with bit of a middle ground.

Few non-developers have a clue how a GeForce 7600GT compares with an ATI X1650XT or a 9800Pro AGP, Voodoo3 3000 AGP or ATI 8800GS speed-wise, but it can make an insane difference in how smooth a particular game will run or your PC.

PC System Requirements are a crock of ****, in my eyes.

I made a Croco Magneto Remake and it ran like a dead dog on Vista.

My current project is being developed on Vista... runs steady at 60fps (Flip(true))on my non-gaming Vista setup... runs at a reasonable 30fps on Qubes creaky XP laptop....

My GFX card is a Geforce7300 GS, its pap, though, as I mentioned... my current project is holding up MUCH better than my XP developed Croco remake.

If I can get a steady 60fps on Vista... I know I'll get 30fps on anything else, and thats what I'm after.

Dabz

I don't think minimum requirements being untrustworthy is limited to 'portals'. A few off-the-shelf games I've played on various PCs have been way off with their system requirements, the same goes for demos downloaded.

Are you insulting my 1ghz Celeron beast? lol. Hopefully towards the latter half of the year I'll have enough spare cash to warrant a new laptop (or PC).

Minimum specs have always been a hit and miss target with PC's. Even recommended specs are sometimes below par with what I'd class as "recommended"

To me a "minimum spec" should be enough to make the game work at a perfectly reasonable quality. Not slow and barely playable, but playable at a decent rate. Playable to at least 75% of how it should play.

a "recommended spec" should guarantee the game works perfectly with all the bells and whistles.

Unfortunately, a lot of "minimum specs" are enough to get the game loaded and working but are in fact so juddery and slow they are unplayable. To me, if it performs like that then the minimum specs are definitely inaccurate.

On the flip side, "recommended specs" also have the tendency to mean "just enough to work with some settings set to minimum".

When I was into PC gaming I had a pretty decent system and quite a few games I bought exceeded the recommended system specs but still had to have some setting turned down just to keep things moving at the pace I wanted.

It's a shame that minimum/recommended specs are not always accurate and that was one of the reasons I gave up on PC gaming.

Absolutely!... I rarely buy games nowdays, infact the last "big title" I bought was Doom3... according to the box my system should have eaten it!... but when I got it home it ran like a slug on downers!... even on minimum detail/resolution!

It makes ya wonder exactly what kind of systems they use to develop high-end games... and how they determine the min/max system requirements that us mere mortals might be using at the time of release.

if the game doesnt run on me IBM XT CGA graphics 256Kram and 360K 5.25" disk drive.

Nah just joking, if it runs on me Via C7-M 1.5Ghz laptop with 256Mb ram and 32Mb integrated graphics then it will run on anything.

min requirements are whats needed to run, recommended requirements are whats needed to run well. I'd say 32mb gfx is about min these days.

A demo, rather than written specs, is good for seeing how a game actually runs.

Interesting....

So you reckon its better to not show any system requirements at all?

What if people download a stupidly resource-hungry game, which doesn't work on their PC - won't that be the last time they ever visit your site, even if the rest of the games on there would have worked?

IMHO there should be these two lines in any PC game product:
Minimum required: processor speed of #Ghz, ### megabytes RAM, Direct X # compliant graphics card with ## megabytes of video memory
Recommended: ... (same type of info as above)

And also, ESRB type advisory ( http://www.esrb.org ):
This game is suited for all ages
...

The trouble is that not all video cards with ## MB of video memory are created equal -- there's some real dogs among them too, so if you have a low-end card you can still technically meet the specs, but in reality it may still be unplayable for you.

Plus MB of RAM is greatly dependend on how much junk you are running in the background at the same time. Someone who keeps there machine relatively clean may be in better shape with 256MB RAM, than someone who runs seventeen copies of BonziBuddy in his 512MB.

some low end systems that come with decent chipset mobos but with onboard Geforce 6100 shader system ram as Vram, So even though they can display the graphics, the Vram is so slow that it becomes a real crutch when playing games, despite having a reasonable GPU onboard.

It goes both ways. Sometimes I'll be surprised that a certain game won't run on my computer, and other times I'll be surprised that it does. For instance, my BlitzMax games run extremely well on my school's computers, which have 4MB of Video Memory and 256MB of RAM.