What's the lowest spec PC you've.....

....tested your game on, and what was the conclusion?

My little "Armand and the Foppish Hat" and "Senet" games both run fine on my wife's old AMD Duron 1000 with a cheap Geforce4 MX card in it, or on a G4 Mac Mini. I haven't tested below those levels, though.

Last time I tested a game-in-progress I'm working on on two low-end computers, the results were significantly different:

- On a whitebox desktop with 128MB RAM and AMD K6 400MHz with a Voodoo3 card (16Mb Video memory), it ran at full speed. (60 fps)
- On a Compaq Armada E500 laptop (600MHz, with Rage Mobility video) the same game got between 0.5 FPS and 0.2FPS. (Yes, that's 2 to 5 seconds between frames. Old BlitzBasic ran fine, but suffice it to say that it doesn't do any hardware 3D acceleration)

I have 2 PC's with intel gfx cards.
Intel chipsets are in almost half of PC's according to the Unity poll.
They create a huge bottleneck with their bad fillrate.
The language runs fine but if you draw lots of big images you are going to see FPS drop from 120FPS to 30-40.

"Geforce4 MX" is no slouch when it comes to "2d via 3d" rendering.

I develop on:
Intel Celeron: 2.93ghz
512mb
Intel 82845G Integrated Series

If my game runs at 30fps or greater, I'm satisfied.

Yeah, it does fine, especially for a 6 year old card that was like $40 new.

I develop on a MacBook (not MacBook Pro). I figure if it runs on that (which has integrated graphics), and runs on the G4 Mac Mini, I've got my Mac users pretty well covered.

Since I target the Mac, that's where my testing takes place. If it runs at all on a Windows machine, that's just a bonus.

I usually develop stuff on my faithful P2-400, 256mb RAM and a geforce 4MX.

Runs a lot of stuff from B3D pretty well. But on my latest game (still developing it) it´s struggling...

Of course, I also test my games on newer/better machines :)

Reason I asked is that I've just cobbled together a test system:

PIII 733MHz
256Mb RAM
8MB shared graphics (see below)
Windows XP Home

As you can see I want to invest as little as possible in this thing. The motherboard does not have an AGP slot - I had an ATI Rage Pro in my junk cupboard that I was going to use but now I can't as I didn't realise I was limited to PCI (not PCI-E).

Is there anywhere that I might be able to get an old-ish PCI graphics card? I'm thinking along the lines of a 32MB GeForce 2 MX or something like that.

The only ones I can find on eBay are either not what I'm looking for, or are in Japan/China/Germany/Somewhere else.

If you can't get a Geforce on ebay then get an old ATI, like this one:
"ATI Radeon 7000 64Mb DDR V/D/VO PCI Graphics Card"

Pretty sure I have a PCI Voodoo 4 knocking around in a cupboard -- you're welcome to it if I can dig it out.

I have a 500mhz p3 with voodoo 16mb card.

I have xubuntu on it and it runs my particle engine OK (well like 500 particles)

Froogle is your friend:

http://www.google.com/products?q=GeForce+2+MX+

(used ones Starting at $14.99, it seems)

Thanks for the offer, Sledge; I completely forgot about this thread.

I just picked up a PCI 64MB GeForce 4 from eBay for £6!

PII 400Mhz 192KB Ram - G400MAX 32MB GPU with XP - I also have a non-3d card in the unit to test software renders. Still goes like the clappers as long as it's not loaded with Win32 Bloatware.

...and Blitzmax games actually work on that? o.O

I use a 1.5Ghz Via laptop with Via Unichrome graphics (shared) if it works on that it will work on anything :)

Although nothing works on me speccy 48k :(

> I just picked up a PCI 64MB GeForce 4 from eBay for £6!

Nice, I didn't know Geforce 4 was still using PCI.

My work machine is a 500MHz/ 128MB RAM/ Nvidia 8MB AGP running XP Home. It runs the BMax apps I write just fine and I use the OpenGL drivers.

Tim tested my first two games on that PC, but they were BPlus. Can't remember if he tested any of my BMax ones...

My bad. What I bought was actually a 128MB Radeon 9250.

Got a bit confused as I was watching about half a dozen different ones. :)