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How are System Requirements Determined?
May Kasahara asks: "Seeing as how my Unreal Tournament buddies are considering upgrading to UT2004 soon, I thought I'd check out the system requirements ahead of time. I thought that I'd have no problems, seeing as how UT2004 is mostly just UT2003 with new content, but upon looking up the specs online, I found quite a different story. My PC runs on a 733mHz Pentium III, just meeting the minimum system req.'s for UT2003 (which runs very smoothly on my machine, BTW), but UT2004 requires at least a 1gHz processor for the PC version. Curious, I checked out the UT2003 system specs listed on the official site, and found much the same info-- specs that were quite different from those listed on the retail box in my storage closet.
Naturally, I got to thinking about other games and apps, and what I want to know is: what gives? How accurate/trustworthy are system specs listed on a box? Are they artificially inflated to sell more hardware from companies that these publishers are affiliated with (nVidia in UT's case), or is there a more logical explanation?"
I've never taken the requirements seriously, except when it comes to video cards. As long as you have 256MB of RAM and a decent card-last year or so- it should be fine.
On
They make an application, then try loading it on progessively lower spec'd machines. When they finally get to a machine that it doesn't work on they back up to the last one and call that the requirements.
Companies usually take into account two things when setting requirements.
The first is the actual requirements. These stem from the specific things that are required by libraries and compiled code. These are things like the class of processor, the operating system, or the DirectX generation supported by the graphics drivers.
The other thing accounted for is the presumed requirements. This sets the lower threshold of performance for which the company needs to account. Few things depend on a specific processor speed, but when a company says X requires a 1GHz Pentium, they are disclaiming liability for when someone runs it with a 766MHz chip.
You may be surprised how much software you can technically get to function on a 486 100Mhz running Window95. You won't be surprised by how incredibly poorly it performs. The company is just trying to avoid having to deal with your complaints when you try it.
They'd rather set the requirements higher than necessary because there are so many variables involved. Slow video card/fast processor, fast video card/slow processor, different speed disks, memory, etc. So, they set them at a somewhat reasonable level so that not too many people will complain when they find it too slow on their computer.
since in the case of pretty much every version of Windows, the box requirements are simply to run the operating system, and you'll need a much faster PC with a lot more RAM to actually run today's applications without wincing - and I'm referring to "simple" word processing and spreadsheets, not games.
:-).
I think you could help answer your own question by trying the experiment of buying the game and checking out how well it works on your system. Then let us know, since you've made us curious
That being said, the odds are pretty good that more features mean more code bloat, which mean the need for faster processors and more memory. But since game performance has to be high, and since game customers are likely to complain about poor performance, the fudge factors used to determine performance specifications are probably a lot different from what Microsoft uses for Windows.
To put this in perspective, consider Windows 2000, which ran fine on a 500mhz Celeron with 64MB RAM. Windows XP struggles on a 1.2ghz Celeron with 128MB RAM, and I know this because we have several of both systems. The 500mhz Windows 2000 system will actually outperform the XP box on a clean installation.
What's strange about this, of course, is that there are few substantiative differences between 2000 and XP. There's more eye candy in XP and that's about it. So think about this: A little extra eye candy and you've worse than halved the performance.
Since games are all about eye candy nowadays, that might be a good start at explaining the situation.
Hope that helps.
D
Ocham's razor: The simplest explanation is probably correct. (ie yes, they are trying to flog more hardware).
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. - Henry Ford
I've found through experience that if an app calls for a certain type of processor with a minimum speed (say 1 GHz PIII), you can generally get away with a much slower CPU of the same family. On the other hand, I've been bitten by apps that state Windows 95 required, but won't run on anything newer.
I've got an amd athlon 750mhz with 512ram a 128 geforce4ti4200 video card and i haven't found a game that won't run fine on it. point: compter reqs are higher because they don't want a million people calling in on why their box doesn't run smoothly.
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I think there are two approaches for that, one I call "social" and another that's technical
The first uses statistics about how is the computer configuration of the possible consumers and try to make the software to fit that configurations (like reducing some default features) or just pretend it fit that minimum configuration (as we see on some OS boxes).
The other is testing the software against real machines configurations until the tester think it's fine playable.
But they don't say in what software environment they test it, so you may go to M$ Woe 98 (ram), configure the game to 320x240 16bit (onboard gpu) and still play it fine.
I used to believe that minimum requirements was the minimum you need to install a software until I saw a 486 16MB running Woe 98 (it took about two minutes just to show up the MS windows logo but it booted).
Don't forget about their machines. If they upgrade their machines often, it is quite likely that they don't have a machine slower than 1.0Ghz anymore to test with, so they call their slowest machine the minimun specs.
My guess marketing sets the slowest machine based on what they think everyone has, and the company then throws away slower machines.
The above, or any other factor others have noted could be it. Likely a combonation.
Performance for a game like UT really comes down to the video card. If you've got a video card that's significantly more powerful than what the average 733MHz (or 1GHz) system does, you'll be fine. ...and if you aren't, get with the times; you could replace the mobo/cpu/ram for $200 and get something far nicer anyways.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
the way i've seen it put is that the "minimum" requirements are the system configuration where the game is playable. maybe not smoothly playable, but playable. (i.e., about 15-25 FPS.) a worst case, i gathered.
:P
the "recommended" specs (which i see showing up on boxes more and more) are what they have found to be the best for maintaining a "decent" framerate (about 45 FPS or so).
i don't recall where i saw this, but i think it may have been one of the magazines i subscribe to. maybe not. i don't remember.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
For younger audience games there is usually a threshold spec that marketing determines that most kids have access to, say that it is a 233 MHz machine. Then the developers have to simply make sure that the game runs on that. I don't think that's how UT games determine the minimum spec though, but they would test the game on a large number of PC configurations to look for compatibility bugs so they probably get their spec from that.
Basically the minimum specs should be read as this. If you absolutly have to play the game and can not afford to upgrade then yes you can at least with luck play it at more then 1 frame per second when the moon is full.
The recommended spec mean that if you pc meets it then you can turn some of the options on and it won't be a slideshow. When the moon is full.
Only if you exceed the recommended spec by a mile do you have any chance of playing the game anywhere near the quality shown in the screen shots and the gameplay videos.
As for bitching about it. Well buy a console. They are supposed to all have the same spec so the game will either run or not run. You know the reviewer is playing it on the same machine as you.
PC means constantly having to upgrade to the latest hardware to play the latest games. Or does it? If you still can stand counter stike then your P3 should be perfect. Or do you really need a higher framerate then refreshrate?
So the answer the question, minimum specs are like the fuel milage in car ads, the prices in holiday ads, playboy women. A work of fiction.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It could be higher polygon count models are used in the new version.
Urban Terror (the other UT) has higher requirements then Quake3 even though it is the exaxt same engine. They have higher detailed models and texture and possibly modified physics (I don't know enough about the physics though.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The reason the system requirements are so high for some games is not because the game really needs it to run, but because many times users are too lazy and/or ignorant to configure their system well and it's not the job of the game maker to tell them to run adaware to get rid of the 1000 pieces of adware they have or run msconfig to get rid of the 10-15 apps that open on startup. So yes, if you have gator, smartsearch, and 3-5 startup items, I can see that 1 Ghz is a good minimum.
I ran UT2K3 on a P3 500 quite smoothly btw.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
The last time I did much in the way of gaming, it was Quake I on a 486. It claimed to require a Pentium, but no speed minimum was given. My 40MHz 486 had a full speed bus, whereas all the Pentia were clock-multiplied. Hence, bandwidth to the VLB video card was faster than any Pentium you could find. The game ran perfectly.
A few months ago I was going through some old backups, and I found an installation of Checkit from that very 486, which had the benchmarks saved. I ran them on my K6-2/300 with a PCI video card and sure enough, the raw characters per second into the video buffer was lower than the 486's score. When I put the AGP card back in, of course, it was no contest.
That same 486 with 8 meg also ran X11 with fvwm95 without hesitation, contrary to popular dire predictions. At best, "system requirements" are a very rough guess, but I think most of them are totally random. If you've got 386-enhanced mode, pretty much everything else is extra.
Sig Requirements: this message must be processed on a turing-complete machine.
I have a 333MHz P2 (overclocked to 416) with 640 Mb of RAM. It has a GeForce FX 5200 128 Mb. It runs C&C Generals: Zero Hour just fine. It runs Halo just fine. The system "requirements" are just a suggestion of a typical system that works for the developers.
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As far as I can figure, minimum specs are a bunch of bollocks, made up by marketers in collusion with hardware manufacturers. This goes for operating systems as well as games. Case in point:
I have two boxen in my house at present: Toshiba Tecra 8000 Laptop (PII 233, 128MB, but now has 256), and a celeron 500 originally with 128MB, now with 256MB.
On the laptop, I've played Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate I and II, Quake I and II. They were slow, but playable.
On the Celeron (with 128 ram and a TNT2 with 32MB), I've played all the above games without trouble, plus Q3A and UT2k3 at reasonable (25+) framerates, Age of Mythology, Max Payne (I), Black and White, Deus Ex, NOLF, RTCW, Hitman and Ghost Recon (which was damn slow, I'll admit) and a bunch of others. I'm pretty sure all these games had minimum specs above what this box could offer.
The thing that gets me is how different linux distros determine their minimum specs. Lindows requiring a PIII-800? Fedora requiring 196MB? Even winXP isn't that bad...
L
A big factor for determining what companies will support is the time+cost involved in QA.
For example, for a game, some QA dude would have to sit down and play the game all the way through on the "minimum" system just to verify that it works. After trudging through on a 1Ghz system, they probably just didn't feel like it was worth the time to test it on a 800Mhz system or whatever.
For something like MS Windows, there's a vast array of hardware that needs to be tested, and they can save significant amounts of money by obsoleting a generation or two of hardware. Win2000 came with a bunch of "unsupported" Pentium-era SCSI drivers, and WinXP basically dropped anything that was common before the PII days.
"Hey Sal! The marketing people want to know the minimum system requirements."
"Uhh, I dunno. We need a 3D video accelerator, and I dunno what else."
"Well, marketing wants it 5 minutes ago, they're designing the box right now!"
"Bah, stupid marketing people. Um, hang on a minute. Fred, how fast is your machine?"
They use sizeof and then count the number of ints, floats, chars, etc. they are using to find out how much ram their program will suck ;)
Why not just get the demo when it comes out in the next week and see if you can tweak the settings and ini's enough to get it running decently? As reported by BeyondUnreal, the demo will be distributed by BitTorrent.
Also, why not just get a new processor. You can get a decent one for under $40 these days. and with a motherboard combo you might get away with something under $80.
Goddamn there are a lot of BS'ers on /.
You wanna know how they pick the specs for UT2003/4? They get a whole buttload of systems, and they run benchmarks on them (probably several times). The systems that average 20fps are deemed "minimum spec", and the ones that hit 40 are "reccomended". Its that simple. They don't pick them out of a hat, nVidia doesn't hand them to Epic, and marketing doesn't have any fucking input.
As for what you'll want for a system, the video card is definitly the most important piece of hardware for a modern game. Performance is almost directly related to your video card. I've got a Radeon 9700 Pro (128mb), and UT2003 runs about 30-60fps on high detail. Personally, the lowest i'd go is a high end GeForce 3, but for what its worth the game did work on a 16mb ATI Rage card for me (albet at 1-5 fps). Don't worry about the processor too much, just as long as its not holding your video card back a whole lot. The only thing you really gain in UT03 by having a fast processor is A) Fancy physics (ragdolls), and B) Snappy load times. As for how much memory, well, 256 is the lowest i'd want. Any less and you'll get into some nasty swapping issues, which is a killer for performance. Contrary to a previous post, most of your memory isn't used for the OS. IIRC, Windows XP will shrink down to as little as 50-70mb, maybe even less (depending on background programs). UT2003 on the other hand, well, at max detail it can load in more than 600mb worth of data (mostly textures) to your RAM. Fortunatly, RAM is relatively cheap, and the more you have the better. The only other thing you'll want is a broadband net connection. Dialup is playable, but Cable/DSL makes a world of difference. (Plus there are tons of cool mods you'll probably want to download)
Oh, and one other thing... I think one of the reasons the minimum specs got bumped up was due to the addition of the Onslaught gametype. Its like a mini version of BF1942. Big battlefields, vehicles, 32 players... its gonna take more iron to run a full scale war than a 6 on 6 bombing run match. But knowing Epic they've jazzed up all their maps and models as well.
Anyways, my advice to May Kasahara is this: Wait for the demo. The UT community is buzzing with activity right now, as last week Epic announced that the demo would be out within two weeks. The deadline is exactly one week from today (Friday the 13th - heh). When that hits - and you'll know it because when the UT2003 demo was released internet performance dropped all around the world - give it a shot. You'll know then weather or not you need to upgrade, or if you can live with reduced quality and questionable performance.
Happy gaming everyone.
"How are System Requirements Determined?"
:)
Mostly on drugs
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nico
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At my company we pretty much look at an aveage last generation machine. That's the minimum specs for the Client workstations. The same software wored three years ago on the machines of that day, but you can't buy those machines anymore. No perticular rhyme or reason, I think the company likes to bust some chops.
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CPU requirements overall are way overbloated. The VAST majority of the load during any gameplay is on the Video bus, the CPU of even machines of five years ago should be more than enough to handle modern games. Think about it, all the CPU really has to do is tell the video card where shit is and handle the 'basics', the video card has to actually draw all the friggin' pixels and figure out the lighting and picture.
I dare someone to do a 'Quake III' test on a machine with a kickass video card, but vary the CPU from an Athlon-XP clocked at 200FSB/1280MHz and then at 333MHz/2100MHz. I'll bet the framerate difference is under 10%.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I had a 386SX 16MHz Laptop with 4 megs of Ram running Windows95. It was painfully slow, so I killed the GUI and installed Windows 3.11 over it. I still used the "Windows 95 DOS" but it ran the Windows 3.11 GUI. It had a 400 MB (full sixed IDE) hard drive and used regular old 30 pin memory. It had a full travel keyboard without the numeric pad and a greyscale 640x480 LCD. I even added a 387 math co-processor. It was called the Laptop386SX. That was the only company name anywhere on the thing or in the manual. I used it to do email with the Juno dial-in program and an external (9-volt battery powered) 9600BPS modem. Bought the whole mess (sans hard drive) for $20 when I was in high school in 1996 or 1997. I only replaced it when the motherboard died.
I remember trying to install one of the "recent" Windows-es (I think either 98 or ME), for testing purposes, on an old P133. During the install process, it actually popped up a dialogue stating that your processor must be 150MHz or more, and refused to install.
(How are THG getting their specs for 486es and such, with these arbitrary limitations in place? Is it necessary to modify/hack the Windows installer?)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
I remember playing Warcraft 2 on a 25Mhz 386 with 4MB RAM. The box said it required a 486 with 16 MB RAM!
No problemo, I just ran it under Windows 3.1 with virtual memory to fill the gap between required and actual RAM.
Sure the game started up really slow but once it was going, it was fine. The biggest problem I had was that it took up around 80% of my hard disk.
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On a similar note, would you expect a Windows .NET Standard Server (RC1) to run smoothly (and perhaps even better than Windows 2000 or XP or some other "desktop" OS) on an old 333MHz Cyrix MII with 1MB Video RAM? Neither did I, until I saw it rock on my system - the only plus I had was a 192MB of RAM and sufficient hard-disk for about 400 MB swap space. I'm pretty sure these requirements were way low by standards of the official ones mentioned on he site. Anyways, was fun while it lasted (it was a time-limited trial edition of RC1)!
Back in 1999 I got a game called "Homeworld". My computer was a Pentium II 266MHz with 64mb of ram and a Matrox G400 video card. The stated minimum requirements of the game were for a PII 233MHz with 64mb of ram.
Despite having an additional 33MHz and a top-end video card, this game slammed the system hard. It'd go down to 1fps in some levels. Multiplayer was similar, simply unplayable. You'd need at least a PII 400 with 100MHz FSB to play this game reasonably well. Even an Athlon system can be brought to a crawl by Homeworld. Why did it state the system requirements it did? Because that was what was needed to sell it. If the game had been released two years later, then they would've marked it as needing a 400MHz PII.
And then there's Sim City4. 2GHz Athlons with 2gb of ram can be brought to a halt by it. And yes, tt says it needs a 500MHz PIII.
They've got presures on the one hard to mark a game as needing high requirements so buyers think it is modern and with flashy graphics, and presures on the other that they don't want to scare away people with older computers. There's also the consideration of what the game actually requires (which is sometimes thrown out of the window when the game requires more than the entire potential userbase owns - such as what happened with Homeworld and SC4's respective drastic understating of minimum requirements).