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How are System Requirements Determined?

Posted by Cliff on from the picking-numbers-out-of-thin-air dept.

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?"

4 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Re:determining sys requirements by I+Be+Hatin' · · Score: 4, Funny
    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.

    That's interesting... it's very similar to the way they measure the load limit on bridges.

    --
    I know god exists. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
  2. All depends by darkjedi521 · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  3. Do you really have to ask? by TheSHAD0W · · Score: 4, Funny

    "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?"

  4. For the ram requirements by __aafkqj3628 · · Score: 2, Funny

    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 ;)