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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.
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Believe it or not, Windows XP will actually run well enough to perform benchmarks on on a P100, if THG is to be believed (they usually are not, but...) They also said that it could theoretically run on a slower CPU, all the way down to a 486DX. IIRC, with a nVidia GeForce (oh, hell, it was a high end card about 6 months ago - I forget the number), it pulled 14.5FPS in Quake 3 Arena. Not bad for a P100...
Windows XP struggles on a 1.2ghz Celeron with 128MB RAM
Is that so? Just to check how much system requirements really matter, I put XP Pro on my Latitude CP, which at the time was a Pentium 233, 64 meg ram, and a 2 gig hard drive.
It ran perfectly fine. Hardly any noticeable lag, booted up in about a minute. Worked perfectly for me as a desktop machine for the better part of 2 weeks, at which point I got a larger hard drive, and put on Slack and 2k pro.
Point being - I don't know what was wrong with your box, but XP Pro works fine on much less than a 1.2 gig with 128 meg ram. Hell when I upgraded to 128 meg ram myself, I put on 2k3 server, and that worked fine as well.
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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No, the simplest explanation is that hardly any gamers have processors under 1Ghz, and any game claiming to run on 500MHz or above will be perceived as "old" and "not worth the money" because it doesn't use the capabilities of modern systems.
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I think they add a bit in for start up software services, too. Since the average /.er has considerably less start up stuff, we can usually sneak under the estimated requirements.
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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.
A lot of that has to do with memory manager tweaks, the cost of internal OS datastructures and so on.
They tweaked the hell out NT4 to get it to run in 8MB, and you could really notice how "swap happy" it was even with 512MB or so. W2000 seems to be tweaked for 64MB, and WinXP seems to like 256MB.
Another example of this is Linux 2.6, which is really tuned for 128MB minimum, according to the lkml.
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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When they finally get to a machine that it doesn't work...
The problem is that there really is no point where it doesn't work, unless virtual memory is completely exhausted (providing RAM limits, at least). The point where perceived speed becomes intolerable is highly subjective. I don't own any GHz+ computers, but I get by every day just fine. It gets to a point, where all a faster CPU does is speed up compiling, ray tracing, and scientific simulations, until application bloatware catches up to renew the playing field. I think that the bloatware takes a good seven years to catch up. Whether Linux, Solaris, or Windows XP, I really wouldn't want to use anything slower than a 200MHz-class computer now-a-days (even classic RISC CPUs become somewhat unwieldy much slower than this).
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