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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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
Lier! Everyone knows that nothing runs Halo just fine!
At least it doesn't run as bad as Deus Ex: Invisible War.
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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