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Games Entertainment Hardware

How are System Requirements Determined? 113

Posted by Cliff 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?"
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How are System Requirements Determined? More

How are System Requirements Determined?

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  • First Post (Score:2, Interesting)

    by luigi22_ ( 733738 )
    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 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-limi

  • determining sys requirements (Score:4, Insightful)

    by oprahwinfree ( 466659 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @10:44PM (#8209176) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:determining sys requirements (Score:4, Funny)

      by I Be Hatin' ( 718758 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @10:52PM (#8209225) Journal
      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.

    • 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 t
    • Unless the software is made by the hardware vendor; then the requirements are determined by what hardware they want to sell.

      For example, Final Cut Pro 4.x and DVD Studio Pro 2 both say they require a Macintosh with AGP graphics, but a simple edit to one file in each, plus one to the same file in Compressor, and they'll run on a PCI-only Mac as well. I've been running them both on my G3 upgraded to a 550 MHz G4 processor, which is also below the processor speed spec of DSP2 (733 MHz).

      UT2K3 had nVidia prom

  • Why requirements are what they are... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by torinth ( 216077 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @10:49PM (#8209206) Homepage
    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.
    • 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...
      • Nope, I'm pretty sure XP (and Win2k) make use of Pentium-specific instructions.
      • How did they get it to install? I have a pentium 133, and Windows ME would not even install on it. It refused and told me I needed at least a Pentium 166. Does XP not have this restriction?
        • It would appear that they installed using a Super 7 board, probably with something like a K6-2. After they installed it they yanked the fast chip and installed the P100. The P100 did pretty well, but then it was running in a Super 7 board with a fast graphics card, a lot of SDRAM, and other things. Try it again on an Intel FX chipset with 8MB of FPM ram and a 1MB Trident card and see how fast it is then.
      • 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?)
        • My guess is that they hacked the installer. Either that, or they doctored the screenshots...

          Also, it must have been ME, as it requires a 150, whereas Win98 needs a 486DX-2/66.
        • Win 2k installed and ran on my p133 fine (bar the extreme ammounts of swapping to disk needed with 48megs of ram, and having to find an atapi cdrom drive since it didn't support my weird no atapi one).

          I'm sure the quake3 test used to run on said p133 with a voodoo banshee at about 10-14 frames per second as well. (With windows 95/98 original)
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Back in '95, I actually got NT4 to run on a 486DX50 with 8MB RAM (or was it 4?). Anyway, the system would actually boot and run but I never could get it to shut down as it always ran out of memory trying to shut down. either way, the amount of RAM spec'd by M$ was more than what I had installed. when I added RAM it shutdown properly; pulled it out, didn't shut down.

    • There's also QA (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 07, 2004 @12:38AM (#8209747)
      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.
      • I think you've hit the nail on the head. This is exactly how we come up with our requirement specs for our {software}. Rather than test with multiple machines, I use my 866MHz desktop system, which then gets listed in the user's manual as the 'requirements'. Of course, when it comes to throughput and performance, we test on the quad 3GHz Xeon system ;)
    • for example many games that states that it requires 16mb video or higher (Hitman etc). runs just fine on my 8mb agp card. actually Hitman was playable on 4mb pci card too. and No One Lives Forever requires 8mb card but acceptably runs on 4mb card too.

  • They'd rather overestimate (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

  • This is an interesting question ... (Score:4, Informative)

    by daviddennis ( 10926 ) <david@amazing.com> on Friday February 06, 2004 @10:56PM (#8209251) Homepage
    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
    • 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 y
      • I call BS.. Windows 2000 and up use almost 64MB without starting any programs.. I've tried it. It's painful with a P2-350 and 64MB of RAM.. it swaps the instant you start anything.
        • I'll have to agree. I have an old laptop that only has 128MB of RAM (can't upgrade anymore). I've fiddled with all of the settings and services and can only get it down to using about 68MB of memory.

          That's fine for a system with 128MB of ram.. a web browser or two and an email client without massive swapping but I can't see it working well with just 64MB ram.

          Btw, xp was using 122MB of ram after a clean reboot right after the installation. It's amazing how many useless services (and exploitable ones) ar
        • You're right, Windows really eats ram, especially 2000 and XP. You can cut down the memory usage by a few megabytes by disabling some of the useless services, but it doesn't go down far.

          When I was in high school, they bought some Celeron 400 systems with 64MB of RAM. They ran either Windows 98 or NT4, and were reasonably fast for regular school stuff like writing essays and web browsing. Shortly after they bought them, they "upgraded" every one of them to Win2K and from that day forward they were dog-as
          • The one thing that is a real performance problem on my K6-II 380/192 MB is McAffee Virus Scan. It's a real performance killer, while AVG that I use right now is not. Either it's got some nasty K6 specific bug, or I don't know, it even seems to be faster on my 486-100/36 Mb than on the K6.

            Adriaan Renting.

            On a side note, everything except windows XP runs fine on my HP Brio P200/64 MB, Windows XP won't even install. With NT or 2000, you should not try to use more than one program though. (I use it for testin
        • strange. for me win2k feels real fine on k6-200mhz and 64mb ram. and winxp feels fine too on p2-350mhz with 128mb ram.
        • I have PIII 733 with 128 megs of RAM right here running Windows 2000. It sucks: slow to load anything, slow to switch between apps.

          Of course, there are several services running that I can't disable, and Lotus Notes isn't exactly light on memory either...

          --RJ
      • It really depends on the computer. I've been troubleshooting a Dell Celeron 700Mhz with 256MB of ram, and Windows 2000. The problem? Dreadfully slow. I've tried reinstalling the OS, disabling the eye candy, all the latest drivers are installed, atleast the computer is very stable. Meanwhile, computers that are much less powerful run circles around it. Heck, I have an old P133 running Windows 95 that can do things like launch Photoshop quicker, I kid you not.

    • Re:This is an interesting question ... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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.
    • Windows XP struggles on a 1.2ghz Celeron with 128MB RAM

      RAM being the key here - I run Windows XP Pro on an old Sony PIII 450 laptop with 512MB of RAM. It runs fine.

      Truly, 128MB is Win98 territory. XP will feel constrained on that, better on 256 and great on 512. Given how cheap RAM is these days I can't think of a reason to havea 128MB box anymore.

      If the choice is between a few hundred MHz and a few hundreg MB, always go with the RAM.

      • I run XP on a Via C3 800mhz mini-itx system with a pair of 64 meg PC133 chips. it runs great. Obviously it wont play Q3 at 50fps or better, but everything else i need it to do, it works great.

        I havent gotten it to hit the disk for swap either. I have the default XP themes turned off (i.e. running in classic mode), and ram usage is fairly light, around 80 megs or so.

        It seems that it automaticly figured that hey, i dont got a great system so lets lighten the RAM usage a bit.
    • I run Office 2000 on an older Toshiba 486 laptop (75 MHz). It runs on Windows 95 OSR2. As long as you stuff enough RAM in the system (it has 32 megs) it moves right along. I wouldn't get up in front of a thousand people and run a Powerpoint presentation using this setup, but for most of what people use a program like MS Office for, it works great.
      • Hell, I ran O2K on my Toshiba P75 laptop with 16MB of RAM, and except for the fact that PowerPoint transitions didn't work well at all, the hard drive was getting thrashed, and O2K programs (especially Word) GPFed a lot (not enough RAM for it to stretch out, I guess), it worked pretty well...
    • Windows XP struggles on a 1.2ghz Celeron with 128MB RAM, and I know this because we have several of both systems.

      Whoa, have to really disagree here. I ran XP Pro for months with 128MB on a Celeron 300 overclocked to 450. Ran just fine.

      Now, it did require lots of tweaking. Turned off all the fat in the system especially animated menus etc, use classic folders and start menu, and so forth. Made sure only the barebones services were running, killed things like system restore, automatic indexing etc.

    • My home rig: Athlon XP2000, 1gig ram, 350gb total disk. Windows XP runs schweet, multitasking no prob.

      My laptop: P4 2.0g, 512mb ram, 40gb disk. Windows XP runs great, but load any memory intensive app and you'll think it's a frickin' 486. Photoshop takes nearly a minute to load (vs about 4 seconds on my desktop).

      I can also lock it up easily if I send files over the 1394 network, because of some retarded network 'enhancement' in WinXP where if the disk can't keep up with the incoming stream of data, rat
      • I'm thinking of foregoing the swap entirely to see if it helps.

        I disabled swap on my desktop system (I'm running windows 2000 and I have 768 megs of RAM) and I notice a performance improvement sometimes. Before, if I left Mozilla sitting around minimized, it would take a couple seconds to restore while my hard drive went crazy. Now, since windows can't put mozilla in swap, it restores instantly.
    • Windows XP struggles on a 1.2ghz Celeron with 128MB RAM...

      Your problem is the inadequate RAM or a truly crappy hard drive, not the CPU. You should properly configure your systems before complaining about performance (256MB and 5400RPM, at least). I've seen Windows XP run perfectly well on a <500MHz CPU with 256MB RAM (even with OpenOffice and Mozilla!).
    • hopefully I'm not straying too far from the original topic. But one reason for hardware requirements change can be ( as is the case with win200 and winXP ) technology change in the software industry. For instance by writing more generic code so you can port to more platforms there is a tendency to make use of indirection which inevitably slows things down. I personally believe( IMHO disclaimer) the reason for XP's sluggishness vs win2000 is because XP was written ( for the most part) using .NET component

  • simple (Score:2, Insightful)

    by n.o.d.y.n.e ( 747945 )
    Ocham's razor: The simplest explanation is probably correct. (ie yes, they are trying to flog more hardware).

    • Re:simple (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cybermace5 ( 446439 ) <g.ryan@macetech.com> on Saturday February 07, 2004 @12:29AM (#8209699) Homepage Journal
      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.
      • It's odd how these have switched, it used to be that requirements were well under what you actually needed so they could sell the software. Only after many complaints were the reccomended systems printed next to the slowest machine that would make the software load.
      • One of my favorite RPGs is 'Castle of the Winds' which is one of the few Windows 3.1 games worth playing for hours. It plays well on the 386SX-16 laptop I have for things like that. I don't run Linux on that laptop because it only has 4 megs of RAM. But I could.

      • Or... it costs a lot of money in optimization time and new rendering paths to support older hardware, as well as new hardware... and at some point on the (always tight) game development schedule, a line has to be drawn in the sand.

    • Re:simple (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Babbster ( 107076 ) <aaronbabb@gmailBOYSEN.com minus berry> on Saturday February 07, 2004 @12:54AM (#8209822) Homepage
      I could see this but for the fact that minimum system requirements tend to list pretty low values. For example, how much money are hardware manufacturers going to make if a bunch of people decide to upgrade to a 1.2-GHz machine and/or a GeForce4MX (those being examples of "minimum" computer specs common on current games)? That's rhetorical, but I'll answer it anyway: Not much at all.

      The REAL truth is even simpler: Game companies will tend to list the lowest requirements which allow the game to run (in at least a playable, if not pretty, fashion) in a relatively low resolution with many - or most, or all - of the graphical details turned down/off. Why? Because the lower the system requirements listed on the box, the more people who will feel comfortable buying the game. This, of course, also leads to many complaints of frame rate chugging on even higher end systems when all the graphical details are turned on/maxed out. "If the minimum is 700 MHz, then my 1.8 GHz will be friggin' awesome!"

      Now, that's not to say that you can't run a game in playable fashion with less powerful systems than the listed minimums. That doesn't mean that the minimums are inflated - instead, it means that the game company is being conservative...and that's a GOOD thing.

  • All depends (Score:3, Funny)

    by darkjedi521 ( 744526 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @11:07PM (#8209299)
    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.
    • Who modded this funny? It's the sad truth.
    • I have had that same problem. Some old games just won't work with anything beyond windows 95/98. Its not like they really can't work, rather they put some kind of os checker in the app to make sure you had 95 or 98 running and it won't let you run without it.
      • If that's the case, Windows XP and Windows 2000 have compatibility modes to lie to the games so that they don't go: "Windows NT? You're playing games at work? SLACKER! I WON'T LET YOU PLAY ME!"

        In Windows XP, it's a tab on the shortcut properties, but in Windows 2000, it's hidden somewhere, and I forget where it is (haven't played with a 2K box in a while, as I switched to Linux).

  • I'm still smokin' (Score:1, Insightful)

    by adot ( 730101 )
    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.
    • 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
  • 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 envi
    • I once put Windows 95 on a 386DX-25 with 8MB of RAM. I had to transfer the install files in with the parallel port, and before that, I had to DoubleSpace the drive to get the install files and Windows on the same hard disk.

      It actually ran OK, you could surf the web in IE 3, play Soltaire and draw crooked smilies in Paintbrush. I even splurged and used the red brick tile wallpaper.

    • Actually, that still meets minimum requirements, as long as the 486 is a DX/2-66 or better. I do know Windows 98 will refuse to install on a system with less than 16MB, so the solution is to stuff it full of borrowed RAM to install W98, and then pull the RAM and 98lite IE away if you want W98.
      • I once got Windows 98 to run on a 486DX/33. In order to get it past the "Windows 98 requires a 66 mhz processor" dialog box I started the installation on a faster computer, and then, upon the first reboot I cut the power, moved the hard drive to the 486 and continued the installation from there. It installed and worked fine although it was a bit slow.

  • 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.

  • It's the GPU (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ameoba ( 173803 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @11:24PM (#8209387)
    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.
    • Though your point is valid, the Unreal was one of the best software renderers I've seend.

      At work, I ran the Unreal Tournament on a 450 XEON w/ 256MB RAM in software mode on the crappy onboard card (S3?), and it was actually quite playable. Sure a better card would have done wonders, and I know an equivilant PII 450 would not have kept up in software rendering, but I was suprised as hell it ran so well!

      As to the original question, it's really a toss up how they determine the minimum requirments, and it v
  • 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.

    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 remembe
  • 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.

  • Read some complete hogwash in the comments. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @11:35PM (#8209442) Journal
    Minimum requirements are really the bare absolute minimum to play a game. Or rather they would be if any pc could be counted on performing the same as another pc with similar hardware. There are just to many variables. Your P3 may out perform a P4. The amount of crap running at the same time. The amount of memory and the quality of the memory. The OS. The patch level of the OS. The settings of the game. Number of speakers.

    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.

  • Could be better models (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AvitarX ( 172628 ) <(me) (at) (brandywinehundred.org)> on Friday February 06, 2004 @11:41PM (#8209470) Journal
    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.

  • Depends on the User (Score:4, Informative)

    by Prien715 ( 251944 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `epopcitsonga'> on Friday February 06, 2004 @11:53PM (#8209520) Journal
    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.

  • They're random. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Myself ( 57572 ) on Saturday February 07, 2004 @12:00AM (#8209544) Journal
    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.

  • This old Comp (Score:1, Interesting)

    by nerd65536 ( 692353 )
    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.

    • Re:This old Comp (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Naffer ( 720686 )
      Lier! Everyone knows that nothing runs Halo just fine!
      At least it doesn't run as bad as Deus Ex: Invisible War.
      • > Deus Ex: Invisible War

        Patch it. I installed the game was almost cried. I installed the patch, and it was all joy.

        Well, technically anyway ...
      • Yeah, Halo often slows down on my main box (2.6), but I played C&C Generals on my old one (PII 350, GF2 MX400) without problems, except for some huge battles, but it was still playable.

  • A mystery to me ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Louis Guerin ( 728805 ) <guerinNO@SPAMgmx.net> on Saturday February 07, 2004 @12:37AM (#8209746)
    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

  • Do you really have to ask? (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Saturday February 07, 2004 @12:45AM (#8209785) Homepage
    "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?"

  • For the ram requirements (Score:3, Funny)

    by __aafkqj3628 ( 596165 ) on Saturday February 07, 2004 @12:51AM (#8209814)
    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 [fasterfiles.com].

    Also, why not just get a new processor. You can get a decent one for under $40 [pricewatch.com] these days. and with a motherboard combo you might get away with something under $80.

  • The real deal (Score:5, Informative)

    by MachDelta ( 704883 ) on Saturday February 07, 2004 @01:23AM (#8209931)
    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.
    • When that hits - and you'll know it because when the UT2003 demo was released internet performance dropped all around the world

      Either that, or the next big virus/worm :P

    • 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.

      Good idea. I'm assuming the guys I play with will probably be doing the demo thing anyway until everyone's hooked up with the game (either that, or play Halo?).

      As for the system requirements thing, I have a GeForce 2 installed (which shocks the hell out of the game admin) and 256 MB RAM. I've been wanting to upgrade bot

    • Goddamn there are a lot of BS'ers on /.

      Well, true in and of itself...

      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.

      This may be true for UT, and it may not. I don't know,
  • 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.
  • 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.

    Link

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