Minimum system specs for a game?

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
#1

Hi all,

I’m looking to send copies of a game I am developing (using the blender 2.42a game engine), to some colleagues but they need a minimum spec of some kind so that they can test it on the lowest common denometer machine. I was going to send them a packaged ‘exe’ or ‘app’ depending on pc or mac.

Does anyone know what spec I should give to them? I would imagine it’s just the same as the Blender spec but I don’t want to guess. How much RAM, type of graphics card, processor etc. for both PC and MAC.

Please don’t hate me if this is a stupid question.

Cheers!

#2

As far as I know … which isn’t much and may be corrected by others later on is there really is no good way to determine the minimum specs other than testing it on multiply machines. So the answer is “what ever your specs are” those are the minimum that you can state. But be sure to advise them that those are simply the known minimum since testing has not been done on any lower grade machine to determine the actual minimum required specs.

The reason for this is the game engine needs “power” based on the game requirement. These requirements can differ significantly from the blender program.

#3

It actually depends on texture resolutions, your optimization skillz, vert counts, shader use, a lot of things.

#4

To basically determine it, find some crappy computers and test it, if it doesn’t run well, try a better one, if it runs well test it on a worse one. There’s no real way to verify the system reqs without some tests.

#5

BGE functionality seems to have more to do with the graphics card than anything else. There is a general list of graphics card performance on Blender.org, but it is rather outdated.

If it helps any, most well-built games run at 15-25 fps on my 4MB onboard card (Intel 82815 chipset, set at 16-bit color mode) on a P3 733Mhz with 384MB system RAM. Graphically intense games run slower (Club Silo ~ 3 fps), as do poorly optimized games. It also seems from my experience that textures create more drag on older systems than face/vertex counts do.

#6

Blendenzo you need to get a new card man :stuck_out_tongue:
for me 15-25 fps is not exceptable for most gameplay. I will take nothing less then 40 ( sometimes 30 )

#7

Good points everyone. My game runs smoothly on my machine and many others I have tested on, although some random machines have failed to give any decent frame rate (however these have always been laptops). Generally speaking, I am interested in telling the end user who is likely to be a total novice what they need. For example, here are 2 minimum spec examples that came up when I searched google.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/prehistoric_life/games/dinosaur_world/

My game has 10 low poly meshes which are textured using a total of 40 8bit png textures (4 each), most at 512x512 or 256x256. The meshes are deformed using armatures. The meshes have transparecy enabled as my textures have transparent areas. As I said before, I want to send this to PC and Apple users.

I don’t feel confident in generalising about graphics cards so any help would be truly fantastic.

#8

How many faces (triangles) are in the scene? Maybe someone has create something similar and may have a little insight, but it will be limited and should only be taken at face value. So it likely won’t be much help, but who knows.

#9

Doesn’t ound like you should have much of an issue

#10

The scene has 730 vertices and 530 faces, all faces are textured.