New era of games and minimum specs.!

[shadowAMD]

I've been recently pondering games and hardware as were on the cusp of next gen, some may say were already here but as a games developer the latest engines are either new or recent so games are yet to hit the shops.

As one of the company owners thoughts turn to target market, we at one point used Unity and whilst it's a lot of work to make it look well good (best description) it was relatively light weight. As Unreal / Frostbite, CryEngine have undergone upgrades (were Unreal users), the base specifications have hit the roof (for some). Our dev specs are along the lines of 780 Ti's and top end I7's and even then some of the heavier scenes can bring down the good ol' FPS to alarming rates. (From both tech demo's, our games and third party game demos).

Sure our game isn't finished (far from) and we'll tweak and optimise, but there is only a finite amount of things we can do unless we start a trade off. Which kind of defeats the purpose of next gen "shinies"..

For PC, what do you feel about base specs of todays games? We've seen AC Unity's base specs of a GTX 680 which to me is still a pretty powerful card, but I may be long in the tooth.

 

[Warukyure]

New baseline for upcoming games will be Xbox One and PS4. Those 2 consoles are something that we needed in the sense that PC games have been held back for so long because of the Xbox 360 and PS3. Yes, while PC games could perform and look much better than the 7th Generation consoles, it was never at a level where they were completely dwarfed. We've seen that as some game devs are releasing "True Next Gen" titles, that the baseline has moved to being that a GTX 670 will be the new "minimum" for games in the upcoming years.

From 2007-2013 the baseline was hey as long as you had a Dual Core 2.6 GHz, 4 GB RAM, and a 8800 GT or an AMD X1900 you'll meet the min requirements for pretty much most games.

I would dare say the new baseline for 2014 and onwards will be at least the FX-6300 or i5-4000 series at least 3.2 GHz or better, 8 GB of RAM, the AMD R9 280 or Nvidia GTX 770.

PC gamers will probably always hate console gamers. Because the fact of the matter is, they hold up advancement in game development, because for a game developer, you always aim for the lowest common denominator as it creates the largest reach for its game. Now thats not to say its all bad, since the best thing it could do is give a starting point. Build a game thats weak looking? No one will want to touch it, build a game with amazing graphics but too high of specs? No one is gonna buy it because they can't run it.

Look no further than to the Crysis series (or if anyone remembers, Doom 3, in a sense) and you'll see why consoles are both a curse and a blessing.

 

[Richyse7en]

good answer

 

[shadowAMD]

New baseline for upcoming games will be Xbox One and PS4. Those 2 consoles are something that we needed in the sense that PC games have been held back for so long because of the Xbox 360 and PS3. Yes, while PC games could perform and look much better than the 7th Generation consoles, it was never at a level where they were completely dwarfed. We've seen that as some game devs are releasing "True Next Gen" titles, that the baseline has moved to being that a GTX 670 will be the new "minimum" for games in the upcoming years.

From 2007-2013 the baseline was hey as long as you had a Dual Core 2.6 GHz, 4 GB RAM, and a 8800 GT or an AMD X1900 you'll meet the min requirements for pretty much most games.

I would dare say the new baseline for 2014 and onwards will be at least the FX-6300 or i5-4000 series at least 3.2 GHz or better, 8 GB of RAM, the AMD R9 280 or Nvidia GTX 770.

PC gamers will probably always hate console gamers. Because the fact of the matter is, they hold up advancement in game development, because for a game developer, you always aim for the lowest common denominator as it creates the largest reach for its game. Now thats not to say its all bad, since the best thing it could do is give a starting point. Build a game thats weak looking? No one will want to touch it, build a game with amazing graphics but too high of specs? No one is gonna buy it because they can't run it.

Look no further than to the Crysis series (or if anyone remembers, Doom 3, in a sense) and you'll see why consoles are both a curse and a blessing.

I get you, thing is the minimum 8800GTS etc. was more of a.. The game will boot on a X card but it'll run in slow motion on all base specs. I remember trying a few on a laptop GFX card 3X as powerful as the 8800GTS on a couple of games and it ran horribly.

That was towards the later life of the last gen 2010+... So the difference between what you actually need to play the game smoothly and what the min specs are, don't always go hand in hand with min settings.

But I agree at the end of the day, the GTX 770 and an I5 + 8GB probably will be the base line.. But I'm not sure if tech is moving quick enough at the moment. Either that or were feeling the pain of the next gen engines..

In regards to consoles in some ways they are better in some ways they are worse. They can handle a much higher amount of draw calls due to the API, mantle and the later DX versions are trying to close the gaps. But it's still really in the early stages and could do with a ratified standard across the board.

It's trying to find the sweetspot when scaling back I suppose, we have some PS4 devkits but I've enough with PC at the moment ..

 

[Richyse7en]

I believe the biggest problem PC gamers are facing at the moment isn't 'are our PCs powerful enough to run X game', but are gaming developers going to optimize said said well enough to run on the PC..... Poor console to PC ports are becoming a regular thing

 

[shadowAMD]

I believe the biggest problem PC gamers are facing at the moment isn't 'are our PCs powerful enough to run X game', but are gaming developers going to optimize said said well enough to run on the PC..... Poor console to PC ports are becoming a regular thing

Well all games are developed on a PC and we optimise (or downscale would be a better term) for console. Generally engines today are far more powerful than hardware will be for some time to come. It's realising the trade off's, we still downscale for PC but generally no where near as much. If things are running like a dog on the best PC hardware, it's down to Q&A.

So there isn't really such a thing as a console port as such, it's a target made for console that hasn't been QA'd enough for a general PC release. Although from what I've seen, it's not just the PC's that have issues..

 

[Warukyure]

I believe the biggest problem PC gamers are facing at the moment isn't 'are our PCs powerful enough to run X game', but are gaming developers going to optimize said said well enough to run on the PC..... Poor console to PC ports are becoming a regular thing

Yeah, because draconian beliefs. I'm sure the people that make a lot of the decisions aren't really the game devs per se, but instead the CEO/CFOs who still perceive it as "Oh PC? They have pirates, just rush and put something out, its not like we're going to get many sales from them anyways" and lately, even some game devs consider this "Well even if we try our hardest to make a game for Consoles and PC, PC people are probably only ever going to buy our game on a steam sale". It's those beliefs that cause a lot of game devs to do a half-assed PC game.

Now here's something else you gotta consider, games have and always have been a business, to aim for those quarterly revenue targets, you need to release something to sell right? So rush it, and whatever. But the reason they work harder on the consoles is that for the most part, to patch a game, game devs need to pay Sony or Microsoft to host the patches on their servers. (Game Devs have confirmed that MS will charge up to $10,000 just to patch a game, if not more during the X360 days) So not trying to incur more costs they want to get it right for consoles. Whereas PC, since no one really governs it, they can just push whatever, and then release patches as much as they want since its hosted on their own servers.