Casual gamer PC specs?

[_6_]

Hi all,

My little game project is going quite nicely, but I've just realised that it runs well on my home dev/gaming pc at about 550fps, but only 20fps on the computer at work.

Does anyone know what computer specs I should be aiming for so that a simple 2D game can run smoothly? I guess I'm just wanting to know what the average pc spec whould be for a typical home user.

Thanks.

casual TBS gameblog (http://www.whitespace.net.nz)

[Bmc]

your game looks pretty interesting.

as for your question, I believe one issue of the casual gaming quarterly has some system spec info.

http://www.igda.org/casual/quarterly/1_1/casual.php

[adamw]

I also took a look at your screen shots in your blog. The change to a 'cartoon' look was smart and looks great.

As for specs, you might check out Popcap forums (http://developer.popcap.com/forums.php). Basically, you want the game to run on as low a system as you can - without the help of a 3D card if possible.

In the end, you want a frame rate that is acceptable for your game. For a TBS, that could probably be pretty low - maybe 20 FPS is fine?

[Nauris]

Love the art of your game. Gives really nice vibe. It`s really interesting to see how it has evolved judging by your old blog posts.
As for your question...err - yeah, what Bmc said :)

[Ricardo Vladimiro]

I am dweling in this question myself.

The game I'm working on makes use of DirectX9 and on my development machine I can't use bumpmaps for instance. Makes me wonder up to where should I take the technology. I do some tests on other computers that I own and obviously the results differ. On my "gaming" machine everything runs wonderfully, on a laptop I can't even see textures.

On the other hand, I've tested the game on other machines and it seems everyone is nearer the specs of my "gaming" monster, therefor I can use all technology there is.

So I've got this big doubt to where to aim: lowish as possible, but it seems there's no real need for that.

Anyone feels the same?

V

edit: by the way, I'm hardcoding 25FPS for a casual puzzle game.

[_6_]

Thanks for the feedback, both on my query and my game :)

I was surprised when I tried my game out on my old laptop recently, which is an 800mhz p4 with an 8meg Trident video card. The game ran at 0fps :( which is obviously not good. And to think I used to play amazingly smooth games on a 7.14mhz Amiga500 when I was a young lad!!

I'll check out popcap and do some research in it.

Cheers.

[Slayerizer]

Thanks for the feedback, both on my query and my game :)

I was surprised when I tried my game out on my old laptop recently, which is an 800mhz p4 with an 8meg Trident video card. The game ran at 0fps :( which is obviously not good. And to think I used to play amazingly smooth games on a 7.14mhz Amiga500 when I was a young lad!!

I'll check out popcap and do some research in it.

Cheers.

you could probably optimize your game without changing the engine.. use 16bit or 8 bits textures (instead of 32bits), try to not redraw the whole screen every frames...

you could probably squeeze more juice out of it.


try to find other games that are similar to your game and see what are the requirements, if you find any, it should give you a good idea of what you should ask or aim for.

I know that my former laptop wasnt able to run any games in 24 or 32bits.. 16 bits was ok for some small games.

[adamw]

I was just pointing to Popcap not for the development engine (which is great by the way), but for their experience on casual games. This and other big time (in the casual space) developers is a good source for information on target audience and system specs. All IMHO of course.

[Expresionista]

I am developing a simple 2D game. I target 700mhz k7 or pentium iii and no hardware acceleration to keep out of problems with old cards and old drivers. I am using quite a lot cpu with procedural effects so the specs are high. In case your game is a simple sprite based classic 2d game, any pc in use should be enough: I remember doom running smooth in my old pentium 60 (with fdiv bug).
Anyway, I believe a 700 mhz computer is well below average nowadays. I'll say 95% of living (surfing) computers are above that mark. I guess (no real data) the average should be close to a 2ghz celeron with 128 or 256 mB of ram and plenty of malware slowing down it.

[Teq]

buy an old laptop and use that as your base spec, the graphics hardware on those is absolute rubbish :)

[Fabio]

buy an old laptop and use that as your base spec, the graphics hardware on those is absolute rubbish :)That's what I do too. :) By just switching to 16bit color mode instead of 32bit, no stencil buffer, and to bilinear filtering instead of trilinear, there was something like 10x speed advantage. Then reducing the resolution made another huge difference. Now a game that was totally unplayable on that laptop is smooth as silk. The beauty of 3D h/w acceleration..

[Teq]

Ahh, am glad I'm not the only one, though I'm sure friends, family and the other half all wonder why I have a collection of piss-poor laptops (want a mactop next) :)

[Sharpfish]

That's what I do too. :) By just switching to 16bit color mode instead of 32bit, no stencil buffer, and to bilinear filtering instead of trilinear, there was something like 10x speed advantage. Then reducing the resolution made another huge difference. Now a game that was totally unplayable on that laptop is smooth as silk. The beauty of 3D h/w acceleration..

Is that for a 3D game or a 2Din3D one? Have any shots of it on/off to compare the quality? the reason I ask is because In the project I'm working on (3D) I had set bilinear as default with an option for trilinear/anisotropic (if available). I was debating whether to set trilinear as default because of it's pros. Maybe provide a downgrade to bilinear. Of course the difference in quality will depend on the source art/textures anyway so in some cases I suppose it would be less noticeable.

[Sysiphus]

I work for mobile (2d and 3d) doing artwork.

Well, I'm used to see an optimized engine running in somewhat pentium 100 like, but lower as has no floating point precission in these machines, no any kind of gfx aceleration, weirdly limited in memory, and other stuff.

True that res is really low, as you can imagine, but the fact is it casually run well at 20-30 fps in very arcade games. But : No antialiasing of any shape, no mipmap, no texture perspective correction, not even lighting. Just polygons, very , very low polygon count (you wouldn't believe it) and the whole workload is making the textures fool everyone's eyes, fake the lighting(so neither smooth groups), disminish the no correction effects, etc.There artist must disguise all.

I know I can use all those tricks in a project I may engage...But while I have been seing these threads here from time to time, is true that seems the shareware games world changes as any other does...and gfx has become more and more polished... I'd like to know if today, a 500 Mghz machine, be it a pentium 3 even, or a celeron/duron, with at least an integrated crappy 3d chip (intel, etc) , and people having installed the OS at least with the manufacturer drivers for card (i don't expect they update, but at least the gfx card drivers like the other drivers..) , having Windows Xp installed (i don't hope they install directx, I have seen near relatives ask for refund for that matter. They never understood what directx means(they did so before asking me)) as this OS seems would ensure enough directx 8 by install, , well if these minimal circumstances make a portion like of 70 - 80% of casual gamers. If that would be so, I'd be left with no doubts, as that'd be enough for me, considering other type of advantages for our game if done in 3d realtime.

I have read that article, but also see that portals like Alawar do distribute quite a number of 3d realtime games..

I don't know if there's some website that keeps an statistic of this...

Is directly related to the thread question indeed. I have been also thinking in going 2d, too. But for other reasons, it'd be a pitty in my case. I wonder if actually a game in 3d like that could also make nice sells, if of the likes of an important portion of casual gamers.

[btw, in antialiasing as last poster says, I'd kill for just a bilinear at work ;) . Anisotropic tended to kill any old Pc machine I used in the past.]

At the end, for some kind of games, I saw I almost need 2d using 3d aceleration, so the problem would be the same in that case,(user installing things, which I don't want) after all, counting on the real time 3d game would be even less stressed that for example a crowded 2d acelerated space shooter.

[Fabio]

Is that for a 3D game or a 2Din3D one?3D.

Have any shots of it on/off to compare the quality?Not handy, sorry, also because my laptop is currently 200Kms away from here (borrowed to a friend for some GPS things). My main desktop development machine has a GeForce 6800. I also have a Radeon 9800 Pro on my wife's machine, but it crashes sometimes (although I know the card is good, I used it on my PC until some time ago, for months) so I've reverted it to my old Radeon 8500 for now. I think it's nice to have both NVidia, ATI and some other chipset to test handy. I was a fan of ATI btw, but after learning they're the Microsoft of graphics cards, now I'm all for NVidia (also because they're committed to OpenGL and have some great guys employed).

the reason I ask is because In the project I'm working on (3D) I had set bilinear as default with an option for trilinear/anisotropic (if available). I was debating whether to set trilinear as default because of it's pros. Maybe provide a downgrade to bilinear.I will give the option, and I will also make a "Suggest options" button that will benchmark the machine with and without trilinear (plus other options of course) and then suggest bilinear if trilinear is too slow.

Of course the difference in quality will depend on the source art/textures anyway so in some cases I suppose it would be less noticeable.It's one of those things that on some hardware give more speed advantage than noticeable loss of visual quality. However, giving an option is very important in my opinion, since the range of performance of 3D hardware is really huge. Said that, I will implement that benchmark thing at the end, with a "Suggest options" (or similar) button, both because many users would be lost in their choice of 3D options, and also because the computer is there to do some processing in our place after all. ;)
Just render some frames to the backbuffer (without swapping/flipping), benchmark how long does it take (I surround it between two glFinish() calls) with and without trilinear filtering, etc..
Also, make sure you're not using features you don't really need. For example, in my engine I had Stencil Buffers by default, but in my app I don't use them. By disabling them I had some speed up, and saved some videomem, without losing anything anyway.
Also, I noticed that in this laptop of mine (PIII 700MHz with integrated SiS630 3D chipset) using vertex buffers and texture buffers BUT NOT color buffers, everything is rendered black also if you use glColor() before starting the batch draw. It's either a bug of the drivers (all of them, including the latest) or a hardware limitation. Since in that effect I wanted to set the color as white, I just changed the texture environment mode from GL_MODULATE to GL_REPLACE, with no loss of visual quality at all, but at least it worked also on the old laptop. :) It may also have become faster (didn't benchmark that time though, argh).
I learnt to have this "minimalistic" approach: enable only what you REALLY can't live without. In some cases, things got much faster and more compatible then. My laptop's support for OpenGL is so lousy that I can be almost certain that if something works there, then it really works almost everywhere. :) Of course I try to follow OpenGL specs to the letter anyway, but we're humans (or subhumans, like me), so checking in the real world is always a good thing to do regardless of all the attentions you've used.
I also run tests with the GDI software renderer from time to time. Although I (will) use features also of OpenGL 2.0, I want compatibility back to 1.1 (of course will look much crappier, but I want it to work anyway).

Finally, although I'm OpenGL committed, when I'll get the time (maybe never) I'll make a DirectX emulator for that, but only for the few OpenGL calls I use (for example I don't use OpenGL lighting, I pre-do it myself), and again put it in the Options screen.. as a possibility in case the main OpenGL driver is broken. Who knows if I'll ever do it, anyway. So many much more important things to do before..

[Sharpfish]

Thanks for reply Fabio.

A lot of what you mentioned is also a part of what I'm currently working on.. that is the 3D features/pre-benchmark etc. Though in my case I am using DirectX (D3D8), it's all relevent.

It's such a minefield working on 3D games when you want to keep them looking good AND being compatible with older hardware.

CPU I can deal with - should run on anything from a 500mhz (maybe lower) and still give decent frames depending on *GPU* - Checks the speed if between (not final yet) 500-1ghz classifies it as system level 1 and sets up some speed hacks/turns off CPU dependent features (not many though as it's more GPU hungry at the moment! :( )

Memory - Current project needs 48mb ram but that is an over estimate - it grabs that before the game starts to check for enough ram (and issues a warning on not enough ram, not enough ram free but enough available).

GPU - The big one when dealing with 3D stuff. SO many different drivers and levels of hardware out there. I have had this alpha running on an "old" voodoo 5 pci 32mb. I think the peak GPU Vram usage is around 8mb last time I checked. Also had it running on GF4ti and ATI9700 (good for different card mnfctrs test but they are somewhat higher than I would ideally aim at).

To save me more research time (and because I have it to hand for testing) does anyone know what a Voodoo5 running in single ram chip (32mb) mode is equiv to in GForce/TNT speak? I am aware it's not exactly base level and would think voodoo3 level would be old enough by now.

As for stencil buffer - I have it disabled as I don't use it. Though I use a 24bit BB - I can use 16bit back buffer but on some tests It has shown z-fighting!

And I will default to 16 bit colour on slower hardware. I just need a better way to check the GPU as apposed to the "system level" and will probably run an invisible check like you suggest.

cheers