Question For Hardware (cpu) Gurus
This is my dev system which I fine tune my project's performance on. If it works "ok" on this system, I figure it will run ok on a wide variety of machines. But lately I'm having 2nd thoughts due to all these low end laptops available now.
My desktop dev system:
Celeron 2.93ghz
512mb ram
Intel 82845G
I know nothing about cpu speed, cache, etc, etc and have NO IDEA how this compares to recent laptops.
For instance, how does my dev system compare to this new laptop which costs $399.00?
Dell INSPIRON 15Intel®
Celeron® 585 (1MB cache/2.16GHz/667Mhz FSB)
2GB2 Shared Dual Channel DDR2 at 800MHz
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X4500HD
Is my dev system faster, slower, equal?
My wife's laptop which just runs everything I throw at as smooth as butter:
Dell Inspiron I6400
Genuine Intel CPU T2300 @ 1.66ghz
1gb ram
Intel Mobile 945GM Express Chipset
I'd love to make this my new low end benchmark, but again..I have no idea if I'd be ahead or behind the typical spec being purchased the past year. ?
Thanks for any feedback.
Is your desktop's Celeron Pentium 4-based? I believe that laptop's Celeron is based on the Core 2 architecture, and if that's the case, your desktop should be MUCH slower.
I bet a netbook (with an Atom processor) would be a good, inexpensive low-end benchmark. This one is $280:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834220354
Also, a fun toy :)
Thanks for the reply, I don't know if it's P4 based or not. Here is the official system spec page:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...0255589&dlc=en
It says the processor is: Intel Celeron(P) 340 2.93 GHz
Yah, I'm looking at those sexy small netbooks. Again, I just don't know where my system stands in relation to those systems as well.
Yeah, I strongly suspect that's P4. I don't know how that aging architecture fares against the Atom (which is what most/all netbooks use), but I do know that both are significantly less powerful than other modern processors.
This depends why you're asking. What are your games doing with the hardware ?
I would think that processor speed is nowhere near as important as graphics speed these days, assuming you're doing either full 3D or blitting your 2D as quads via the GPU.
As you can see for yourself, the gpu on your dev box is a long way behind the curve, even for non-gamer laptops. If your game runs fine on it, I doubt you'll have any problems at all with frame rate for anyone else.
If you're asking because you think you're not drawing enough stuff, then imo you're probably right. Add more particles :)
Mind you, I can't believe your dev box only has such a crap amount of ram in it. I know you need a low watermark for ram somewhere, but not in the machine you use all day. It must be horrible!
It's just nuts really. Some new boxes run games worse than my 4 year old box. Now I'm involved with several flash projects and I'm concered that my dev box is more powerful than these low end laptops/netbooks, etc. It's very hard to pick a "spec" and develop based around that. I need to pick up one of those atom based netbooks and see what they're capable of. And maybe time for 1gb in my dev box as well. :) The main reason I don't develop on better hardware, I'm just stupidly afraid I'll write some zany ai or render a zillion sprites and think "runs fine, let's continue". lol..
I think you can pick a better mid-range machine to develop on, personally. I don't have a high-end machine, either, but going Celeron + Intel Integrated is a little overboard IMHO. Get a discreet GPU and a non-budget CPU, and save that junk for min spec testing (which is sounds like you already want to do, hehe).Originally Posted by JGOware
Choosing a min spec is indeed a tricky problem, especially when you never really needed to deal with architecture nuts and bolts in the past. The bottlenecks are going to be different all the time, so you kinda have to pick a min spec for each component. For example, on your machine the bottleneck *might* be the GPU (integrated is dog slow, and the Intel 8xxx cards in particular sucked and had buggy drivers), but it might also be the CPU (IIRC, the P4 was noteworthy for being one of Intel's worst designs in terms of perf per clock; how do you think the Celeron version performs? :D). And then there are always random driver issues that cause unexplainable perf hits.
Can you give us an idea of what your game is doing/rendering? It might be easier to determine a min spec from that...
Thanks vjvj, good stuff. :)
"Can you give us an idea of what your game is doing/rendering? It might be easier to determine a min spec from that..."
It's not just 1 game, it's all of them. lol. I guess the good news is, my dev box is probably a good candidate for "low spec testing" and yes that's exactly what I'm ultimately trying to determine. So at the least it sounds safe to assume my dev box is the low man at the totem pole, just have to find out the performance of these cheap laptops/netbooks. Especially with flash games, it's vital to spec performance since it's usually not hardware rendering.
Yeah, Intel Atoms paired with Intel Integrated 9xx GPUs are pretty ubiquitous now, so that's a great place to start. I have practically zero experience with Flash, but my understanding is that it's rarely/never GPU accelerated (which I think is what you were saying, also), so CPU and memory performance is going to be pretty important.
Another thing that will help is to download AMD CodeAnalyst and profile your games to get a sense of what parts of the system you are hammering the most. If they're CPU bound you'll be able to drill down and find out precisely where all the time is being spent. You won't be able to see much about the GPU obviously, but you'll be able to detect GPU driver bottlenecks as those will still show up in the list. This info will be pretty useful in determining how low you can go with a min spec. And if you find any low-hanging fruit optimizations, congrats! You might have just lowered your min spec :)
Not if you like Crysis and GTA 4 type games.
Why don't you run some benchmark tests and compare results with the other computers ? IIRC Futuremark had huge list of hardware configurations you can compare it with.
Scharlo A.
Big Blue Bubble
If anyone here is developing a game like that and is beyond 50% complete, I'll commit one whole year of my life to help them finish it for free.Not if you like Crysis and GTA 4 type games.
I think it is not a good idea to buy a cheap machine to mimic the customer machine. Usually you will have active and running several programs at once (since is your dev machine) and a slow machine will hurt you developer process. Also, you always can test in a "vmware machine" or try with beatester.
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