Do you think PC requirements are advancing too fast?

Recently we got to see the minimum requirements for AC: Unity and The Evil Within. Both of these require a good quad-core at their minimum and they both require a high end video card to run. But their minimum requirements are higher than what the PS4 and Xbox One have to offer. Let's take for example, an Alienware 14 from 2013:

i7 4700MQ 2.4 Ghz (quad-core)GTX 765M (very mid-end but surprisingly good)
16 Gigs of RAM

All price-troll discussions aside, the Alienware 14 is obviously more powerful than a PS4. You could max out Skyrim at 1080p at around 50-60 FPS 3 years ago. Now, you can barely run The Evil Within at a constant 30 FPS (and it doesn't have almost any graphical options). I don't even know whether it can run Unity at 1080p on its lowest settings. But the PS4 and Xbox One can do it. Shadow of Mordor requires SIX Gigs of VRAM, and most of us don't even have that much power, and an AW 14 can barely pull off 30 FPS on High 1080p. Even my desktop, an i5-2500k with a GTX 670 seems to be slightly underpowered for these games, and I got it for as low a price as I could just last year. I should be getting 60 FPS maxed out on Lords of the Fallen, but I don't, and this might be the case with DA Inquisition too.

My point? I believe that developers are pushing minimum requirements way too high. It's as if they don't really bother optimizing their games and believe that everyone has a hexa-core lying around to run their games. Even space requirements are becoming absurd. Unity requires 50 GB of free space. It just shows lack of proper optimization ie. compressing their audio and textures. People can even run SoM ultra textures on 2 GB of VRAM instead of 6 GB. I think the best solution would be to create a thread where people can post their system specs and what graphical options they can opt for with 30 FPS (and 60 FPS for those who can handle it) for all new games because I'm pretty sure many of us here can't afford to upgrade every year and developers are lying to us just to promote their games as graphical marvels and the current-gen consoles as wonder machines.

I agree that developers are getting sloppy, especially with PC ports. The biggest issue lately seems to be poor memory management which requires users to have crazy VRAM requirements. Watch Dogs still stutters like crazy with Ultra textures regardless if you have enough VRAM or not. Some games are just poorly optimized period. Crysis 3 still drops below 60fps in some areas due to poor environment optimizations. It is just lazy development.

Specs:

3770K @ 4.4 Ghz

8 GB RAM

970 SLI (4 GB VRAM)

480 GB SSD

SB ZxR

I think the better question is it worth upgrading for any of those games? (no)

People would buy more PC games if they still can play on their same old PC.. I for one.. there should be an option that you don't need too many cores or too many rams just to play the newer games just came out... oh well.

^This

With the shared memory on consoles the devs are getting SUPER CRAZY LAZY of late. They don't even bother optimizing PC ports for distinct VRAM and system RAM half the time. So you wind up with insane VRAM and system RAM requirements like AC UNITY and Advanced Warfare.

Now that being said, if you have less than 8Gb of system RAM you shouldn't be complaining because it is super cheap. But the VRAM craziness boils down to shitty coding and laziness on the part of devs.

mostly no.

new gen...the bottom line has raised so requirements are going to go up.

the vram requirements for example....why are people surprised by this? games have access to between 4 and 5GB of ram on consoles, the vast majority of which will be used for graphics. it doesnt take a genius to see that vram requirements were going to spike in games. nvidia and amd are also aware of this and have (and will release) GPUs that will meet the challenge (seriosuly...anyone bought a 4GB 980? i hope you not expecting to be playing everything at 4K at 60FPS for the entire gen with that card.). back in the day graphics chips with extra ram bolted on over the standard was considered a useless gimmick and, at the time, it was. now games are going to be far more memory intensive instead of processing intensive (the actual GPUs in the consoles are not that strong).

anyone buying a quad core/4 thread processor today....games will be optimised for 6 x86 cores.....want to take that gamble? if i was on a tight budget i would prefer to go with an 8 core AMD CPU than a quad core intel. core for core the intel wins. on software that is designed to intelligently scale from 1-X cores: the intel wins. on games released and designed for the PS3 and 360 the intel wins. but games designed and optimised for 6, and only 6 cores....the dual and quad core/thread intel pays. more slower processors will be preferable to fewer and faster processors for the games of tomorrow. if you can though try and get an 8 threaded intel :S.

looking at the shape of the consoles (which we have known about for what..2 years now?) games will be optimised for more but slower processors, will use a lot more ram but wont be as heavy on the graphics processing side of things (in the sense that the GPU itself does not need to be on the absolute bleeding edge). if you are building a PC make sure it has the following if you want it to last:

1) an 8 core processor. if you have to go AMD then do so but get an 8 core (or 4 core/8 thread) processor.

2) at least 8GB of main memory (16 would be nice but not essential....yet).

3) a graphics card with at least 4GB of Vram (6+ would be better). if its a choice between a 770 with 2GB of vram and a 760 with 4GB of vram then go with the 760. the 770 will give better performance in games released up to last year but the 760 will endure longer. no point in having the extra GPU grunt if the GPU is stalling while data is exchanged over the PCI express bus.

some of it can also be pointed at lazy development sure (it would be nice of engines scaled intelligently based on the number of CPU cores and speed and it would be great if memory management between the GPU and main system memory was better)...but the reality is that the bottom line has also risen significantly and games are built for console specs.

anyone building/buying a gaming PC needs to ensure that the console specs are well covered. just because the GPU itself is more powerful, or an i5 in 4 core trim is more powerful than the combined processing power of all 8 cores in the Ps4 doesnt mean squat. the vram amount needs to be covered. if its not then the PCI express bus becomes more involved and thats really bad. the number of CPU cores needs to be covered. games will be optimised for 6. no more and no less. if an engine is optimised for 6 and is running on 4 then some tasks may stall causing performance issues.

PC requirements are over inflated.

The Evil Within said you needed 4GB of vRAM when the game only used around 1.5GB of vRAM at 1080p.

Don't trust rumors and wait until the game is released to see how it really runs.

Developers have gotten sloppy with the pc. It's evident in so many tittles coming from large publishers. Ubisoft is the worst for this, but companies like Square-enix and EA(has gotten better) aren't far behind. For some reason companies just don't want to use the pc's robust capabilities. Could be pressure from Sony and Microsoft making this happen but I doubt that's it entirely if at all.

Really looking forward to what Chriss roberts and his team produce. Hope it turns out to be a mind melter visually as well as technically, because it would sure be nice to see what can come to fruition when corporate heads aren't calling the shots. As corporate heads and management probably play the biggest role in why pc isn't supported well on the technical side of things.

No it is slower than it has ever been since the 386 days when i first started PC gaming.

And just because Ubishit and a tiny handful of other publishers releases crappy ports with overblown requirements, that does not reflect on the PC hardware advancement as a whole.

I think the PS4's video subsystem is much more powerful than a GTX 765m.

Yeah... requirements sky rocketed way too much. Lazy devs need to get off their ass and do their jobs.

@osan0:

There's so many things wrong with what you said...

So your saying we should all buy Nvidia GT940's or AMD 350's with 6GB VRAM.

/facepalm

This.

PC requirements continue with the over-inflated trend like the past. More so now than the past, but you need not worry.

I will say though, that vram is crucial for some games. The Evil Within would not be one of them, of course. But video games like Shadow of Mordor and Lords of the Fallen on max settings do not run well on 2GB vram. Unless you like chugging your way through.

I'm speaking from experience after upgrading from a GTX 670 Signature 2 (2GB vram) to a GTX 970 SC ACX 2.0, this week.All of the games I mentioned above run smooth as silk.

I'm just glad they patched The Evil Within. That was a good move by Bethesda.

This is very true. Again, speaking from experience. Like osan0 said, back then, you can get away with playing Crysis 3 with a GTX 670 2GB vram. Try that with one of these new games, pushing max settings (tessellation, AA, AO, and all that jazz, Ultra textures), and 2GB vram will not hold up. Again, back then, it was a gimmick to get you to pay premium for 4GB vram, which is the standard now.

Just look at the prices back then for a 4GB vram card that was not needed, and the standard 4GB vram GPU now. You can get a GTX 970 4GB for $325-360. Best value right there on the green side.

some of their PC requirements are way off. I remember Wolfenstein New Order said it required an i7.

I installed the game recently on my i7 4770k, the game barely uses 15% cpu, sometimes less. Same goes with Watch Dogs, it had some high cpu requirements but didn't put my cpu in any high usage at all, but the GPU vram usage was terribly high for how poor the game looked.

Shadow of Mordor similar thing, the amount of vram it requires just doesn't make any sense to how good it looks. Even at ultra it doesnt look good enough to justify the huge amount its using. I hope they realize you can do image compression and the quality will remain the same usually. Its like JPG compared to a PNG, both can be compressed, but PNG will be identical to its source, while a jpg will be slightly lower quality. Similar when you do DDS compression, i've never noticed any quality change from no compression or high compression. I've not even looked at any of the textures in the game to see how they are compressed or what resolution they are at, but the size and quality don't seem to match up.

So much bad pc optimization lately for some of the games out. I don't blame consoles either really... i've seen some PC exclusive games that are just awful. Civilization 5 is a terribly optimized game, it only uses 2 threads and it was built only for PC, why doesn't it use more cpu cores... you do the largest sized map in the game with a lot of civs, near the end of the game turns will take minutes to complete, even longer if you have built a ton of cities and units everywhere. Just terrible.

Some PC gamers thought the Xbone and PS4 specs being close to PC specs would result in better ports.

We know better now (Dead Rising, Evil Within, AC: Unity) it just made devs lazy.

I love how my HD7950 is enough for almost highest settings on AC: Black Flag and Watch_dogs, yet it's not enough for minimum on AC: Unity.

Can't wait to see Far Cry 4s insane specs, even if it looks very much like Far Cry 3

Bad ports are bad.

That's all.

Not really. There are only 2-3 games with ridiculous requirements and 1 of those evil within runs suprisignly well even on something like 7850 ( that produces similar results to a PS4

Devs just exaggerate requirements ( except Ubisoft who are just lazy and rush their products )

It's just rumors. Don't trust the rumors.

PC requirements only seem to be advancing fast because they have been virtually stagnant for the past 5 years or so. Now that the nextgen consoles are out, it was inevitable for PC requirements to also get a boost, since the majority of games are developed for different platforms. In a couple years, PC requirements will slow down again and repeat the cycle.

Very weird because my 2gb GTX 760 @ 1.3 ghz ran Shadow of Mordor at 60 fps average on ultra settings with high textures at 1080. So no chugging along there. Also Lords of the fallen a Titan 6gb barely gets past 75 fps while a 2gb 770 gets 60 at 1080 ultra settings.

Requirements don't mean much anymore. The listed requirements are nothing more than an exaggerated guidline that shoots for the ceiling specs rather than true specs to run the game.

The only reason you are seeing the requirements so high is because we are advancing a a high tick on resolution and companies wanting to save face. I don't remember if it was GTA or another game but pc gamers were thrashing a developer for a horribly optimized game that gamers with systems over recommended were struggling with. Since then, folks just put whatever they want on the requirements expecially with the signficant amount of Pc variations possible. Those who want to play games at the high resolutions will require significantly more power then someone rocking something fairly low. Its also why the requirements mean absolutely nothing. For example, I'm rocking a old 5 year old pc build with a phenom 4, gtx 460 etc and play my games perfectly fine with a mix of highest setting and mediums. Thats because i switch between a 1440x900 resolution (monitor) and 1366x768 resolution (32 in hdtv). Think of someone playing with a more up to date rig would be producing at that low resolution. It would be pretty lol with the 200+ fps. Its all about perspective.

I've been playing shadow of mordor on a 768mb video card on high (not the max) and at my resolution, only 680mb of vram is used. Sadly, I do hit the ceiling on the ultra high but my card is pushing 5 years old so no complaints there.

My 780 Ti ran out of VRAM on Shadow of Mordor maxed

Allocating and what is actually is needed are two different things, if your your memory bus and bandwidth is fast enough 2gb is plenty for 1080. A game just throwing all it can onto memory vs efficiently swapping out the old for new data separates the good from the bad.

It is because they are programming the games for the new consoles. Minimum requirements didn't change very much for most games from 2006-2013. Once the new consoles came out, the new minimum was pretty much set. If you can run the new console ports on minimum now, you should be alright for at least a few years. To play on minimum, anyway. Recommended specs will go up, but it will hit a wall. Like what happened last generation as well.

Good point

Personally, since my pc is currently more powerful than the xbox1 and ps4, I see no real reason to upgrade for this entire generation.

Optimization might be a bit of an issue for some games, but overall I expect to be playing at med-high settings for at least another 6 - 7 years.

And even if that isn't the case, I don't care anyway. I refuse to waste money in and attempt to get high settings on poorly optimised games.

If I have to play at 900p then so be it. Doesn't make that much diff. anyway.

There's a lot of hype about how we need the latest gpus with 4 or even 6gb of vram. But that's only for the the enthusiasts imo.

Well that wouldn't be maxed, would it?

It's always been like this. The lull in graphical advancements from like ~2010 to now has made PC users expect too much. It wasn't too long ago where costly, yearly upgrades were required if you had any hope of running games at max. Now, even mid range machines are expected to nearly max games at moderate resolutions. I build a mid range machine every 3-4 years. It's crazy how well they can run modern games now compared to 10 years ago.

My Jimmies have been rustled. What new games are you maxing out with playable framerates? You must be playing at a very low resolution because my 1GB overclocked GTX 460 can't handle the newer games at "top settings" at 1080p.

This is the best explanation for what we're seeing... I guess it makes sense to upgrade your pc whenever a new console gen rolls around, right?

not always. This gen, the new consoles are outdated out of the box on day 1, and devs have been artificially increasing requirements to make the consoles not look as bad.

I've tried it on high textures and it ran well. Ultra, not so much. Hehe. I turned up everything though. Tess, draw distance, etc., at 1200p. Then again, we can't expect developers to support the 600 series any more. I am sure it's the video drivers. They make a huge difference when they're good. According to MSI afterburner, it was maxing out the VRAM, and the game would chug. I sold it anyway, and I'm using a GTX 970 now. :D Smooth as silk!

Yeah... I dunno I understand the recommended or optimal requirements increasing, cos even though theconsoles are objectively weak, they're a hell of a lot more powerful than the ps3 and 360, so I can see devs being able to push the game even further graphically speaking... Those crazy minimum reqs, however, baffle me

NVIDIA, AMD and Intel pay developers to make shitty ports so they can sell new hardware.

When they're releasing a AAA game, they inflate the minimum specs to impress those who over-value hardware requirements. It's like saying that their game is so sophisticated, only the best machines can handle the technical demands. If you take their specs verbatim, you'll never be able to 'keep up'.

Dont be baffled, look at all the recent games asking for 3-4gb of vram or i7's, when in fact its not needed or does not even use half the amount of memory or cpu power. Fact is that these consoles are packing cpu's slower then AMD's best cpu's from 2009 ie Phenom 2 X4's. and their gpu's are like 7790/7850 type of performance ranges. Then these consoles dont have access to the "8gb" of memory but only 5gb or less for game cache and vram which means in most cases the allocation will be 3gb or less for vram. The bigger and complex the game is, the less vram is available. They are inflating requirements to push console sales

I wouldn't worry about the requirements one bit. Sure it's a sign of shit coding on terrible multiplat ports, but on the other hand they're just publishing insane (or inane?) requirements to juice up PC gamers' engines.

It's just a few sloppy ports. We get tons of them - many of them still run like shit.

hello im a little bit of noob so if you could help me to decide should i buy this notebook. I would be glad if you could tell me would i be able to play NBA2K15 on it. the name of the laptop is

HP Pavilion 17-f002sm Notebook PC

and these are the components:

procesor: AMD Quad-Core A8-6410 (2 GHz, 2 MB cache)

graffic card is intergrated: AMD Radeon R7 M260 Graphics

and it has 4gb of ram

someone please help me decide. thanks.

this is the link to pc http://www8.hp.com/rs/sr/products/laptops/product-detail.html?oid=7265323&jumpid=reg_r1002_rssr_c-001_title_r0001#!tab=specs

This post does make me sad to be PC gamer TBH

But it also makes me grateful of the modders (unpaid) out there who figure out ways to optimise these games so that the majority of people can pay them with decent frame rates and graphics without buying a whole new PC every 6 months.

The game developers should probably be grateful, too...

Yeah, I thought requirements have slowed down instead in recent years. Mid-end cards bought 4-5 years ago can still run present games at decent settings. I can run most games fine with old cards like 9800GT and GTX 570.

Hard disk space requirements on the other hand has definitely increased alot though.

Well, I certainly didn't expect so many people to look at these new requirements the same way I did. I'm gonna pick up something I read the other day for those who mentioned that the PS4 has 8 GB of shared RAM:

The PS4 does not have all 8 Gigs of RAM available to it. Only 5 to 5.5 are available to games. Not only that, but within those 5.5 Gigs you also need to hold game state data, where as on PC, that stuff can be kept in system RAM, only textures and level assets required for rendering need to be on the GPU buffer.

This is pretty much true, so like with last gen, I expect the graphic settings on the PS4 to fall down from the current 'high' to somewhere near 'low' equivalent of PC within the next few years (with the XbOne only god knows where lel) because as someone pointed out earlier, the current-gen consoles were outdated on release. Still gonna have to buy one though, because as was the case with Crysis 3 and AC Black Flag, the graphical setting on the PS3 was far lower than the 'Very low' setting on PC, but I could still enjoy the game without having to spend so much money on upgrading my old rig.

@mladenmoraca: I'm pretty sure it can play NBA 2K15, but I think there is a specific thread dedicated to "Can I run it?".

Not really.

PC's are unique. Let's be honest, they could have made Assassin's Creed Unity and the latest CoD on the old engines and had similar requirements. But that technology has been out for a while. Seriously, Dx 10 and GPUs with 1GB of VRAM have been around for several years. Computers were made to be replaced or upgraded.

@BassMan: Yep. Mainly the VRAM. I was fine about 2 , maybe 3 years ago, with my 1gb of VRAM in my crossfired 6870s,but now they're showing their age. I don't really think the requirements are coming along too fast though. Most PCs that are around 4-5 years old can still run most modern games, just by turning the settings down.

I'm hoping to get myself a PS4 after Christmas. Mainly because I can't afford to spend stupid amounts of money on high end PCs, plus even if I had the money, I can't even justify spending that much. I'm trying to troll, I've been playing PC games for a while and I think I just want to enjoy the latest games with out the hassle.