So how does system requirements testing work?

[ChaosTroll]

Do you use actual people with actual computers? or do you throw it through a bad ass computer running vmware emulating a bunch of different types of computers?
If you're using the former, I have a pretty decent computer that I can also overclock the graphics card on (i doubt that will be necessary since it's just unreal tournament, but meh)

Just curious, never really known how people do it honestly.

[frvge]

Normally, companies hire a specialized company, which has several hundred PCs with all kinds of configs. Then those games are run through a testing simulation, which also has tests like "stay in one place for 10 hours" to test for memory leaks.

We don't have that luxury, so we'll probably just throw it out into the wild and gather statistics on Frames per Second. Some basic testing will be done before that.

[MulleDK19]

Does it matter really?

I mean... Download the game, install... If it works, then you meet the requirements... If not... Then you need to upgrade...


It's a free game after all... Don't people worry about sysreqs because they don't wanna pay for something they can't run anyway?

[ChaosTroll]

When I think system requirements I think "download time" Not all of us have the luxury of good internet. I myself have been on dsl or lower speeds for the past 10 years. Before that, no internet. Not until I moved out on my own did I get some bad ass 15mbps cable hookup. So even if the game is only 2gb, some people want to know if it runs before they spend 40 hours downloading it just to realize their computer sucks. Now this is usually when tech support gets flooded with stupid questions resulting in the answer "dell computers can't run this with their crappy intel brand built in graphics card on your crappy 512mb ram POS" Which was the case for me when I BOUGHT splinter cell chaos theory for pc. I know for a fact I can run it, I just like to see system spec requirements because I like to see what the games are packing and know if I should overclock or not when I run it.

[MulleDK19]

When I think system requirements I think "download time" Not all of us have the luxury of good internet. I myself have been on dsl or lower speeds for the past 10 years. Before that, no internet. Not until I moved out on my own did I get some bad ass 15mbps cable hookup. So even if the game is only 2gb, some people want to know if it runs before they spend 40 hours downloading it just to realize their computer sucks. Now this is usually when tech support gets flooded with stupid questions resulting in the answer "dell computers can't run this with their crappy intel brand built in graphics card on your crappy 512mb ram POS" Which was the case for me when I BOUGHT splinter cell chaos theory for pc. I know for a fact I can run it, I just like to see system spec requirements because I like to see what the games are packing and know if I should overclock or not when I run it.

Still, you sure are gonna upgrade your hardware at some point anyway, right? So why wait with the download anyway?

If you download it, and your computer runs it fine, then all is fine.
If you download it, and your computer is unable to handle it, then you have the game for when you get better hardware.

Same outcome, really.

[LennardF1989]

@ChaosTroll, we have a wide variety of systems among the developers (ranging from 2,08GHz Single-core CPU's with SM3.0 cards to Octo-core systems with bad-ass video cards), it will be tested appropriately so we can give a good indication of the absolute minimum specifications.