System Requirements Question

[Ganimoth]

Well we will see after release, I also plan to test my old Radeon 1300 XT with 128 MB RAM, which would be really interesting

[petri]

Well, the CPUs and GPUs are decent enough performance wise but 512MB just wasn't common 1.5 years ago, even in MacBook Pros. So if you're not only looking at the most up to date notebooks, it for sure wouldn't hurt officially supporting 256MB too.

Fair enough. We need to find a 256 MB graphics card and test the game with it.

[lowzei]

*thumbs up*

[Darklord]

Send the game to me, I will find a 256mb Graphics card system to test it for you! (I'm an IT tech there's PC's everywhere here)

Daniel.

[Greco]

Both my Mac as well as my PC also only have 256MB.

512MB is still a lot if you're more notebook oriented. I hope it will run by lowering some texture resolution. Playing games like Dragon Age 2 or Portal 2 wasn't a problem on both systems.

Skyrim's official minimum requirements are 512 MB card, but it runs perfectly on my netbook netbook, that's why I have still faith!!!!

[lowzei]

I don't know what specs your netbook has but Skyrim on a netbook sounds sporty to me.

The GT330M in my MacBook Pro for instance isn't a screamer compared to desktop solutions but it's a decent GPU for many things, coding as well as gaming. It should be possible to get a Dungeon Master level (can't remember those sizes correctly, 31x31?) running on it. Contrary to the GPU RAM, SM3 is around since many years, might only be a problem speed and driver related in integrated solutions, although i'm not quite sure why they need SM3 but it can be a lot more comfortable.

512MB sounds a little bit like 1MB in Dungeon Master days to me. My A1000 only had 512KB but i was lucky and a friend of mine lend me his ST for a week and so i could play through Dungeon Master this way. Otherwise it would have taken quite some time until i got my 2MB expansion. There is something special about these kind of games as they always require so much memory, although this time it's Chip- instead of Fastmem.

I would be interested to know why it takes 512MB. Often you can get away with less by choosing the right compression formats for the right purposes. On the other side, each project is different.

[Darklord]

From what Petri has said it's the textures that require the larger graphics memory, without it the game may run quite slowly. It does depend to a certain extent on the rest of the system as well though.

Daniel.

[lowzei]

I wonder if they use DXTC, if you use it wisely it can safe you a lot of memory without looking too bad, sometimes you want a better look, sometimes less memory usage.

[petri]

We're using texture compression in places where the visuals are not hurt badly. E.g. GUI textures and normal maps are mostly uncompressed for best quality.

[lowzei]

Depending on the content and lightning situation it can be a lot better compressing the diffuse component instead of the normal map.

Out of curiosity, do you use any form of occlusion culling?