How do you find the limits of what your game can do?

Every game starts as an idea or dream of what you would like it to be.

All games have limits:

• Minimum Spec. Hardware Platform
• Unity Game Engine Architecture and Features
• Game Mechanics, Design and Code.

OK I will admit I always want to throw lots of things around in games e.g. Big battles, Hordes, things that push the envelope.

But even if you want a limited game as you add more particles, larger levels, bigger or more adversaries there comes a time when you will need to profile and optimise your game for performance.

So do you profile early and often, stress test/prototype your game design early or crunch when your deadlines loom?

How do you manage the limits of your game?

Personally I like to "Stress Test" early to get an idea of the maximum my games can handle.

 

Deja-vu...

I will just add this: Finding the limits for the sake of finding the limits is useless and at times it seems that's what you're suggesting.

 

Minimum spec: just look at what your shaders and polygonal processing requiring for GPU spec, find some relevant GPU, slap it there (usually shader version and polygons per second are enough unless using some extensions).
Profile for CPU, then slap something that's about right.
Check how much your game requires, add what user would like to run in background and just slap 2Gb/4Gb marker if it doesn't take much. Otherwise, add 1 Gb to actual peak of your game RAM consumption. Place whichever is higher of those two, or if you're lazy just the first number you think of.
HDD: you just measure how much your game weights and add up to 50% to accomodate for further patches, installation temporary files and such.

Recommended spec:
There are two approaches:
1. Theoretical. You calculate theory where it goes full FPS. Always goes wrong, but who cares. If a lot of people complain on forum, just change it.
2. Practical. Place weakest PC configuration you've tested game on and on which it goes full FPS on maximum quality.

That's why you make user choose from different quality/level/difficulty settings that can include all that...

P.S. Yes, all those are placed only after game is complete. Because why would you care if it's not?

P.P.S. In ideal case, you will need to test game on at least 50 different PCs, so you can choose minimal and recommended from them. Very few people can do that though, so improvise.

 

Dupe.