Testing my game for performance

Does anybody know of a great way to test a game for performance other than actually playing it on multiple computers?

I have a few computers, but it would be helpful to find the exact minimum recommended system specs for my game so I can divulge that information on Steam for people.

 

have the existing game send data to you

 

Is that built into the editor or what?

 

Removing and adding different graphics cards and processors as your motherboard allows. That's about the only other way I can think of getting the equivalent of testing on multiple computers. You can't really emulate differences.

 

Analytics when you do beta testing? Read a computer's specs and get its min/max/average frame rate. Get enough of those and you'll be able to make an educated guess as to recommended specs.

 

I haven't looked into all the tools for Steam, but I do recall seeing something about seeing information from users. But maybe I can use a Unity asset for that? I remember seeing something about where players go and progression throughout a game.

 

That's unity analytics you're talking about. You can make your game report an "event" and the information will be sent to your developer's account (and you can try to analyze it statistically). However, I think it doesn't report "performance". Only platforms and whatever data you sent. It could be used to figure out, for example, how many people didn't find a blue keycard on level x, how many of them didn't reach certain level, and so on.

You can also run the game through a profiler to chceck for a bottleneck (which could help you to further optimize your game), but that's about it. Running on actual testing hardware is the best idea.

 

Yeah, if you're talking about Unity Analytics then @neginfinity pretty much nailed it. The way their event points system works it'd suck for this kind of testing, because each unique string you send costs a point, and there'd be a lot of unique strings in recording system specs.