Official What hardware is the game targeting?

I think this is a great suggestion and a good target to cluster around. If it needs to adjust later fine but good to adopt something like this early to facilitate decision making. Take my upvote.

 

GeForce GTX1080 as minimum spec ?
GTX1080 is a pretty powerful card no ?

Even Cyberpunk 2077 only ask for a GeForce GTX 780

 

Hey! So I'm aboard the other requirements, but GTX 1080 is super overkill. As min spec we could probably go for a 1050 or lower, and recommended we could go for a 1060 6GB, which might also be overkill

 

Holy pig man, i'm working on GT 740m ._.
URP is super optimized, i think this project could work even on mid-mobile

 

I would say find references on games that are of a similar scope and theme as the one we are developing and base the specs on their minimum specs. That way we can have a better scope as what something is overkill or not.

For example, Yooka Layle. I think it's a game that is quite similar to what we are looking to develop.

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I don't know what you folks think?

 

Sounds good! Another goodie but oldie is Legend Of Kay:

• 
  MINIMUM:
  • OS: Windows 7/Windows 8.1 32 or 64 bit
  • Processor: Dual Core Processor at 2.0+ GHz or better
  • Memory: 2 GB RAM
  • Graphics: 1024 MB NVidia or ATI graphics card
  • DirectX: Version 11
  • Storage: 6 GB available space

I Believe the processor is ok, RAM should be 4GB and for the card, 1GB or 2 sound great so here is my take on minimum:

• 
  MINIMUM:
  • OS: Windows 10 64-bit
  • Processor: Dual Core Processor at 2.3+ GHz or better
  • Memory: 4 GB RAM
  • Graphics: 1024 MB NVidia or ATI graphics card
  • DirectX: Version 11
  • Storage: 6 GB available space

 

Many good games where made with low specs, imho having to target these specs help a lot a project to focus on what matter and budget accordingly. I know the project isn't about ambition and pushing unity to its limit, but part of learning making games is precisely about dealing with limitations and the lessons pay off handsomely. Especially for art, even AAA capitalize on lesson learned in previous generation. And a lot of time, you have to port your game to mobile, so there is a real case of learning to deal with low specs, Fortnite is a case study about it. Another case is genshin impact, crazy good visual that scale amazingly.

Personally I have a gforce 705 and a radeon r2, respectively 150 and 70 flops more or less, my phone is probably around 4 or 11 flops on opengl 2.0. And there is visually decent games on island since at least the GameCube era with dense forest. Composition matter the most anyway. I mean Mario galaxy still looks nice today upscaled, sonic colour was confused for a x360 games, both are Wii games so no more than 12 flops with essentially no modern programmable shader, I would definitely learn about their visuals as we can have more breathing room than a simple Wii. Also probably a switch could a perfect minimal target, I mean fraking Witcher 3 run on it.

It would be sad you cut off poor people like me, especially those trying to learn game dev, because they can't access a 1000+ $ computer of a middle class family, and that's already more than twice my monthly income. And there is a huge emergent market in India that are still on low end phones. I could barely run the 3d game kit already.

So planning early art to scale, as it's easier to upscale rather than downscale. If it looks good with low end, adding details for high end would be a breeze.

 

To build on top of this thread, how should we monitor whether we are actually able to run on these lower spec machines?

Would it make sense to have a dedicated performance testing thread for each release where people will test the game, post their performance numbers (would be great if we can build in some tools to keep track of the FPSs min, max, avg and such to have a consistent dataset) and also post the specs of their machine + OS? Through that we could put the data into a spreadsheet and start looking at whether there are performance issues rising that we need to resolve in order to meet the target requirements.

 

Separate thread for testing is a nice idea

Wouldn't Profiler data be enough? Don't know if we can put it inside spreadsheet, but it's much better for an actual debugging

 

Potentially yeah, but running the game inside the editor or as a debug build to allow for the profiler to track data could cause extra overhead that won’t be there in the final build and could give us some inconsistent data. It would be better to test with a true final build in order to get rid of such overhead. Once we do figure out that there is a performance regression then of-course we should use the profiler to find out where it’s coming from

 

• GeForce GTX 1080
• 4GB of VRAM

Doesn't fit together?
I would suggest for recommended (I even can play Call of Duty Modern Warfare on 1440p with all max with around 70 FPS with that gpu):

• GeForce GTX 1070
• 8GB of VRAM

Also, for min settings, I don't think this game will be a HDRP unity game with breakthrough graphics (that's not what the styles etc. tend to), you can play it on a newer integrated GPU without problems.

 

having a thread performance dedicated to just testing performance would be nice, or maybe the performance reports could be made in the bug section. For early testing, I think there should be a demo scene (perhaps unoptimised) with an estimated performance cost similar to the project in mind that we could all download and test. optimizations would be made based on the performance results.

 

It's gonna be very difficult to create a scene specifically for creating a baseline of performance when we basically don't even have a game yet. I think it's better to keep track of the performance as we go and once we start seeing issues we should step in to improve the codebase

 

a 750 should be able to run this game, unless we build a really non graphically optimized game

 

Allow me to toss my two cents in from a different angle: the idea behind the Open Project is that anyone from all walks of life can contribute, right? The team behind this won't necessarily have company-provided hardware or a rig built for gaming (let alone game dev). Some of us just might be trying to pitch in from our Dad's laptop that came with a measly RX 540 because we've got $20 to our name and are still hunting for jobs, but also incredibly excited about an opportunity like this. We then end up frustrated because later down the line the project became too demanding for our hardware and we can't even test it for bugs, let alone actually contribute.

I haven't been this motivated to get involved in a project in ages. Please don't cut me off.

 

Just be prepared for the possibility that the game won't be in an optimized state for most of its development.

According to the sources that I have been following Cyberpunk's system requirements are for 1080p @ 30 Hz with low settings. Meanwhile hardware reviewers have been estimating based off of the visuals and the Witcher 3 that you will need a 2080 or greater to have good performance without raytracing.

 

We need to think about performance from the start, as it would be hard to refactor things at the final stages.

And we need to know exactly why we have slowdowns - if it's due to bad design choice, or a mistake made in code

 

Planning ahead for optimization doesn't mean it will run ideally on an older machine from the beginning. An RX 540 has approximately the same performance as Intel's latest integrated graphics.

 

I'll make sure that it runs perfectly on mine

 

The range from min to recommended is actually really huge. I think the 1080 is over 100% faster than the 1050. Also, it's weird to make us have a 1 gb vram requirement when it and the amd equivalent have at least 2.

4 gigs of ram on Windows 10 is kind of tight, and what are the earliest cpu's we are supporting? A pentium 2 duo is a lot slower than a 2500k is a lot slower than a i5 10600k, and for AMD equivalents, it gets really slow once it's not a ryzen first gen.

Also, what are the targets? Is it min for 720p low settings, and recommended for 4k 60 fps? Given the huge gap, that's not entirely unrealistic, we should probably just know what we actually mean when we say min and recommended. Not to mention it's good to have some cut off point where the specs are really low and you get into a "YMMV" zone.

Most importantly, even if we have very low system requirements on the minimum end, that doesn't necessarily mean you can develop for it. Development requirements are generally higher than runtime requirements.

 

I'm currently running a GTX 1080 upgraded from a 960 which is nearly identical to a 1050, and having tested both extensively I can say with confidence that it's much closer to 150 to 200%. You will occasionally run into a game that only sees a 100% increase but that's mostly for games that are limited in some other way.

Agreed. You would have to go back as far as the GTX 750 to see a 1GB card. Neither the 900 series nor the 10 series has anything lower than 2GB, and that includes the very budget tier cards like the GTX 1030.

 

I have just read through everyone's comment. Some of my thoughts:

• If not going for HDRP than minimum and recommended specs both look overkill when it comes down to graphics card selection.
  
• Relation between graphics card, VRAM & RAM don't feel balanced. If going for GTX 1050 than shouldn't we expect minimum 2GB of VRAM. On the other side, if someone has a GTX 1080 card, he is most likely to have minimum 16GB of RAM or more.
• Windows 7 is decent OS to support. Just for consideration.

 

I think we should use a more flexible approach with the requirements for now.

Let's start by considering a few key points for system requirements:

1. What Unity can run;
2. What is the project scope;
3. How to cover the maximum amount of the player's and developer's systems;
4. What technologies will be used (Processor instructions, DX, OpenGL, Vulkan, etc);
5. Inspector results when testing (RAM and VRAM consumption);
6. Build size.

In the current state of the project we can only evaluate the first three points, while the others can only be evaluated as estimates, corrected during development and actually pinpointed at the final stages.

With this and what has already been proposed, my suggestion is to follow these steps:

1. Start with the Unity official base requirements and apply on top a very basic target requirement as an estimation.
   In this case, we could use a mix between the Yooka Layle suggestion, the developers' statistics and the steam players' statistics.
   
   
2. Create a thread calling out for the community to continuously test the project using similar specs and give reports on issues with performance, hardware or operating systems.
   
   
3. Reevaluate the target requirements as the project moves forward and issues arise that cannot be solved with compatibility fixes or optimization changes.
   
   
4. Give a final review when the project development reach a stable point to create the minimum and recommended requirements.

My Target Requirements suggestion:

OS: Windows 7 (SP1+) 64 bit or Ubuntu 16.04
Minimum Unity requirements. Upgrade to Windows 10 or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS only if issues arise.

Processor: Intel Core i5-2500 3.3GHz or AMD FX-8150 3.6GHz
They both have x64 architecture, SSE2 instruction, 4+ cores and are above 3.0Ghz. It is even above many specs for other adventure games.

Memory: 4 GB
Minimum OS requirements. Raise to 8GB if need, but avoid increasing more as it could be overkill.

Graphics: Nvidia GTX 650 or Radeon HD 7750 with a minimum of 1GB of VRAM
Minimum support for DX11, OpenGL 4.2 and Vulkan 1.2 with reasonable power. Increase to 2GB cards or a little more power if needed, but avoid too modern cards.

Adv. Graphics: DirectX 10, OpenGL 3.2 and Vulkan
Minimum Unity requirements. Increase if shaders require it, but each increase might need to review the graphic cards above.

Storage: 2 GB of hard drive storage
This is a vertical slice of a very cartoony game, it should not have a huge size. Increase if needed, but I suggest a ceiling of 5GB. No SSDs should be necessary.


For the final specs and testing:

• Minimum specs reference: 720p @ 30fps
• Recommended specs reference: 1080p @ 60fps
• Let us not enter in the 4K/8K domain since it will increase the project size and complexity by ridiculous steps.

 

I just saw that.
Let me reevaluate my suggestion:

For OS I suggest then Windows 7 and Ubuntu 16.04 for minimum, but Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as recommended, since they are the current supported versions. MAC I don't know anything about to give any suggestions.

The processor I just copied from the Yooka Layle suggestion. I also thought it was a little above necessary. A dual-core 2.0GHz might do the work, but future testing will be needed to add some real processor names.

4GB of memory is the minimum for 64 bits operating systems, lower than that could bring issues beyond the game, unless the game will support 32 bit systems, which I don't really recommend.

For graphics I searched in the Vulkan site for the lowest cards with support for Vulkan 1.2.
The Nvidia site mentions GT 630 as supporting it, but I can't find anything on the HD7450, the lowest was HD 7750.
If the project is not going to use Vulkan, then your suggestion is already great.

In this case, both cards support DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.4. This part I suggest adding to the requirements for everyone to keep in mind to avoid making shaders with more advanced tech than available in the project.