“Minimum Requirements” and other MythsPage 2
Can I have my money back please?
by Steve MacGregor
OK, so you stand in the shop looking at the box. The screenshots look so good it makes you want to cry. The text describes the authentic flight model, the accurately modeled terrain and the dynamic campaign. Nervously, you turn to find the dreaded words: “Minimum System Requirements”. Your machine comfortably exceeds the minimum spec on the box, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
You pay your money and head back home. You install it and prepare to run it for the first time. You’re feeling optimistic, so you set the graphics options and resolution to a middle setting and fire it up. And . . . it jerks along . . . like a three-legged dog . . . on Valium. OK, so no problem, you think. You turn down the graphics settings and try again. Yet, it still jerks along like that three-legged dog. Feeling more than just a little concerned, you turn all the graphics options down to the minimum, select the lowest resolution and try again.
By this time the game looks slightly worse than most five-year-old simulations, and it still stutters so much that it’s unplayable. You scour web sites and forums in the hope of finding a fix that will allow you to play it. After a few weeks, you sigh heavily, and consign the box to the deepest, darkest corner of your games cupboard only to be dragged back out after the next, inevitable, hardware upgrade.
Now, am I the only one to suffer this trauma, or have you been there too? Have you ever bought a game that runs so slowly that it’s unplayable, even though your system should easily be capable of running it? I have, and it irks me every time it happens. It’s good that new games push the envelope of PC performance. It’s inevitable that some people won’t be able to play the latest games. However, I would like a reliable indication of whether a particular game will run on my system before I buy it.
The question of whether a particular game will or won’t run on your system is central to the purchasing decision. It is critical that you can look at the minimum system requirements for a game (as printed on the box) in the shop and confidently decide if it will run on your machine. Now, I don’t believe we can, and I think it’s time that we got angry about it and made developers and distributors realize that this isn’t an acceptable way to do business.
F/A-18 in all its’ graphical splendor, as it appears on my system. In addition, I STILL can’t get 10 FPS!
My machine is a Compaq Presario 7477, with an AMD K6-2 533 MHz chip, 64MB RAM and a Creative Riva TNT2 card with 32 MB RAM. I have lots of free hard disk space, and I defrag regularly. Most games run OK (Flanker 2 runs smoothly at max. resolution and max detail). All other applications (and I mean all) are shut down when I'm running games.
The latest game to arouse my displeasure in this respect is Jane’s F/A-18. A great game. Probably. I can’t tell you for sure because in the campaign game, I get less than 10 fps with every graphic option at its lowest setting and in 640 x 480 resolution (at which point it looks pretty awful, with bland landscapes and cardboard aircraft). And my system comfortably exceeds the recommended spec for this game. The minimum specifications for Jane's F/A-18 is a Pentium II 266MHz, 64MB RAM, and a 4MB 3D card. The recommended setup is Pentium II 350 MHz, 64MB RAM and a 16MB 3D card.
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