(05-20-2011, 03:59 AM)Shadow Lady Wrote: Not really a helpful item, a game running at a max of 60FPS in an i5 2500k @4.8GHz would run about ~20FPS in a core 2 duo @2GHz (considering CPU is the bottleneck) and as MyDreamName said it doesn't say anything about how compatible it is... just that you have slow or fast hardware.
Not exactly true. Speed is an important factor, and if a game is compatible but plays at 10 FPS, then it's not really playable in the way that people expect it to be (i.e. actually play the game and have fun, which isn't quite possible with 10 FPS).
While speed depends much on the System the user has, it also varies between games, and some games work well with much lesser hardware than others.
So it can be useful for people IMO if it also has a "requirements" index. For the sake of simplicity, I'll choose 3 possible values: High, Medium and Low, just so that people can know what to expect with that game. This requirements index should take into account speed hacks which help the game, such that if default settings requires a high end system for good FPS, but with speed hacks it will work nicely on a low end system, then this game's requirements index would be 'Low'.
It's not a scientific measure, But I'd say that 'High' requirements should mean that it would be reasonably playable on high end systems (i7/i5 2500K etc at 3GHz and above) with a modern GPU (GTX260 or equivalent and above).
Medium requirements would mean around E5700 @ 2-3 GHz with GPU around 8600GT or so.
Low requirements would mean laptops with embedded GPU, and/or CPU around 2GHz and below.
Just to have a rough clue which games demand more resources than others.
The specific scale I suggested here might not be good, but I'm sure a reasonable scale can be set, possibly with the help of the CPU benchmark thread.
However, that still leaves the issue of who will actually test and write down how fast each game plays. As it stands, the beta testers already put much time into testing many games. Asking them to also index the speed might be a bit much IMO.
I know I'd like the compatibility list to also have a rough requirements index too.. but I can also live without it and just try the games and see if they run well or not...