Gamer-at-Arms – Easy PC, Lemon Squeezy

“Everyone’s favourite interactive benchmark” of the Month!

Just over a year ago, planet Earth was still roughly at the same point on its trajectory round the Sun as it currently is, give or take a few hundred thousand kilometres or so. It’s sort of fitting when you consider that in the year since I posted it, I’m no closer to buying and assembling that PC I said I would get and no closer to smashing the laptop that I’m currently typing this very blog up on to smithereens.

I can probably narrow the reasons for this down to two: firstly, I’m a sucker for shiny things. Each month I set aside money for things like Xbox Live, Netflix and general savings but the rest I keep in my bank account to do with as I please. Naturally, this means I buy shit that’s so pointless it makes throwing money down the drain look like a worthwhile endeavour.

The other problem is that I still don’t really have any clue what I’m doing when it comes to building my own computer. Sure, I might know how to put it together once I have everything, but what actually comprises “everything”? For every gigabyte of RAM that I know I need, there’s a graphics card with a number in the thousands at the end of its name that confuses me; I can’t be arsed with that. I just want to play games!

What PC gaming needs is a super simple way of indicating what components are compatible with which games at a glance – something there on the boxes for both the component and the game that you can easily compare. Think of it like the Gas Mark system used by gas ovens and food suppliers. For most things that can be cooked in an oven, you’ll find a Gas Mark which tells you what to set your oven to and on most ovens you can just set it straight to that Gas Mark. It’s dead simple.

You can see quite clearly that this is more than enough RAM than you’ll need for Starcraft 2.

PC gaming needs this level of simplicity; it’s why people still buy consoles. Consoles provide simplicity in every aspect of their being, from knowing what games will run on your console to actually playing them. Being able to associate the words “Xbox 360” on the front of a game with something that will work on my Xbox 360 requires practically no effort on my part – compare this with having to retain an in-depth technical analysis of my PC for comparison with potential PC games I might want to buy. There’s no simple and convenient way to shop for PC games.

An easy way to overcome this would be to introduce a system whereby individual components were tiered off in some way. If a component is good to such a degree, it’ll get a “Silver Tier” or “Bronze Tier” or something like that. Consequently, PC games would list their system requirements as normal but would also include the tier rating for each individual component – not perfect, but it’s a start.

What I’d like to hope is that as more and more developers took to the idea, they’d start to tailor their games to work on a minimum tier – let’s say Bronze, for instance. Publishers could start sticking a big Bronze star right on the front of the box or on Steam, giving you a clear indication that so long as your computer was built entirely from Bronze parts or better, it can run that game. It’s almost exactly like how a developer and publisher bring a game to a console, isn’t it? The difference in this case is that the game is still scalable – if your PC is some game-devouring RAMbeast that can make even the notorious Crysis its bitch, you’re not losing out.

I’m aware that things like System Requirements Lab exist for this very purpose, but that isn’t much use when I’m out and about, or when I don’t yet own the components I want to test a game against. Its feasibility as a means with which to measure game compatibility isn’t absolute, which is why something like a tier system needs to be implemented and be as widely available as possible – on boxes, on Steam, everywhere.


Posted

in

,

by

Tags:

Comments

3 responses to “Gamer-at-Arms – Easy PC, Lemon Squeezy”

  1. Johnny avatar
    Johnny

    If you look at a PC game it says the minimum and recommended requirements on the back.

    If your PC has a GTX 460 for example, and the game wants a GTX 450, it’s not hard to imagine that your machine would run it if the CPU is up to scratch and the you also match the RAM requirements.

    The problem with your tier system is the sheer breadth of systems available. Rockstar did something similar with Max Payne 3 on the PC. Instead of giving a minimum and recommended they gave around 8 different examples of machines that would run it. This requires a fair amount of testing, which costs money, meaning most devs probably won’t bother as min and req should be enough for most PC gamers to recognise.

    In order to a be a PC gamer it only takes a little extra learning. What exactly does it matter that a CPU has x amount of cores? What’s a decent RPM for a HDD? 64 operating systems for higher than 3.5GB RAM? What clock speed do I want on my RAM? Which GPU should I get? What the chuff is a GFLOP? What difference does memory bandwidth make?

    A lot of this is what makes PC gaming appealing to people like me. People who like to fiddle with all the little bits and choose all their own stuff before assembling it. Even when I was 16 I had two PCs in my room and just used to switch parts between them to see what would happen.

    In the end it’s worth it, and I can promise that as someone who just recently got a hold of his first decent gaming PC. Wait until you play Battlefield 3 and Max Payne 3 at 1080p. Absolutely incredible the difference it makes.

  2. Joe avatar
    Joe

    Unfortunately, trying to force a simple system into what is such a broad range of open hardware would actually just cause more of a problem. The technology moves so fast that it would be impossible track.

    For example, if you take my graphics card that is a couple of years old, it would have probably qualified as a ‘gold star’ back when it comes out. However, now it needs the settings of a game like Battlefield 3 knocked down a bit to perform comfortably. So I’m then running on ‘High’ instead of ‘Ultra’ and it still looks amazing, how is that card now categorised?

    The customisable settings in PC games, and the preference/standards of the player mean there is very flexible scale of what’s acceptable.

    The specification numbers are the most objective way to show performance of a piece of hardware, and make for clear required system specs. It takes a little bit of reading up, but I would say after doing some research to find out what specification numbers are the most important, there isn’t too much to get your head around.

    The key to remember is that there are some good websites offering a decent price for a custom gaming PC (although you pay a bit of a premium for that), or there are lots of online communities that will help at least make sure you don’t build a bad system. So there are places to start, for example the Character Select forum!

    The market is also a very handy reference point, as a CPU or GPU that is too cheap to be true, normally is!

  3. Mark P avatar

    Some very good points – technology does move incredibly fast. However, the games would be what set the benchmarks. Each year they’d be re-evaluated too, so as Gold components got older they’d degrade to Silver and then Bronze over time, with new parts taking the Gold spot.

    Jonny, You were saying about “people who like to fiddle with all the little bits…” etc – with a tier system that wouldn’t go away. The new tier system would be in addition to what already exists so you techheads wouldn’t lose out!

    Basically, my issue is that PC gaming doesn’t really cater for people who just want to play games. I don’t think PC gaming will ever truly take off so long as consoles provide a hassle-free alternative. PC gaming needs to have that.

Leave a Reply