1 GB of VRAM required?

[Sarsben]

First off, I can read, and I've seen the system requirements. I'm just curious whether anyone here has played the game with a lower end graphics card with much success, as that 1 GB requirement seems a tad steep to me.

I'm playing on a laptop with an NVIDIA GT 330M with 512 MB of VRAM, plus an integrated Intel card. I know it's not exactly ideal for games and I knew I'd be needing to update sooner than later to keep up with the times, but this has been my primary gaming setup for the last three years. I've played The Witcher 2 and Crysis 2 on here... can I really not play Transistor?

[Prankman]

I played the game at native 1080 resolution with a measely 252 MB of video ram. There was some noticable slowdown in a lot of areas because the game uses lots of smoke and lighting effects, but it was absolutely playable. I'm sure lowering the resolution from native would help that if it slowed down too much.

[Sarsben]

Okay, thanks for the response. I'll probably go ahead and pick it up soon. Worst case, I just have to wait until my next computer purchase to play it properly.

I'm pretty used to having to fiddle with settings anyway.

[MithranArkanere]

This looks like made using XNA. It doesn't have very good performance. And when you move lots of big images on screen, it'll get slower.

It isn't something you can fix with some settings changes. Either it runs smoothly in your machie, or it won't.

[hrotsurz]

No dont buy it duder .... I have a 525 gtm and it runs atrociously (even sometimes unplayable) it does have the 1 gb of vram and as I said it runs terrible

[MithranArkanere]

It's isn't really about your VRAM. The problem is likely because XNA doesn't properly use hardware acceleration and puts too much stuff in the CPU's hands, so it'll be clunkier than it should.

Specially in laptops.

[Aidinthel]

My laptop has 256 MB of VRAM, and I was able to run the game but only after lowering the resolution quite a bit. It was still perfectly playable, though.

[Sarsben]

Thanks for the input. I'll definitely be getting it eventually, whether I play it on this computer or my next. My sister has a better gaming PC than me, so sometimes I hijack her computer when I'm visiting to play games that don't run well on my laptop. I might just do that if mine can't manage it.

[FrozenHead]

Hey, guys. We do in fact need a gig of VRAM due to the large number of sprites packed into each map. If you run on a machine with less than that, you'll be paging (hitting very slow framerate) in scenes that actually use more than your video card's memory. I wouldn't recommend playing the game on a machine below the minspec because you're likely to have a pretty poor experience due to performance.

Transistor isn't an XNA game... it's built in C# using a highly customized branch of MonoGame. We spent a lot of time on optimization to hit lower end machines, but Transistor does a lot more work at runtime than Bastion, and has more tech pumping away under the covers that all add up to higher minspec requirements. We spend CPU cycles on video decompression, audio effects, and increased scope of simulation. We spend GPU cycles on lighting and fancy shaders to hit the look we wanted for the world.

[TheGZeus]

Originally posted by FrozenHead:

it's built in C# using a highly customized branch of MonoGame.

Sorry to diverge from the topic, but this makes me curious if Linux support is planned.
(Incidentally, between MonoGame and Unity I've noticed Mono as opposed to MS's CLI being used for game develpment quite a bit.)

[FrozenHead]

Linux is definitely planned: http://supergiantgames.com/index.php/2013/06/transistor-faq/

We use Microsoft's .Net stack on Windows, but it is Mono on all other platforms.

[TheGZeus]

Originally posted by FrozenHead:

Linux is definitely planned: http://supergiantgames.com/index.php/2013/06/transistor-faq/

We use Microsoft's .Net stack on Windows, but it is Mono on all other platforms.

Ah, missed that.
Looking forward to it!