Hardware limbo: How low-specced can you go with Nier Automata?

[Yael]

Originally purchasing Nier to stress-test a new laptop, which I had to send back, I am now stuck with a 60€ game on a dated low-end gaming laptop. And, surprisingly, it is still enjoyable! I am rather impressed by the down-scalability of the hardware requirements, so I was wondering how far down people have tried it (successfully).

On a laptop with a Geforce GT 740M (2GB) I can run the game at 640x480 resolution, lowest settings, at roughly 25-30 fps. Not comparable to the 30-60fps 1920x1080 at max settings with the sent-back laptop, but enjoyable nonetheless (though it looks like a PS2-era game this way).

I suspect though that this isn't the lower limit of what can be done, given that the game supports even lower resolutions – I don't think I've ever seen a PC game before that supports 400x300 and less – so I was wondering how far one can stretch this game :)

[Prison Mike]

Man, you're a true warrior. This game already looks bad maxed out at 1080p. I can only imagine how it looks like at 480p lowest settings, LOL.

[ドイツ人]

AMD A10-7350B, forcing clock speeds to 1.5 GHz CPU/500 MHz GPU. 25-30 FPS at 720x480. I actually had to play it like that for a couple of hours before I finally managed to make it work on my desktop PC (f***ing, whitescreens).

Considering that I could play Bioshock Infinite at 1366x768 with decent settings on that thing, that's... not exactly great. And playing on a low resolution like that definetly hampers enjoyment imho.

[黑色行动]

AMD A10-7400P with Radeon R6 + R5 M230, I'm getting a 22-30 FPS and 25 FPS Average at 960 x 540 with FAR Mod.

I can get a playable framerate of 30-40 FPS by setting the AMD Crossfire mode to "Optimize 1x1" but doing so will increase the temp of my GPU to 95C, thus I didnt use it.

I hope the devs patch this soon, I dont mind playing it on 960 x 540 but I hope with their patch i can play it at atleast 30 fps on average without using Optimize 1x1.

[Theodocius]

You are dreaming big. The Devs will not install a patch for this game; they already have your money. Steam knows this. After two hours of trying to install the FAR patch and slogging through an unplayable game because of poor optimization, Steam will refuse you a refund. Avoid this game on Steam if you have not purchased it yet. Save yourself the trouble.

[Habits]

Theodocius の投稿を引用：

You are dreaming big. The Devs will not install a patch for this game; they already have your money. Steam knows this. After two hours of trying to install the FAR patch and slogging through an unplayable game because of poor optimization, Steam will refuse you a refund. Avoid this game on Steam if you have not purchased it yet. Save yourself the trouble.

Two hours trying to install FAR?

[Mr Deap]

positive の投稿を引用：

Man, you're a true warrior. This game already looks bad maxed out at 1080p. I can only imagine how it looks like at 480p lowest settings, LOL.

The game graphic appreciation is subjective.

It's taxing, because nothing is baked which make stuff move lively & animated giving a more natural atmosphere as a whole.

[Kisai]

Yael の投稿を引用：

Originally purchasing Nier to stress-test a new laptop, which I had to send back, I am now stuck with a 60€ game on a dated low-end gaming laptop. And, surprisingly, it is still enjoyable! I am rather impressed by the down-scalability of the hardware requirements, so I was wondering how far down people have tried it (successfully).

On a laptop with a Geforce GT 740M (2GB) I can run the game at 640x480 resolution, lowest settings, at roughly 25-30 fps. Not comparable to the 30-60fps 1920x1080 at max settings with the sent-back laptop, but enjoyable nonetheless (though it looks like a PS2-era game this way).

I suspect though that this isn't the lower limit of what can be done, given that the game supports even lower resolutions – I don't think I've ever seen a PC game before that supports 400x300 and less – so I was wondering how far one can stretch this game :)

Don't even play this game on a laptop, you'll kill the cooling system. The minimum requirements is always low-balled for PC games because the amount of people who actually have the required system specs is 5-10%.

The minimum requirements for this game should be an i5-3xxx with a Geforce 780/980/1060, and that is ONLY for playing at 1080p. If you are willing to play it at the worst possible settings, you can, but you're not going to enjoy playing it.

Take a look at any video card benchmark and you will see the price/performance gap jump pretty far between the worst video cards ($50/$100/$150) and the best cards ($300/$400/$500)

For example:
GTX 1080 has a score of 11,980, and costs $500
GTX 1070 has a score of 10,905, and costs $340
GTX 1060 has a score of 8,905, and costs $235
GTX 1050 has a score of 4,660, and costs $100

So going from the 1050 to the 1060 is a double in performance, and going from the 1050 to the 1080 is nearly triple the performance.

The GTX 1060 and the GTX 780Ti are the same price/performance
The GTX 1070 and the GTX 980Ti are roughly the same price/peformance

So to put things in perspective, the 1060 = 2 generation old high-end card, 1070 = 1 generation old high-end-card.

And... just to make people feel even more embarassed about spending money on PC hardware:
The GTX 680 has a score of 5698 and is somewhere between the 1050 and 1060 in performance.
The GTX 580 has a score of 5011 and is only slightly better than a GTX 1050.

So if you are trying to play Neir:Automata on something nowhere near the minimum requirements, you are better off spending money on a PS4 which costs $400 and will have more life over 7 years than a GTX 1070 will over 2.

[ドイツ人]

Ouroboros |☣| の投稿を引用：

I can get a playable framerate of 30-40 FPS by setting the AMD Crossfire mode to "Optimize 1x1" but doing so will increase the temp of my GPU to 95C, thus I didnt use it.

If I were you I'd try to enable a 30 FPS lock, that should help temperatures a bit. Dropping below 30 FPS is an issue in this game because it only really scales down to 30 FPS, meaning you'll be getting slow motion at anything below that.

[ProfessorFrog]

Too low fps in this game will prevent jumping and jump+attack launchers to work correctly. It's probably the 30fps limit which was mentioned above here.

I suggest putting the fps threshold slider in FAR all the way to the right. It gives me more fps and a lot less hiccups. On my nvidia GTX970, amd FX-6100, 8gb ram, I can get 130-180 fps in the debug mode arena on the most utter lowest settings. During normal gameplay i'm mostly stuck between 55-80fps.

Disabling shadowplay helps, but that's not what I want. Looking for any performance increasing tips.

[Luna]

Kisai の投稿を引用：

So if you are trying to play Neir:Automata on something nowhere near the minimum requirements, you are better off spending money on a PS4 which costs $400 and will have more life over 7 years than a GTX 1070 will over 2.

I do not understand how spending 400 dollars for Gtx 970 performance makes sense. You also mean the Ps4 pro I assume, Ps4 doesn't cost that much.

[3AMine]

Theodocius の投稿を引用：

You are dreaming big. The Devs will not install a patch for this game; they already have your money. Steam knows this. After two hours of trying to install the FAR patch and slogging through an unplayable game because of poor optimization, Steam will refuse you a refund. Avoid this game on Steam if you have not purchased it yet. Save yourself the trouble.

blahblahblaah stop spreading misinformation, please. They said being working on a patch long ago, and they are, and you can check yourself how much their dev branch is updated. https://steamdb.info/app/524220/history/

[notFore]

Theodocius の投稿を引用：

You are dreaming big. The Devs will not install a patch for this game; they already have your money. Steam knows this. After two hours of trying to install the FAR patch and slogging through an unplayable game because of poor optimization, Steam will refuse you a refund. Avoid this game on Steam if you have not purchased it yet. Save yourself the trouble.

The "it took 2 hours to install a simple plugin" is the best part of your rant lmao.

[SkacikPL]

As far as OP goes, probably a whole lot in terms of CPU, a fair bit in terms of RAM and not much in terms of GPU.

[Yael]

Kisai の投稿を引用：

If you are willing to play it at the worst possible settings, you can, but you're not going to enjoy playing it.

Just finished my first playthrough and started well into the second :) While the choreography of the fights suffers, by either maintaining 30 fps or slowing down the speed of the game proportionally when dropping below, the game is entirely playable, and you may guess from the first sentence, it is actually fun :) Playing Dragon Age: Inquisition at 1280x720 with lowered fps actually had a much worse impact on fun.

The rediculously low resolution (640x400 is the lower limit for maintaining text-readability) even has the curious side-effect of making a lot of the game look like deliberate pixel-art (particle effects in particular), and other things are a bit evocative of PS2-era games.

That is quite unlike ego-shooters, where every pixel counts when sniping at long distances. Forget that, I just tried Borderlands 1 with 640x400 and it actually looks better than with 1280x720 o_O

That said, I have played ego-shooters on the N64, which was pushing half that resolution (320x240) and adding 4-player split-screen on top of that. So I may simply be hardened to such limitations.

Kisai の投稿を引用：

Don't even play this game on a laptop, you'll kill the cooling system.

Honestly, no. Just no. I have never personally seen a laptop so shoddily built that this was even possible, though in the early 2000s a local company had a reputation for building laptops that died quickly, because the desktop-grade components were operating at too high temperatures.

The cooling system very well may kill sensitive ears though.

[KoreReactor]

Running it on a GTX 660ti with everything maxed except AA, which I'm forcing 4x via Nvidia Inspector. Running around 30-40 fps, which may not be great but definitely playable.