Why such a minimalist game have those requirements?

[Noptyn]

16GB ram? GTX1060? ...Why?

I don't have troubles but since I don't understand much about hardware components I was curious about this.Can someone explain?

[jonnin]

Its a brand new game, not even done yet, and it asks for the specs of a computer 5 years old.
It isnt optimized well yet so it struggles a bit on weak computers, even though its not photorealistic graphics it has particle effects, lighting, and voxel type computations.

to explain the hardware, the current graphics cards are 3000 series, so its 2 series (where each series has 2-3 cards in it) old. New computers often have 64gb ram, 32 for budget systems. The game does not require that much, but they give you a number that supports windows hogging a bunch in the background, your other crapware that runs all the time hogging some (like steam :P ), and whatever other programs are running in the background like a browser. I mean in reality 16gb is a lot, but programs use way, way more than they need. If it isn't playing sounds or graphics or handling huge amounts of data, it should only need a few MB. The game uses sound and graphics, but how much, i do not know.

[Noptyn]

I have those requirements but they still seems strange for this type of game but....64 Gb is NORMAL? Hell man, I think I live in another world :D

[Captain Cosmo]

Reminds me of what they said in the old WinXP days when 8gb was the high end and 4gb was the standard. "You won't ever need more than 16gb unless you're running art design programs or such." Now it's like game developers said "Hold my soy latte" and make it a point to export art development assets onto clients' PCs instead of packaging them in a neat compiled asset or something. I'm way oversimplifying the process, but the gist is it wasn't a challenge to be accepted. Somehow we got on this train of thought that "Better graphics = better game", while ignoring gameplay and story to a larger degree. Noptyn is not wrong for making a call out on the requirements for this game - while I've sunk well over a hundred hours into Valheim, it's still circa 2012 graphics and mechanics and shouldn't need nearly as much resources as it takes to run.

The inefficiency bothers me from a technical standpoint, even if it doesn't diminish my enjoyment. The biggest thing that I notice is the world save which causes everything to freeze and camera blur to go nuts every 30 minutes or so, and that really shouldn't happen in the modern day.

[Lucidess]

Imagine assuming the game's file size is related to how good your video card needed to be...

[Captain Cosmo]

Lucidess původně napsal:

Imagine assuming the game's file size is related to how good your video card needed to be...

Not... at all... what's being discussed. But since you brought up game size, I remember when 16gb hard drive space was huge and considered excessive, even for MMOs. We freaked out over the size of World of Warcraft, originally. If you were a rich kid you had a fancy 100gb hard drive, then you could have WoW, Everquest, Dark Ages of Camelot, Unreal, and Quake 2 installed all at once. 800mb to 2 gb was about the average size of a full-studio production game about 15 years ago. You needed about 700mb of RAM and a TNT Riva card or such to play them. I felt pretty cool having a graphics accelerator card that I linked up to my GPU. I got to play Mechwarrior 3 and Unreal Tournament with the full settings, even!

Ahh, good times. Then before that games were 300mb and under, like Crusader and Wizardry, and.. yeah, that was a long time ago, probably longer than most people have been alive. We did so much with so little. Jesus, I'm old.

[GunsForBucks]

The game is under a gig install size. Open world with being able to alter elements of it with good physics.

Frankly, to me, the game is pretty amazing in what it does/attempts to do.

My impression is the low poly art style is driven by wanting to keep the open world working smoothly.

[haunting_deer]

The game runs ♥♥♥♥ even with high system speccs. Its just badly coded or optimized and the engine is not working with huge builds and stuff. Good idea bad execution as i said earlier. Dont even bother playing it if u have to turn down everything. Its getting worse each building piece u place.

[sibbs]

haunting_deer původně napsal:

The game runs ♥♥♥♥ even with high system speccs. Its just badly coded or optimized and the engine is not working with huge builds and stuff. Good idea bad execution as i said earlier. Dont even bother playing it if u have to turn down everything. Its getting worse each building piece u place.

..
The above quoted post is so wrong.
This game runs very smooth, I've over 1000 hours played and never had a crash. With max graphics running at 5120x1440 i get 130ish fps and in my base I get 70ish, my 3090 Gpu is around the 38c mark even after a 6-10 hour gaming session.
Unity has it problems but the Developers have done an excellent job in the coding of this game. When playing other Unity games and comparing optimised games to these I find Unity runs about 2-5c hotter, so I doubt there will be much more optimisation to this game.

When you build a PC you need to buy known quality parts or else you will always have some sort of trouble with gaming.

[Yakumo_2020]

might just be the lowest specs of the systems the tested it on.

Sure it may run just fine on a lower powered system but IG can only guarantee that it works on the system listed.

[Yakumo_2020]

haunting_deer původně napsal:

The game runs ♥♥♥♥ even with high system speccs. Its just badly coded or optimized and the engine is not working with huge builds and stuff. Good idea bad execution as i said earlier. Dont even bother playing it if u have to turn down everything. Its getting worse each building piece u place.

I have a low end system running the game on Linux, so I have the additional overhead of Proton to deal with and I haven't had any noticable lag yet even with all the building I've been doing.

If your hardware is above the recommended specs and your getting poor performance then you might have issues relating to what else is running on your system and not Valheim itself. It could just be an antivirus program slowing down disk access by the game, or maybe a browser tab is trying to mine bitcoins in the background. look up how to view the performance of your OS and see whats going on when Valheim isn't running.

[Crom]

What engine the game uses?

[Mharr]

It's Unity based, and full of physics interactions and lighting effects and is constantly generating the world around you as you explore. These things are all power hungry. The worlds in lower spec games *look* huge but are tiny in functional terms when you peer behind the curtain.

[BaseWall]

the graffics are top knotch, it has some space for fine tunning...but overall the best graffics ingame atm