"Minimum" and "Recommended" requirements should be clarified

[Tomoko]

I want steam or games in general to define what minimum and recommended requirements actually correlate to in terms of performance and settings - i.e., is minimum requirements literally the bare minimum to get the game to launch at all, or is it to get the game running at a consistent 30FPS at 720p on low settings? Or, are minimum settings considered 30FPS at 1080p?

Same goes for recommended. What are recommended specs going to reach? I've played some games having almost identical specs to a recommended game and only reached 30FPS at 1080p on medium settings. I consider 60FPS to be a bare minimum standard if I have moderate pc specs, so that felt like a lie to me.

However, I can't know if it was a lie because I have no idea what settings and performance standards the company considers "recommended requirements" to reach.

This also ties into some issues pre-existing with recommended specs - i.e., some games will list a "60GB file size requirement" and be over 90GB in reality. Obviously this changes and updates over time but it's misleading information.


I just want, just above the recommended settings, a little text that says "recommended requirements to reach 60FPS at 1080p on medium settings", or something along those lines. That's all I care about, and it shouldn't be hard to implement.

[Start_Running]

That's a dev issue. Devs are the ones who deal with that and there's no industry standard for listing specs beyond what you see,

[BJWyler]

There are a lot of different factors that determine what one is able to achieve. You can take two systems that meet the recommended specs, and one can get 60 fps while the other only gets 40.

You can take the minimum specs to mean being able to run the game at its lowest settings, while recommended means running the game at an average or above settings. To try to get more specific than that would just bring about more issues than it is worth.

[🍋 Lemonfed 🍋]

Developers like ubisoft often have more complete system requirments charts elsewhere , like 6 differents setup with their expected optimal setup and performances.

For some reasons they never put it on steam and I only find them by looking on google. lol

but then some developers also post the expected performance agains't the system requirments and sometime it's just way off from what you'l actually get , drivers updates and games updates can affect performance positivly or negatively by a good margin.

[Shinoskay]

Originally posted by Tomoko:

I want steam or games in general to define what minimum and recommended requirements actually correlate to in terms of performance and settings - i.e., is minimum requirements literally the bare minimum to get the game to launch at all, or is it to get the game running at a consistent 30FPS at 720p on low settings? Or, are minimum settings considered 30FPS at 1080p?

Same goes for recommended. What are recommended specs going to reach? I've played some games having almost identical specs to a recommended game and only reached 30FPS at 1080p on medium settings. I consider 60FPS to be a bare minimum standard if I have moderate pc specs, so that felt like a lie to me.

However, I can't know if it was a lie because I have no idea what settings and performance standards the company considers "recommended requirements" to reach.

This also ties into some issues pre-existing with recommended specs - i.e., some games will list a "60GB file size requirement" and be over 90GB in reality. Obviously this changes and updates over time but it's misleading information.


I just want, just above the recommended settings, a little text that says "recommended requirements to reach 60FPS at 1080p on medium settings", or something along those lines. That's all I care about, and it shouldn't be hard to implement.

I actually like this idea, so posting to support it.

though, one caveat, im pretty sure minimum is whats needed to start and play the game 'functionally' on the lowest possible graphical settings. I think thats a universal understanding but I could be wrong.

[🍋 Lemonfed 🍋]

but yeah , I also would like to see more games tell your what performances to expect.

at least it's would often explain why this X games have much larger requirement then this other game.

[Tomoko]

Originally posted by Start_Running:

That's a dev issue. Devs are the ones who deal with that and there's no industry standard for listing specs beyond what you see,

You can say it's a dev issue as much as you like, but at the end of the day steam does not have an area to list this information neatly for the end consumer, so it's a steam issue ultimately. Devs would need to set aside important sections of their store page to show this information, and so it's not worth it for them.

Whereas, if it were simply part of the system reqs, it would have a dedicated area to placed that information. And that's something steam needs to implement, not game devs.

[Hard Core Rikki]

Storage speed is the biggest culprit now.

Since steam tracks performance anyway, valve should check the actual storage i/o on the different hard drive types and specify the minimum speed rquired to maintain fullspeed ingame and not rely on the extremely vague fields developpers fill themselves that might even lose relevance across updates.

As in, does this game load and run fast on a 7200rpm hdd at 10mb/sec or does it require at least 120mb/sec (basically sata or better) to maintain adequate performance.

[Tito Shivan]

Unfortunately there's no standard on what minimum and recommended settings mean in regards game performance. (Other than game may not even run when below minimum requirements)

[Nx Machina]

Zero to do with Valve as they did not create those 3rd party games. It is the developer who literally cannot test every PC config out there so they list min, rec specs.

For example , they may have a min spec PC which has different components to your PC such as an Nividia card from evga, different ram etc, or a high end PC which again has different components.

Secondly various factors affect performance not directly related to the game. Failing hdd, sdd, realtime antivirus scanning, windows indexing is on, borked Windows update, latest Nvidia, Amd driver is a downgrade to the previous one, etc.

[Tomoko]

Originally posted by Tito Shivan:

Unfortunately there's no standard on what minimum and recommended settings mean in regards game performance. (Other than game may not even run when below minimum requirements)

...That is exactly why I made this post, to highlight the issue and mention that video games need to say which standard they are using, hence my post.

I felt that was quite obvious so I'm confused why you made this specific reply.