And that’s especially true where games are released on Steam.
There have been some major PC games released these past couple of months. In February, we got Helldivers 2, Pacific Drive, and Sons of the Forest came out of Early Access. This month, it’s been Dragon’s Dogma 2 and the PC-port of Horizon Forbidden West that have garnered all the headlines. They’re as varied as you can get, in terms of performance, gameplay, and features.
But they all have one thing in common and that’s ‘system requirements’—a list of PC components the publishers claim are needed as a minimum or ones that they recommend. The time I’ve recently spent testing the performance of Dragon’s Dogma 2 (as well as Pacific Drive, Sons of the Forest, and Horizon Forbidden West, just because I wanted to) has reminded me an awful lot of developers know very little about PC hardware and although this is something I’ve know about for a long time, and experienced first hand, it’s still a surprise that the industry hasn’t got better at this.
Let’s take Dragon’s Dogma 2 to start things off. The minimum system requirements on Steam are a Core i5 10600 or Ryzen 5 3600, with 16 GB RAM, and a GeForce GTX 1070 or 8GB Radeon RX 5500 XT. The first thing to note is that Capcom, unlike the developers of the rest of the games I’ve mentioned, have stated an expected performance figure to go with this: 30 fps at 1080p.
The closest PC configuration I had to the above for testing was a Ryzen 5 5600X, 16GB of RAM, and a Radeon RX 6600. In the main city area, called Vernworth, that PC ran the game at just under 40 fps on average with all of the quality settings put to the lowest values. Depending on what game you test it with, the Ryzen 5 5600X can be an awful lot faster than a Ryzen 5 3600, and the Radeon RX 6600 is certainly better than the RX 5500 XT.
Sure the performance was better in the open world but not hugely so, which raises one simple question: What settings are Capcom using to claim 30 fps at 1080p on such a configuration? The game has two quality presets, Low and High, and although there are a wealth of Dragon’s Dogma 2 PC settings to play around with, many of them make little difference to the overall performance.
And then there’s the recommended requirements of a Core i7 10700 or Ryzen 5 3600X, 16GB of RAM again, and a GeForce RTX 2080 or Radeon RX 6700. Here Capcom suggests an estimated performance of 30 fps at 2160i (or 4K). At first I thought the ‘i’ was a typo but after all the testing, I came to realise that it refers to using the game in Interlaced rendering mode, which almost certainly forces the engine to render the frame checkerboard style.
