Out of curiosity, does anyone know if any game publishers have started a move towards using Vista’s Windows Experience Index (WEI) or another forum of benchmark tool to list whether your system meets the recommended or minimum requirements? You’d think such benchmarking tools would be far more likely to give you a better understanding of whether your system is good enough to run a game than listing particular CPUs (or equivalent) or video cards (or equivalent), etc. I know that there are sites like YouGamers and the like that allow you to determine whether your system will run a game, but publishers seem to stick with the specifics of the hardware. Does an index score like that of WEI in Vista give publishers a better tool to use? If not, why not? If so, why aren’t they using it yet?
They used to have somethign called “Multimedia PC levels”. You had MPC1, 2, 3, etc. That didn’t last long, either.
Bruce
You wouldn’t think it’d be terribly hard to have a benchmark be a guide, though. A publisher could take their so-called minimum or recommended machine, run benchmarks, publish what those benchmarks are with their values, then let the public do their own testing to see how their system matches up. WEI is a simple example, but there are obviously more comprehensive tests, too. It’s not a lot of effort to run a few systems that are being used to QA the game through some benchmarks to get an idea of what matches those specs.
When was the MPC level used? Was it published on the boxes?
There will always be the companies that will optimize their apps for the benchmarking utilities. Remember the nvidia driver fiasco?
The problem is not having a “better tool,” unfortunately. It’s better enforcement of it.
All games that carry the Games for Windows logo up top have a minimum and recommended WEI when you look at them in Games Explorer on Vista. It’s a nice, simple, easy-to-understand guide and you’d think some publishers would use that on the box as well, but it doesn’t solve the problem. Because I’ve seen games that claim they’ll run on a minimum 1.0 WEI score system and “recommend” something like a 3.0, which is clearly total bullshit. Other games have actual reasonable required/recommended values.
Just like system requirements on the box, there’s absolutely no consistency for whether they’re total bullshit or not, and the “minimum requirements” will almost always give the player an experience that is not at all fun and looks nothing like the box art, magazine pictures, commercials, etc.
Also, the WEI in Vista has a big problem in that it maxes out at 5.9. The scaling sort of made sense for awhile, but we had CPUs and graphics cards that could hit 5.9 for awhile, and memory’s about there now. So if you overclock, or have one of the fastest graphics cards, or later on you get a fast quad-core CPU and DDR3 1600 RAM or something, it’ll still say 5.9.
My Macbook can’t be rated for some reason. Every time I try, it keeps telling me there’s new hardware and needs to be rescanned. So I scan it and it says there’s new hardware. Not that it really matters, Sins is the first new PC game I’ve bought in ages and it runs just fine on my MBP.
I thought the WEI had no upper limit?
I think its a great idea, and I hope people actually get behind it. Although I think video card makers concentrating on stability and standards more than bloody fill rate would help more.
Yep, I can see that. BioShock has a required rating of 1.0 and a recommended of 2.0 (yeah, right) while my system is a 5.0 (RAM and CPU limiting). The Witcher had something a little more realistic with a 4.0 required rating and a 5.0 recommended rating. Both are GfW.
Also, the WEI in Vista has a big problem in that it maxes out at 5.9. The scaling sort of made sense for awhile, but we had CPUs and graphics cards that could hit 5.9 for awhile, and memory’s about there now. So if you overclock, or have one of the fastest graphics cards, or later on you get a fast quad-core CPU and DDR3 1600 RAM or something, it’ll still say 5.9.
I agree that WEI needs to be updated more frequently than it is. When Vista was released, 5.0 was the top, and they upped it to 5.9 shortly afterwards, but there has been no change since. Is that due to the fact that no one is using it (or using it improperly) so there’s little incentive for MS to keep at it or is the lack of use due to MS not updating it? Is using the rating system a requirement of GfW logo and, if so, who’s supposed to be checking to make sure it’s used correctly?
This is all coming from someone who’s finding all the threads on game forums like “will my system run such-and-such game” could be tackled with a little effort. Maybe we all have to rely on third-parties to benchmark the games and our own systems and that’s the only reliable way to do it. After all, specs have become meaningless a while ago now and they aren’t helping people make a purchase decision like they used to.