Minimum system requirements?

#1 You must have a card with Shader model 1.0 or above. But otherwise the requirements are pretty lean. The renderer is where the meat of the requirements come in.

#2 Yeah, I figured as much. I was hoping for someone to be able to show me some reference works.. like.. "hey, I did this project and it barely ran on a computer with this specification".

#3 The engine itself can run pretty lean, but once you fill it with content and game-specific AI, physics, etc...then you really test system requirements. Much more than the core engine does.

#4 Your question is not really one that can be answered. David's response is most likely as close as you will get due to all the various factors that come into play. I agree with David that TGEA itself, in my opinion runs very nicely/smoothly with few issues in this area. But as with any engine, the more TRIS, or draw, poly's, etc.. the lower the fps is going to be.. which also depends on other factors such as the number in any given rendered area and so forth.

Good Luck!

#5 I understand that. It's more like I wanted to see what I could expect from the engine running at older systems. But I guess this engine can do pretty much what any other engine can do with the same type of system. So maybe I should browse around for games that use that target system as recommended requirements and see what they can do. Obviously it'll differ but it's good to get an idea :)

Thanks for the replies though.

#6 It will not run on older systems of you are talking of NVIDIA GeForce FX5 or Radeon 9600 ... or at least not "acceptable" unless you got to pure minimum.

System requirements are similar or higher to Supreme Commander for a real game unless you go into the graphics core and modify it to work on lower end systems as well.

#7 That's what I wanted to know. This means I can't show it on school computers unless I get a laptop that can run it.

Thanks :)

#8 That's pretty much a given since most school computers have on-board video with the most stripped down requirements. You don't need shader models to use Word or Excel. Sometimes a school will get lucky with a tech geek admin with money to burn, but that is extremely rare.

#9 Well some new laptops at China Mart - ACER's with 8300 M spotted for like $700 bones. Otherwise build a Micro ATX system with a GPU. TGEA has a shader subsystem and shaders are a series of small HLSL based programs that execute on the GPU hardware. Hence the requirement. Apsire MAtx case w/handle. 8800 GT+ etc. I call that my "redneck laptop" solution. :)

Systems with 1.0 - to 2.0 are "transitional" technology. Like baby teeth. IMO*

#10 An 8300M is kind of wasted money. The only thing it has in common with 8000 series cards is its name and that it supports SM4
But do not believe that its amount of shader units will be enough to use it for TGEA on a real scale as even 8600GT get down to 20-30 FPS with a legacy terrains, a few dif, a water surface, a foliage replicator and a shape replicator and nothing really interactive going on beside a single player running around with the space orc and firing crossbow bolts.
(we used a modified version of the most current FPS.starter with additions for the original port as base)

#11 Oh well, my school isn't that bad since they are teaching game development here... it's one of those IT schools. However their equipment is starting to get really old (geforce 5 series). So it can run some of the older games but most games with lots of shader usage.. well.. they don't work well :)

Marc: Thanks for the info. That's about what I was hoping to do and I don't know if that'll run on the laptop I was going to have my presentation on.. hmm. Oh well, we'll see.

#12 What does your presentation use?
Especially what does it need to show in realtime?

One way to get more out of it for the presentation is lowering the resolution (800x600 or 1024x768 at highest) and setting shadows to low to disable selfshadowing.
These do not make a real visual difference but actally give back quite some performance on the Shader Unit caped systems.

Still I would look if you can lend someones Notebook with a little more "gaming related" GPU, 600/700 series with 256MB VRAM or more just for that presentation.
Alternative, if this is allowed and you might have a more powerfull system at home: Record it as video and only show on the notebook that stuff that asks for true interactivity.

#13 Does running in fullscreen provide better performance?
Thanks for the other hints :)

#14 TGEA does not run in fullscreen at all. It maximizes a window (click into the corners and you will fall out -> reason why TGEA borkes on Vista).

I put a fix for that into the bug boards but it actually won't significantly raise the performance ... less than 1FPS on my 8800GTS so definitely not really worth the work for anything else than preventing the "window minimize bug" from happening

#15 Well, the upside of that is that it'll prolly work pretty well with dual monitors?

fullscreen apps tends to not like dual monitors, heh.

#16 Yupp, thats correct.
But a pure shader engine doesn't work that well on multi screen as well. (although, in supreme commander it is serious fun to have 2x 1680x1050 to get into a seriously strategic mood :))