The 2gb RAM requirement

I've been thinking for awhile that the 2gb system memory requirement may be bad move. I understand the desire to reach out to the wider audience etc but:

1. 2gb is practically nothing nowadays - Pretty okay modules are dirt cheap (be they even sodimm) up to 8gb. Every PC now comes with a good quantity of memory. If there's something some of them may lack - it's on the GPU part.

2. Asking for a minimum of quad core cpu and a high class 4K radeon GPU and just 2 gigs of memory seems weird - So maybe you don't need to load that many things in memory at once, being that space is pretty vast and few assets get used on high LODs, but once you start putting all the other stuff, i can imagine a situation where having that minimum spec configuration will help me rediscover the words 'memory bandwidth'.

Please consider upping the min spec to 4 gigs of system memory.

If you can upload some 2Gb of texture maps and meshes to my Vram and manage system memory at or below 2gigs I can only shake your hand in recognition, but the fact would remain that you have spent a considerable amount of time making sure you don't cross that threshold and likely also had to tune down asset fidelity maybe even burden the CPU more due to implementations lacking variables.

And all that could have been avoided if you just upped the requirements to 4Gb.

If however your engine is one made by the electron gods themselves and this presents no issues for you then just .. carry on :D
 
1. I am currently docked at the station and ED process uses about 450MB RAM, Factions SP scenario uses about 500MB RAM. I have never seen more than 800MB RAM usage by ED process in earlier versions. So 2GB minimum might actually be enough. And of course it is stated that more is always better in the Minimal requirements.

2. ED is well optimized to use 8 threads, I have seen it using 10 threads on i7 4930K CPU, so 4-core CPU is reasonable.

Take into account that you can get FX8350 octa-core CPU for as much as £137, quad-core i5 CPUs price is approximately the same.

High-end 4-Series Radeon is equal to modern entry/mid range GPUs costing about £100 such as R7 260x or GTX750Ti, so I see nothing weird.
 
Aleksej, my point was about memory.
What is weird is not the cpu or gpu spec, they're great; it's the fact that most games in their requirements would couple that configuration with 4Gb of system memory. And indeed if you get 2Gb, you would struggle in many of today's games.
Apparently that's not the case with Elite in it's current stages, but it may change once the true memory eating features get implemented e.g some effects/sequences may require a big amount of caching geometry or whatever when approaching the surface of a planet and those bump maps become actual geometry.

In any case cobra appears from the outside to posses a very well thought out architecture.
 
This game is going to be 64bit eventually, I read, I think anyway, so it will make use of more memory for those that have it.
 
2GB is more than enough. If you want to know what you can do with efficient code you should remember, of the cassette version;
"The BBC Elite sources were initially crammed onto a single sided 40-track disk (100K of data!) and comments and whitespace tended to suffer accordingly."

The sources! Compiled and run they fitted into 28k (I believe) using a fairly limited instruction set. 28k for the ship data, planets, suns, stations and Thargoids, generating 255 systems in each of 8 galaxies, the graphics rendering, the AI with varying difficulty, the trading, the "radar", the galactic map, everything. IN 28K! It only needed another 4k for the screen memory.

That sounds impressive enough but the there was a call for an Electron version. The Electron only had about 20k of program memory available (it was a cut down BBC with less flexability). Shave off another load of code? No problem. Drop just 1 ship type, the routines for rotating disc/lines on the planets and suns, and the Thargoids.

20k? What the heck can you do with 20k nowdays?

Don't worry about 2GB, it's far more than E: D needs. :)
 
also remember that the min spec is for the alpha/beta test and may go up or down when the game reaches its final state - still a lot of content to add and a lot of optimisation to be done.
 

Huh ?
A very poor comparison, no analogy can be made about the two games implementation, other than to note that they use PG.
Class instances in modern OOP languages will give you quite a different amount of code and memory usage if you want to implement the same thing. And I'm sure Frontier doesn't write their code directly in assembly.

Back then, Elite was made with those limitations first in mind. We don't have that today, since tech is completely different.

I won't even mention the fact that those planets and their data isn't even remotely the thing that I was pointing out will take a lot of memory. Instead, it will be largely visual assets that will take up the space.

I'd like for E: D to start caching in the stations geometry before I actually exit SC next to them, so to reduce the shakiness. I'd also like it that I see the stations in SC at all. Those issues could be at least partially addressed if given more memory.

I imagine that for the expansions featuring planetary landings, we're going to see an increase in the systems reqs.
 
If you look at the specs of some tablets, a Samsung galaxy for example, it can have 2.3ghz quad core with 2GB of ram. This allows Elite to be played by millions of other customers. That might not be a coincidence.
 
Samsung Galaxy using Windows OS has a market share having several zeroes after the decimal (with very good reason, they are absolute shait, I own one). And even less have anything better than Intel's integrated GPU.

Unless Frontier wants to port their entire base to Android in which case I wish them good luck.
 
Will Frontier Port to Android? They would be stupid not to.

‘Porting’ to Android would require a complete rewrite of the game from (I assume, based on the Launcher's installation) C++ to Java. Also, PCs are much, much more powerful computers than tablets. Ignore comparative core counts and clock speeds, they're meaningless when you cross architecture boundaries. Remember people thinking the Spectrum was faster than the Beeb based on their clock speeds? ;)
 
I don't think that the 2gb ram requirement is a bad move, along with it's other minimum specs.

New off-the-shelf PCs and laptops do go well above such specs, and they'll see the game specs and realise their machines are more than capable of dealing with the game. Also, those with slightly older machines will get a shout in as well. They won't feel the need to make any kind of upgrade for what they see as just one game.

So I think it's a good move by FD to keep system specs down for the game. It won't harm it in any way. It'll still look and play well. If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to optimise it even further. This is in stark contrast to Star Citizen. They seem to be pushing as hard as they can in completely the opposite direction, with only the highest grade and most expensive systems able to play it.

Hate to think what that's going to be like in 2016 when Star Citizen is proported to get it's final release :eek:
 
It almost sounds like the OP want's them to state the min specs higher than the actual min specs to play the game. No that can't be it.
 
No, it can't. I've clearly written what my worries are.

But I'll rephrase - I don't want Frontier spending any dev time and computational resources to meet a silly system requirement.

Because of the nature of the game so far, there isn't much usage.
That will very likely change with upcoming expansions, but then probably so will the requirements.

2GB of RAM is a large quantity for a single application. And the code is optimized and compiled

You're funny.
 
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No, it can't. I've clearly written what my worries are.

But I'll rephrase - I don't want Frontier spending any dev time and computational resources to meet a silly system requirement.

Because of the nature of the game so far, there isn't much usage.
That will very likely change with upcoming expansions, but then probably so will the requirements.

You're funny.

Sorry but it is hard to understand your agenda and the purpose of this thread. You have made the statement, which is not supported by ANY facts (because some other games need more RAM).

Perform the tests and prove that 2GB is not enough for ED and then we will discuss the issue if it exists.

FD can change the minimal requirements at any time the way the need them. Current minimal requirements are set for Beta stage. Full release does not have any hardware requirements yet. When the expansion is announced it might have different minimal requirements.
 
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