Come Tuesday/Wednesday there'll hopefully be lots of minimum spec reports from beta testers so this should give everyone an idea of what will and won't work.
True.
For me there are 2 types of "Requirements" to run a game (or any program, really). There are "outright" and "subjective".
By "Outright" I mean requirements such as "you need a 64-bit operating system", or "Internet connection required". The code simply won't execute without it. If you launch the game, it throws an error and exits.
By "Subjective" I mean requirements such as "R9 280x or GTX 960 recommended". Which usually mean that the code will run, but whether the performance is acceptable or not is a matter of opinion and tolerance. Some people insist on nothing less that 90fps, some people are happy with 30. Some people are will to spend the extra on prettier spaceships, some people aren't.
To be honest, you can assess the outright requirements pretty easilly usually as they're binary things. DO you have a 64-bit operating system? Well, Winver will tell you yes or no.
Subjective is rather more difficult. You can fire up the Demo version (assuming one is available - and I think it should *always* be) and see what kind of performance you get. Set things to the highest detail level and start playing. If you're happy, great. If not, reduce detail level to the next lowest and try again. When you're at the lowest setting and performance isn't acceptable, you need to upgrade to play the game. If the performance is acceptable then upgrading might make the game look better, and it's a value judgement on whether it's worth it the expense.
But. What to upgrade? Is the jerkiness caused by a struggling graphics card? Running out of RAM? a Chugging hard drive? or maybe just a CPU that's not up to the task? It's often hard to tell and - whilst things like perfmon or cpuid and stuff can help - there really isn't a reliable way to know what's causing the issue other than to try stuff. The best way is to borrow proposed upgrades from a friend to try. If you can't, take your PC to your local, independant computer store who may be willing to help you try a few graphics cards and extra memory until you find a worthwhile upgrade.
If you start by uninstalling any programs you don't use, stopping services you don't need and making sure you have up-to-date drivers for everything and your options are set correctly in the BIOS (which is at the latest version) you have a slightly better chance of a favorable outcome - most especially if your PC is CPU or RAM restricted.
There is a truly amazing about of diversity in PC componentry, so it's really unlikely anyone will have the exact same PC as you, unless it's a named model (EG Dell Optiplex 780) - but, even then, they may have ticked different options to you when ordering. Therefore the only reliable, definative way to know is to try stuff. It's much easier with consoles. Everything is written to work on given hardware, so if it doesn't run acceptably on that it probably won't make a release until it's tidied up.
I don't know if a Horizons Demo will be made available. But I hope so as it's the only reliable way to make sure you can run a game before parting with you hard earned cash. Even if you have a kick-
rig, sometimes you get weirdnesses like the games "doesn't like" a particular graphics card, or something. The only way to know for sure is to try.
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While linux client would be awesome thing to have, how do it affect system requirements?.
Norralot. Except we could run the game from a seperate OS from the one we have our itunes collection, AV software and all the rest of that (expletive redacted) stuff on. Meaning the game gets sole custody of the hardware, and doesn't have to fight with all the other crud going on.
And the OS is free.
I'd like a Linux client. But it's such a fringe requirement that I doubt Frontier will bother with it, and I don't blame them. Rumour is they've dropped Mac support from Horizons, so I guess that wasn't a big seller. Linux would be an even smaller one.
