re: The Witcher 3, who is getting it?

quote:

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Just make up a rumor that it requires 16 gb of vram and 4k resolution to even play and then they'd be all over it

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Even for PCers with high-end hardware, this practice is annoying because it either turns out to be a lie, or it means the game is poorly optimized and there's a huge resource requirement disparity between "very high" and "ultra" with no payoff in terms of quality enhancement. It's also extremely misleading to suggest a vram requirement but be vague about the rest of the GPU. NVidia releases 4GB versions of mid-range cards and has been for a while, but none of those older cards would be up for the task of moving huge uncompressed high-res textures in and out of memory fast enough because of the limited memory bandwidth. It's funny how those recommended requirements rarely mention resolution, so are we to assume 1080P? 1440P? 4K? Because to say that something needs 6GB of vram for 1080P at any setting is laughable (shadow of mordor).

Instead of throwing out arbitrary numbers and specific models for "optimal" performance, publishers really ought to stick to bare minimum "the-game-won't-run-without-it" requirements, and list the various settings that tax specific hardware (i.e. textures are memory intensive, MSAA needs memory and GPU, the game is coded to use as many as 4 cores or as few as 1, etc.)

Even the way Star Citizen devs presented hardware requirements is better than how it's usually done. They straight up said you need XYZ specs to run it, and you are not going to be able to max it out with current high-end hardware.