Perfomance Test Suggestion

[Fennerman]

I have a suggestion to make that, in my opinion, is very very important for PC users: A performance test! (Like F.E.A.R's one, a small ingame clip in which a bit of everything happens and that checks your framerate) Honestly, it really sucks when you start playing a game and all the beauty and inmersion goes away when you have to restart it over and over again to find the best settings for your machine. With a performance test made before the beggining of the story you rest assured that when you begin the game you are free to inmerse yourself without thinking "hmm... maybe this could look better or be faster... maybe I'm missing a lot of the game's glory", and then you go for more tweaking while the game's inmersion and beauty are all destroyed by frustration. This has happened to me more than once. For example I was just playing rainbow six Vegas and the beggining was very pretty and realistic, but I had to do lots of video tweaking to get the best of my PC, but after I did that (about one hour), I didn't feel like playing anymore... I'm sure this happens to lots of gamers, even those who have the best machine around, cause they like to see what looks better on THEIR machine too... besides some people like bloom, others like HDR, etc.
So, a performance test would really be appreciated by every PC gamer out there.

[Mr.Bubblez]

The launch is coming up really soon, are you sure you want them devoting time and resources to a performance test?

There are several ways we as end users can devise our own methods for predicting in game performance. Im sure within days of release you will see people posting their specs/settings/fps. We can also compare our performance with the same save file or with a benchmark program such as 3DMARK.

[Nyghtfall]

There's a site that will analyze your PC, to determine how well it will run certain games. I've found it very useful for helping determine, before I even buy a game, how much I can expect to max out its video settings:

http://www.srtest.com/referrer/srtest

Also, most games can auto-detect your specs and adjust settings accordingly. You can then work from those settings and tweak them even further, until you find the right balance between performance and eye candy, to suit your needs.

[Fennerman]

I know you can predict how well it will run, but I'm talking about tweaking to get the most of your pc. Two people, one with 1gb of ram and the other with 2gb, can have the same score on 3dmark but have a very different framerate in a game. You never now how the game is really going to run until you actually play it, and wouldn't it suck that in the opening secuence when you are descending into rapture you realize your framerate is too low and you are missing all the beauty? So you either accept it like that, or you just go to the video settings and start turning one or two settings down... then restart the game. Then oops! too slow again, gotta turn the resolution down, and restart again (most games ask you to restart for every major video setting change). For the third time you descend into rapture all the inmersion is gone... I'm talking about a better experience, think of this as a movie that is paused in the cinema 5 times in the begginng to tweak the image cuality of the projection. The beggining of the game is very important to the inmersion and I don't wanna be pausing it over and over again to find my best settings... Of course you could play it safe and put low settings inmediatly, but everyone who has spent some serious bucks in his machine will like to make it look as good as posible.
And about the time and resources to make a perfomance test... I doubt there's much effort in it... they just have to set a camera in some level where there are AI's interacting and record the framerates.

[BioShockWins]

in essence a good idea, but as others have stated, we don't have a lot of time before the release. If the game was already Gold [meaning finished] I would deffinatley give 100% support, but we might not have enough time to make this thought feasible

[Glottis]

Maybe after release it might be possible to patch in something like it ? like the Lost Coast performance tool in HL2.

[Fennerman]

well I guess I made this suggestion too late...

[Mr.Bubblez]

well I guess I made this suggestion too late...

probably. overall its still a pretty good idea. i know that since its unreal3 people are going to be very interested as to how it performs.

[MF9000]

well I guess I made this suggestion too late...

I would think if your rig can run F.E.A.R. at max settings with good frame rates, then you should be able to run Bioshock. F.E.A.R. kicks my current setup's fanny. I have to turn down the screen size a bit to run it without dropping too many frames. Of course it would be nice if IG would release their official specs on what it takes to run Bioshock. However to date they appear to still be working that out. I would have hoped by now they would be able to release that info, but perhaps something is holding it up.

[Mr.Bubblez]

another thing that just came to my head. it would be hard to just place a camera in a certain area and take the fps because of the dynamic interactions between the AIs and random spawning. You could have a splicer spawn while the test is running, then piss off a BD and the frames would take a hit. Therefor it could be hard to get the reliable results from the tests.

[Fennerman]

another thing that just came to my head. it would be hard to just place a camera in a certain area and take the fps because of the dynamic interactions between the AIs and random spawning. You could have a splicer spawn while the test is running, then piss off a BD and the frames would take a hit. Therefor it could be hard to get the reliable results from the tests.

All that is pretty easy to manage, they can run certain part of the game and modify the spawning and where the AI's are without big hussle. In fact they can do pretty much anything they want.

[Raveness]

They've already got something that can be used as a benchmark test: The 3-ways video. Aren't benchmarks more about how many frames the differently tweaked graphical options are reduced by, and not about what fps you get in the busiest graphical scene?

[Mr.Bubblez]

Aren't benchmarks more about how many frames the differently tweaked graphical options are reduced by, and not about what fps you get in the busiest graphical scene?

Its a combination of both. You want the best quality possible while always maintaining a playable fps. A great example of why this is important is the PC version of Oblivion. On my old system i could run it at 1600x1200 while indoors, but outdoors with several enemies on the screen 1280x1024 was barely playable. PC gamers have to budget their settings around the parts of the game that are most graphically intense, else the game will be unplayable in certain situations. For console gamers this is obviously a non issue because graphical settings a locked.

[Mr.Bubblez]

...are locked.

[Fennerman]

I think is about inmersion... I remember playing silent hill for the first time on the PS... what a beggining! I don't think I would have loved the game as much as I did if I had to be tweaking video options... I think all the amazing atmosphere that was achieved for that game would have been partially lost. It's like when the phone rings right in the best part of a movie...

[Mr.Bubblez]

well man thats PC gaming for ya. even with a performance test you would still end up needing to adjust some settings.