PC Gamers - Do you run close to minimum spec ?

molecule

We are often told that in-game performance has to cater for the 'minimum spec' that Zos chooses as a bottom line.

Here is the official minimum spec ;

Windows 7 64-bit; Intel® Core i3 540 or AMD A6-3620.
3GB System RAM.
85GB free HDD space.
DirectX 11 compliant video card with 1 GB of RAM (NVIDIA® GeForce® 460 / AMD Radeon™ 6850) or higher.
DirectX compatible sound card.
Internet broadband connection.

To put the minimum specs in some perspective ;

AMD A6-Series A6-3620 - Released for sale Jan 2012

Intel core i3-540 - Released for sale Jan 2010

AMD Radeon HD 6850 - Released for sale Oct 2010

GeForce GTX 460 - Released for sale Apr 2010

Zos is using minimum spec on technology most of which is close to 9 years old.

This needs addressing as i cant imagine any PC gamers would run a spec remotely close to this.

I would be interested to see roughly what specs people are using.

JaZ2091

Well from a perspective, they know a lot of people aren't interested in building gaming rigs or getting the newest upgrades especially if they are casually playing. It doesn't surprise me as they would want many people from all backgrounds access to their game regardless.

Gythral

ZOS is using what was in the office on day 1 of the
"we're gonna make an MMO based on TES"

but clearly even the office coffee pot has better specs today!

ZeroXFF

Up until a week ago I was running on an AMD HD7850... Just 1 generation ahead of minimum spec. Does that count as "close"?

The rest of the system is modern though.

EphemeraCrawford

It's running for consoles not pc graphics cards.

Royaji

Firstly, minimum spec is dictated by what the oldest consoles, like original xBox One and PS4, can pull.

Secondly, have you seen the debacle after they've increased the minimum spec for Macs? Yup, there was a lot of angry people. Pretty sure that if enough people played on old Macs there will be enough players with old PCs.

And ESO is not targeted at those "PC gamers" with new rigs too, their target audience are casulas with fairly weak systems.

Att1Tude

Doubt you can stand still on 9 year old gfx

DMuehlhausen

Not sure why you are asking this question.

Not everyone can update their rigs every 2 years or less. so minimum specs have to be pretty old. Also unless they overhaul the engine the min specs that worked at launch will still work today. It's the same thing with WoW. It wouldn't run very good probably but I bet you could get it up and running on a computer with "min specs" from 2004.

whitecrow

I don't remember the specs, but I actually was playing ESO on a 10 year-old PC a few years ago. It was fine for a while, but it got to the point where I couldn't walk around Belkarth without constant lag, and I decided to finally invest in a gaming PC.

IsharaMeradin

Not sure where my specs fall with regards to the minimum or the recommended. My specs are in my signature. Perhaps you can figure out where it fits.

bearbelly

I run on:

Windows 10 64-bit
Intel i3-4370
16GB RAM
GTX-970
1TB SSD

ghastley

Windows 7 - 64 bit, check. I wouldn't want to downgrade to anything later.

The hardware side is well in excess of the minimum, but I use up a lot of that by running a multi-monitor set-up with 6000x1080 total resolution. There are a lot of in-game settings that folks will have above "minimum" if they have better rigs.

However, the choice of running the game on a cheap laptop when I travel is something I don't want taken away.

Atreidus

Hi. I run this game at an system which easyly can run 2x this game at ultra settings.

AMD FX 8300 4 cores 8 logical processors. Averange frequency 4.2 ghz(3.2 GHZ basic and up to 5 ghz).
14GB RaM DDR3
Win 10 Pro X64(preview ring with new technology)
MSI Geforce 1050 TI 4 GP(4 GB of Ram)
DSL 100k as connection
125 gb ssd for system and 1 TB sata 3 harddrive.

Settings of course: all to the max.

Averange fps:40+ at an older lcd - monitor which still can run at 1366x768(full HD)

Geforce expierience with experiental features to making custom shaders ingame for the game if i like to.(advanced shading/other colour - efects etc.) incl. Ansel etc.

If this is the real hardware of Zenimax then it is time to upgrade asap.

Catsmoke14

Both below* and well above, since there are currently two of us, and neither one is an issue.

The old one is an AMD Athlon II X4 desktop and HD 6950 Vid card. Played Skyrim on it on 11/11/11.

*I don't remember how crappy the A6 was. Maybe "at min". But why start trouble for people?

Kadoin

Atreidus wrote: »

Hi. I run this game at an system which easyly can run 2x this game at ultra settings.

AMD FX 8300 4 cores 8 logical processors. Averange frequency 4.2 ghz(3.2 GHZ basic and up to 5 ghz).
14GB RaM DDR3
Win 10 Pro X64(preview ring with new technology)
MSI Geforce 1050 TI 4 GP(4 GB of Ram)
DSL 100k as connection
125 gb ssd for system and 1 TB sata 3 harddrive.

Settings of course: all to the max.

Averange fps:40+ at an older lcd - monitor which still can run at 1366x768(full HD)

Geforce expierience with experiental features to making custom shaders ingame for the game if i like to.(advanced shading/other colour - efects etc.) incl. Ansel etc.

If this is the real hardware of Zenimax then it is time to upgrade asap.

You will notice no more of a performance increase than the performance increase of the newer PC's floating point performance vs your older one. Just a warning...

Atreidus

Kadoin wrote: »

Atreidus wrote: »

Hi. I run this game at an system which easyly can run 2x this game at ultra settings.

AMD FX 8300 4 cores 8 logical processors. Averange frequency 4.2 ghz(3.2 GHZ basic and up to 5 ghz).
14GB RaM DDR3
Win 10 Pro X64(preview ring with new technology)
MSI Geforce 1050 TI 4 GP(4 GB of Ram)
DSL 100k as connection
125 gb ssd for system and 1 TB sata 3 harddrive.

Settings of course: all to the max.

Averange fps:40+ at an older lcd - monitor which still can run at 1366x768(full HD)

Geforce expierience with experiental features to making custom shaders ingame for the game if i like to.(advanced shading/other colour - efects etc.) incl. Ansel etc.

If this is the real hardware of Zenimax then it is time to upgrade asap.

You will notice no more of a performance increase than the performance increase of the newer PC's floating point Performance vs your older one. Just a warning...

Yeah i know. But the bottlenecks are my slowest rams I have got 4 different ones stacked at a special MSI tuning bord. And The slowest shall be 1333 mhz. Compared to possible 2100 MHZ it is slow.

The next bottleneck is my older monitor. My card can do more. at higher resolutions: The keyword is downscaling. Render at this uhd - resolution and downscale. Thats how all good games are pushing their fps dramatical.
Even at DX 12.

DX 11 is a bottleneck for my 12er anyways.

I only use the default tuning. Not even the light one or medium of my Gigabyte easy tune. 4.2 ghz And it is safe up to 4.5 ghz(extreme) with my default AMD Cooler. Then the CPU is locked and unlockable if i ever have got a water cooler.

So at this UHD res downscaled my Nvidia has got the best performance. But this will require a new engine of the game.

To making it short: MY tower is a tuning Enermax. More cooler -s paces and filters then a vacuum cleaner. And is was built by a PC company.


ps.: a higher fequency is bringing more. This i can confirm. But: You need Windows 10 pro x64 for this at least.
A home wont be supporting all features.

M_Volsung

I'm about one setting away from playing ESO:Minecraft...

Kiralyn2000

My rig is 7 years old, except for the GPU (~5 years?)

Win 7 x64
i5-2400 no OC
8 GB ram
R9-270X 2GB

...the crypto-currency thing needs to die, so we can get rational prices on mid-range GPUs again (the only real option in the $150-200 range for years now has been the 1050Ti. I'm not spending $300+ on a GPU. But I kind of need to build a new computer first, anyway. /sigh)

lucky_Sage

My laptop is 4 years old and it gen 7 i7 procceser and GeForce 850m and 8 gran
Until a few weeks ago I could run high with 60fps in bgs for the most part other than server side beucase I can't get it to do the the windows update. And about 6 months ago I could run on ultra but my laptop is old and fans are going out and few other issues

idk

OP does seem a little out of touch. Zos has upgraded the minimum specs for the game at least twice since launch. In both cases there were players who could no longer play the game.

OP may be confusing minimum specs with the recommended specs as well. I am thinking this because OP is suggesting companies cater to the minimum specs they publish when that statement suggests what is needed to barely run the game.

So while many run above the minimum specs, we know that some run near minimum specs. I do not think the poll can ascertain how many or what percentage of the player base runs near minimum specs as most players never frequent the forums.

Kagukan

I recently went from a AMD A10 to an Intel i5 7th gen and GTX 1080. A whole new world in game.

Imagawa

I'm way over spec. But I also play other "modern" games.

i7 8700k
1080 Ti
32gb ddr4 ram - 3200
1tb m2 samsung ssd
144 mhz G-sync 27" monitor

close to 100 fps overland, 75 towns - but not in Alinor or Hew's' Bane .... not sure why

overkill..... and showing off.

joseayalac

I got my Gaming PC with the new Ryzen 5 2400g stolen. The game ran beautifully and perfectly on that rig. I will replace it soon.

But currently I play with a Vaio laptop with an i5-4ish and no GPU. I play on minimum settings so it looks like the games I played as a child but still I kick ass in BGs.

molecule

idk wrote: »

OP does seem a little out of touch. Zos has upgraded the minimum specs for the game at least twice since launch. In both cases there were players who could no longer play the game.

I have listed the most up to date recommendations from Zos @ 5/2/17

https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/26031

This is not an e-peen whos got the best PC thread, i am genuinely interested in how many 'casual' ,if you like, gamers play and if my assumptions that the min specs cater for a tiny portion of the player base are totally wrong.

And yes, i do realise that the forum in itself is only a small percentage of the playerbase.

HazelRose

I used to play this game on a $400 clearance toshiba laptop. I upgraded to a lower tier gaming laptop, unfortunately its in for repairs right now. I did update my clearance laptop and the game runs. But it requires min graphics settings and it stutters routinely.

code65536

Who TF cares?

First, this is an old game. Development started on this game about 10 years ago.

Second, self-professed "gamers" tend to be wildly out of touch with what people actually use for PC gaming. There are a lot of people who run below the "minimum" spec. Follow the "gaming" media, and you come away with the impression that nobody runs hardware over 3 years old. That's nonsense. Especially with the stagnation of Moore's Law in the last half decade, the performance difference between a system from 7 years ago and today isn't nearly as high as what it would've been a decade ago.

I have ESO installed on 6 computers. Ranging from my main system (Ivy Bridge i5, RX 570, plays just fine at max settings on 1080p), to an older system (Sandy Bridge i5, Radeon 6670, plays just fine at medium settings on 1080p), to my netbook. Yes, a netbook, with a 1.5GHz Ivy Bridge Celeron running integrated CPU graphics. Gets about 10fps with low settings at 768p--not playable, but just fine for logging in to get hirelings and train mounts.

joseayalac

molecule wrote: »

I have listed the most up to date recommendations from Zos @ 5/2/17

https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/26031

This is not an e-peen whos got the best PC thread, i am genuinely interested in how many 'casual' ,if you like, gamers play and if my assumptions that the min specs cater for a tiny portion of the player base are totally wrong.

And yes, i do realise that the forum in itself is only a small percentage of the playerbase.

Casuals don't regularly use this forum, at least not as much as hardcore gamers.

Maybe if you asked on Reddit you would get a more accurate sample.

TelvanniWizard

I´m way over the minimum required.

Bouldercleave

I just replaced my rig last year with a new custom Digital Storm set up.


I was just scraping by, but $8,900.00 later and ZoS will never get the best of me. I haven't dipped below 90 FPS since I plugged the new rig in.

Katahdin

My specs

Windows 10
i7 3.5 ghz 6 core
16 gigs of ram
8 GB video card (forget the actual model but it's farely recent)

D3AKUs

I5 7600k
8gb Ram
RX590 8GB

Runs fine at 1080p everything maxed ( Sliders at half tho ).
Upgraded the GPU from a 1050ti yesterday.
Murkmire was pretty devastating for the 1050ti in a lot of places ( up to Summerset it ran absolutely fine tho) and a few other things in the game would also destroy the gpu at times. Now its fine and with the higher shadows options and other stuff turned on now the game looks a lot better.

Think ill put in another 8GB of Ram and call it quits for the next 2 years. The 1050ti also served me for 2 years and did a fine job until now, guess the RX590 will do the same.