[SOLVED] Games officials requirements are real?

[mrizkhan20]

Hello guys.. i have a dout.. the official game requirement are real?? Because my one of friend playing farcry primal on e8400 pc.. specs are
E8400
2gb
Gtx660
Game run smoothly at 1024x768 resolution.. e8400 is dual core very old cpu.. how can this possible???

 

[Shektron]

That's because minimum requirements aren't the same for every game - some games consider 720p, others consider 1080p, and then there's the difference in what is considered as playable FPS by the developers. It may be that the developers take 1080p 30 FPS to be the goal for minimum requirements, so if you play at 768p you can have a worse PC than the minimum requirements and still get 30 FPS. Minimum system requirements doesn't mean the game will not even start if the PC is slightly weaker than those requirements - it just means the game wouldn't be a fun experience with such a PC, but people have varying FPS expectations and some can deal with lower FPS much more easily than others.

 

[DSzymborski]

Specs are guidelines, not bright lines. One person's playable is another person's horrific mess. If a company set the minimum as the worst specifications that anybody could possibly enjoy the game with, then they would have a lot of angry people who thought they would enjoy it with their qualifying specs and would not. I know that if I bought a game based on me meeting its minimum specs and it turned out to be 20 fps or whatever at 1024x768, I'd be absolutely furious.

 

[cryoburner]

A GTX 660 is actually a decent amount faster than the GTX 460 and HD 5770 listed in Far Cry Primal's minimum requirements, so that wouldn't be a problem at lower resolutions. 1024x768 is also slightly lower resolution than the 720p they were likely targeting for that minimum, so the graphics settings can probably be turned up reasonably high without affecting performance much as well.

As for the e8400, that processor does have a notable thread deficiency compared to the 2-core, 4-thread Core i3-550 and quad-core Phenom II X4 955, but the per-core performance isn't too far behind. Going by Userbench's data, at lightly-threaded tasks, an X4 955 should only be roughly around 15% faster, and an i3-550 around 37% faster (scroll down to single-core speed)...

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400-vs-AMD-Phenom-II-X4-955/2720vs2935

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400-vs-Intel-Core-i3-550/2720vsm632

And according to this article, Far Cry Primal's performance tends to be limited mostly by the performance of a single processor core...

https://www.dsogaming.com/pc-performance-analyses/far-cry-primal-pc-performance-analysis/

In the screenshots there, you can see that one core is at 100% utilization, while the other cores on their 6-core processor are seeing much lower utilization levels. So, on that two-threaded e8400, the processor might be running that one major thread mostly alone on one core, while grouping the other, less-demanding threads together on the other.

I suspect there might be some performance hitches on that system from time to time, but it wouldn't surprise me if that game were playable while maintaining 30+fps most of the time. As the others said, game requirements generally are more of a guideline than anything, though if some of your hardware doesn't meet the minimums, chances are good that you may encounter some performance issues.