The Obduction Updating Frenzy

Ever since the specs for Obduction have been declared things have been rather interesting at both the MOUL and Cyan forums.

Seems there are more people in the community than I expected that will actually be able to run Obduction. It is funny though watching people on ridiculously ancient hardware have sads about not being able to have a system that can run the game.

Well, I’m guessing it was enough for someone at Cyan to step forward and say something. I recommend reading the whole post in the link. Here are some of the bits I found interesting:

Between in-house testing, and a 3rd party hardware lab taking a look at the title, we really tried to find that minimum spot where the game was perfectly playable without the performance taking enough of a dive to be an issue. In reality, the game will start on anything that supports DirectX 11, but on the early DX11 cards they’re just too old to be able to push what we’re doing. The one gig of video memory limitation is honestly aiming a bit low as well. The game at it’s lowest settings can stay within this, but you’re looking at a pretty poor visual quality. Turning the graphics up past the lowest point, you’re going to start seeing a large amount of stuttering and hitching as the game has to swap between video memory and system memory. A 2 or 3 gig card helps, but the 4 gig of the recommended specs is highly recommended. If you’re picking up a new card for the game, try to aim for at least 4 gig of video ram.

Funny, even they admit that 1GB is kind of a stretch when it comes to minimal requirements.

I am afraid that there is a can of worms to open however: the AMD vs Nvidia battle. To be upfront and honest, the game runs about 15% faster on nvidia cards than the equivalent AMD card. The nvidia cards also seem to deliver a bit smoother experience as well. There’s nothing wrong at all on the AMD side however and both companies really do offer the same visual quality. You won’t lose or gain any pretty effects with either manufacturers card. But if you’re picking out a new card for the title, be aware you’re going to need a slightly faster Radeon than you will a GeForce if you’re looking for that super-fluid 60 fps experience.

I am going to reserve my judgement until I play the game on my hardware, but I’m not exactly happy to see another game that may possibly fall to GameWorks.

Hard drives and storage:

The one area that makes a huge difference with the game, and isn’t necessarily reflected in the system specs is hard drive/ system storage speed. We do a *lot* of streaming from the drive during gameplay, and slower drives have a terrible time keeping up. A generic traditional mechanical hard drive is going to see a lot of hitching and pausing during the game while it loads in. Outside of a video card, upgrading your drive to a solid-state drive if you haven’t yet will make a huge impact in how smooth of an experience you’ll have with the game, along with being a very nice and very noticeable upgrade for your machine in general.

This has me a bit concerned. If you need to run your game on an SSD to stop hitching and stuttering then something is really really wrong. I didn’t get this with any UE4 game I’ve played so far, and that’s on a 2TB 7200 RPM Hitachi Ultrastar with 32mb cache.

I know I’ll be able to play this… But between the NVidia favoritism and info regarding drive performance I’m not sure what to think. Guess I’ll figure that out on release.

Oh, and psssst, Cyan! Stop Uncategorizing your posts! Only n00bs have the excuse to use Uncategorized as a category. That’s a big no no with for a blog/website as it’s hard to find uncatagorized posts. Search engines have a better time finding your posts when they’re tagged and categorized properly! Unless… Finding your blog is supposed to be a difficult puzzle in of itself. Never mind.