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How performant is performant?
I'm very close to releasing my first full project (check it out!), and I realized I have a problem. I have no idea how performant my game should be. I know how to make my game run lightning fast on my own machine, but I have no standard for or concept of how fast it will run outside of the editor on someone else's computer. Is there some way to tell how fast it will run on another computer, or is there some sort of limit of age I should aim for? I know that aiming for an ancient computer to be performant is ridiculous, and I know that aiming for mine (which is relatively new and quite fast) is also absurd, but my question is where the middle ground is, or at least a rough ball-park estimate. My project is a PC/Mac exclusive (with maybe Linux in the future), so don't worry about mobile optimization. If you want a reference point for how my game runs, I am using an Intel i5 7600K CPU @3.80 GHz, with 16 GBs of Ram.
Thanks in advance!
The Koala Squad
Test it against your target $$anonymous$$/max specs. How do you know what you should target? If you're releasing for S$$anonymous$$m, look at the S$$anonymous$$m Hardware Survey, it's very helpful. Gives you a good idea of what kind of hardware the majority of players have then you could judge accordingly. To me, a game's performance is good enough if it runs at a decent playable framerate on the $$anonymous$$imum target specs.
This should be an answer! Thank you! While I am not releasing for s$$anonymous$$m (yet... maybe in the future), this is a good foundation for what to look for!
vexe is right, but one thing I don't see in your post is your GPU. That's key to a difference of what you see and what everyone else will see.
If you have a good GPU installed, you can turn it off and switch to the integrated GPU to get an idea of a moderate performance level result. Otherwise, while your machine is good, for a PC game you can assume that any CPU this side of 2012 with two cores will perform very similarly relative to the GPU used. The GPU is quite key, and while the i5's integrated GPU is good, any ga$$anonymous$$g card will be at least double, some will be 20x faster.