Caption about the
iymage goes in
hereC
huhai Labs
co-founder Giles
Goddard thinks
minimum
settings are going
out of fashion. A
veteran of
Nintendo in Japan who has worked
on everything from Amiga and N64
to Wii and Oculus Quest, he’s
noticed a change over the years
with regard to developing for
different PC specifications. “It used
to be that the developers would aim
for the lowest spec, and they’d
make it look great on that,
regardless of anything,” he says.
“And then, if you had a faster PC or
graphics board, you could put more
bells and whistles on top for
post-processing effects or whatever,
but only to make what was already
there nicer-looking.“I think nowadays, because
everybody’s got a [powerful
computer] the bar is so high that all
the AAA makers are basically just
aiming for the highest spec PCs.
They’re assuming that if you’re going
to pay that much for the game, you’re
also going to pay a lot for your
gaming setup [so] obviously, they
spend a lot of money, time, and effort
making the games as great as possible
on those machines. I don’t think it’s
really in their interest any more to
aim for the lower spec. It definitely
used to be the priority, I think, maybe
ten or twenty years ago.”HIGH LIFE, LOW SPEC
These shifting priorities are
reflected, Goddard suggests, in the
way games are discussed and
reported on. “It used to be quite a
hot topic – if you turn on these
settings on this PC with these specs
you can get these kind of graphics. It
used to be in all the reviews and all
the magazines, how to get the most
out of this game. And that’s just not
talked about – you just assume it’s
going to be max settings.”
“That goes with my experience of
this sort of stuff,” agrees Terry
Goodwin, technical director at
Lab42, whose projects include the
PC versions of Yakuza 0 and Yakuza
Kiwami. Studios that specialise in
porting tend to feel it most when
clients neglect lower spec hardware.
“Especially with developers that are
very PC-focused, even if their goal is
not to make the most amazing-
looking game, they often don’t thinkabout the low end at all, which is a
problem for us when they come
along and say they want a Switch
version, or whatever.” On PC
especially, he says, “Optimisation is
not as considered as much as it
probably should be.”
One reason it’s a fine time to pay
more attention to lower spec gaming
is that it’s better for the environment.
Playing with the settings turned
down tends to consume less
electricity, though newer components
may be more energy-efficient in
themselves, and supporting older
hardware is obviously more
sustainable. Developing for cheaper
components also makes games more
inclusive – an important extension of
conversations about diverse
representation or creating
accessibility options for players with
disabilities. But the simpler point is
that tailoring and optimising a game
for leaner PCs involves a lot of craft
that tends to be disregarded amid the
industry’s endless arms race for the
cutting edge. It’s every bit as much a
‘feat of technology’ as capitalising on
the latest rendering techniques.TAKE YOUR BENCHMARKS
Choosing and developing for a
minimum specification is a
complicated battle that, ideally,
begins on the very first day of
production. “When you set up a
production, you set up budgets,
right?” says Hjalmar Vikström,
co-founder and game design director
at 10 Chambers, developer of horror
squad shooter GTFO. “So the
financial budgets, of course, but then
you have performance budgets,
memory, RAM, some kind of
performance goal for certain
hardware. And that’s basicallyBOTTOM: GTFO uses
fog as a tool for both
atmosphere and
performance.“WHAT’S THE TARGET
AUDIENCE, WHAT’S THE
LOW SPEC AND THE
RECOMMENDED SPEC?”
Low-Spec Gaming
FEATURE
MAXIMUM GTFO