Anyone who purchases software (mainly games) knows to check the system requirements before you buy. My question is what sort of risk do you run if you ignore them. I know that if your system doesn’t meet the requirements the game will not run very well and possibly not at all. I recently ran a demo of Motocross Madness 2 with no problems. My system exxceeded most of the requirements except the video RAM. It “required” 8 MB, but I ran it with hardware acceleration on only 4 MB. Could this do permanent damage to my system or are the people who wrote out the requirements simply over-compensating?
I won’t say there is no danger in running a program that outstips your computer’s ability to keep up with it…
…but, what the hell! Damaging your computer is very difficult to do with well-written software.
About the worst thing that I can think of is having your computer lock up, and being forced to do a hard reboot, which happens often enough to me that I can say it has little long-term effect. Of course, you run the possible risk of damaging your hard-drive with constant rebooting, or at least losing data, but that’s fairly trivial. I would recommend closing all other non-essential applications before running a game or high-performance app (3-D rendering, etc.).
What’s more of a concern is making sure your system software is up to the task. Before running any modern game, I would recommend updating your hardware drivers (check computer or component manufacturer’s web site) and any API’s (Microsoft DirectX) that are necessary. The last thing you want to do is corrupt a copy of Windows and be forced to reinstall.
To get back to your original question, the requirements are more of a guide for performance than a mandate for computer health. Also, the vendor may be less than willing to help you with potential problems if you don’t meet the specs.
Hardware requirements are simply guidelines to tell you in what enviroment a particular program works the best. If you ignore those requirements, you will probably not get the best preformance out of that program. However I seriously doubt that anything bad would happen to your computer if you ignore those guidelines. The only situation I can think of is exactly what grayseal said, the program might cause your computer to freeze, a result being a possible loss of data.
One thing to remember is that in Windows, you MUST pay attention to the OS requirements. Specifically if it says that it will not run on NT, then DO NOT RUN IT ON NT. I nearly nuked my computer at work because I downloaded a program that was not supposed to work on NT. In the license agreement there was a warning that said the program will destroy any information if it was run on NTFS, (NTFS is the File system type that NT uses) so I stopped, and installed it on another computer and it did indeed nuke the computer. It was completely unusable. First it froze, then when I rebooted it would not even start loading NT. Now, not all programs will do this, but you just need to pay attention to what it says about what OS’s it will work on.
-N
It really depends. If the amount of something - Video RAM, RAM, CPU speed - is specified, if you don’t meet the specs it usually runs slower. With video RAM, I think it just limits you on the resoluion you can use. The exception is hard disk space - obviously, if you don’t have enough, you won’t be able to install. If it calls for a specific type of hardware, e.g. Pentium III CPU, DVD drive, etc. - it probably won’t run at all without that hardware. I heard of one video capture board which requires Pentium III and won’t run on Pentium II or Athlon.
There is one fatal flaw in the assumptions you make regarding the system requirements on the side of the box. That is, you assume that they have been made with any thought toward what the system requirements actually are to run the program in question. This is simply not the case.
I spent approximately a year and a half employed as a sales associate (read: corporate peon) for a national chain of software stores. In that time, I had occasion to read the sys req’s of many a software title. I came to one overwhelming conclusion, these req’s are devised by the marketing department and not the design team. Many times I saw sys req’s that were obviously lower than what the complexity of the game demanded. Infrequently, a game would come through that could be played with significantly less than what the side of the box would have you believe. I once saw two games (Wing Commander something-or-other, and Warlords III I believe) that had the exact same requirements, but one was obviously more complex and demanding than the other.
Have I helped, or just fanned the flames of controversy?
Averye0
an amendment to the above statement.
My experience was almost exclusively in the gaming side of computer software.
Obviously most business-type software publishers take their requirements more seriously and are thus far more accurate. Like anything else, YMMV.
Averye0
Just build a decent computer and you won’t have to worry about Requirements. A 600 Duron chip is around 80 bucks, memmory isn’t to bad, and Video cards are cheap as well.
Well, my main concern was that running a program that calls for a higher requirement in one or more areas would overwork these components, and do permanent damage to them. I highly doubt that’s possible, but I figured I’d post it anyway just to satisfy my curiousity. I just bought a new system with a Pentium III 667, 128 MB RAM, and a 15 GB hard drive. It only has 4 MB of video RAM, however, and I see most games require 8. Someone else I know ran the same game on a system with 8 MB, and it would play very choppy and then quit to the desktop after a minute or less. Someone told him that his video card may be overheating, which I thought was a bit far fetched. So, more specifically, is something like this possible?
My old system met the requirements of several games, but would run them very poorly. I almost always get a demo first or see what sort of hardware PC Gamer recommends.
Lack of RAM will not cause a component to overheat. Running the component at a faster speed than one it is rated at (overclocking) will. So will inadequate ventilation (i.e. sticking your computer in a small confined space).
In general, the amount of RAM on a video card is less than critical to it’s ability to run a particular game. While 4megs is less than optimal, it does cause any significant performance hit (unless you are doing large-scale 3D rendering).
BTW, for the comparative power of your PC, your video card seems a bit anemic. For a serious jump in performance, grab yourself a nice Nvidia-, Matrox-, or Voodoo-based card. Don’t worry about the amount of RAM, after 16 megs it doesn’t matter, look at video processor speed. Currently, the king of the hill is GeForce series from Nvidia, but the Matrox G400 looks just as nice (but slower) and the Voodoo 5’s are quite capable.
Dang, I’m wordy tonight…
Averye0
Ditto on the above sentiments. Nowadays, there are usually two sets of requirements on any box, the minimum and the recommmended. I would completely disregard the minimum, and even if your system just meets the recommended, I’d still be wary. Case in point, I bought a game that requires a P3 500, 128 MB’s of RAM and a 3D video card with at least 16 MB’s of memory. My system meets all those, but the game stills plays like shit. If your system doesn’t meet the reqs. in say, processor speed or RAM, I doubt you could do any damage, but as mentioned above, don’t run a game if it wasn’t intended to run on your OS.
I suppose we ought to further break the reqirements down into software and hardware requirements.
Hardware req’s have been thoroughly addressed in the above posts.
Software req’s are pretty much absolute. If the box says “DirectX7 or higher” believe it. If it says “for Windows 95 ONLY”, be wary about installing it in 98, and for the love of all things logical, don’t run it in NT!
'nuff said
Averye0