So, I was wondering what your guy’s opinion is on how much you should worry about what computer can run your games? The reason I bring this up, my current project runs like a champ at 60 FPS solid. The only time I can get it to dip is if I plaster about 30,000 particles on the screen. That’s totally insane, considering I doubt there will ever be more than a few thousand on the screen at once. But, it runs like a champ on my desktop gaming PC. My Desktop has 16gb of Ram, a SandyBridge i7 and a GTX580.
Loading the game on my laptop is a different story, it runs at a somewhat staggered 58-60FPS (still butter smooth really, but it can tell by watching the FPS meter it isn’t a “solid” frame rate anymore) and it can only handle about 3000-4000 particles before it drops to about 20-30 FPS. Once you hit about 10k particles it becomes unplayable.
But here’s the catch, my laptop is an UltraBook. (this one specifically) It’s not designed to play games, it’s designed to be a super mobile laptop that still has enough power to do day to day tasks. It also had an i7 (Mobile version of the SandyBridge), 6gb (not 16gb) of Ram and the wonderfully blazing fast (note: Sarcasm! :P) IntelHD graphics that comes with almost all business PCs. So when it comes to gaming, it’s worthless.
The laptop can run a few games though, like Towns, Diablo (the first one), Red Alert 2, Starcraft 1, most any old Dos-era game. It can even run a few semi-modern games like Hotline Miami. But generally speaking it is not designed for gaming and it sucks at it.
Should I give a damn my game doesn’t run well on lower end laptops/PCs? I imagine any computer with a “real” GPU of any kind from the past 6 or 7 years should be able to run my game, but my game is finally hitting the level where those business-class machines soon won’t be able to play it anymore. This is a bit sad, because I wanted the game to be “hypermobile” in the sense you can put it on anything from a gaming machine down to that old POS donated desktop at the local middle school and the game would still run well enough to play. But if it can’t run on my laptop, a somewhat new (1 1/2 years old) business-class laptop, that means those really low end machines are probably going to have the same issues.
So, my long-winded question is this: Should I care? It’s not like I’m not trying to optimize code, don’t get me wrong. But the game’s engine/graphics is simply just becoming too complicated for those budget machines. I’m just curious if I should drop the idea of making it run on “almost anything” and focus on making it run on low-mid and higher machines that actually have at least a budget GPU in them.