Performance Test Results

After looking over the results of that previous performance test, I’ve decided that the requirements on Steam will be…

“Recommended: 2Ghz CPU x2, or better”

I’m not going to bother with a minimum requirement, because that just depends on what level of crappy performance each individual is willing to put up with. But that recommended requirement should be fine for medium quality at standard definition.

If you want to go up to HD or high quality, you’ll need a lot more power. I don’t recommend ever using both of those settings at the same time though. Whether you find anti-aliasing or a higher resolution more important, is up to you, I guess. But I think a higher resolution in a lower quality looks better.

Another thing I noticed is that running the test outside of browsers sometimes led to a huge improvement in performance!

On my PC in particular, performance was massively worse inside of Firefox. For others the difference was smaller or non-existent. I guess this depends on browsers, operating systems and settings, but clearly running EBF4 as a standalone application will have a noticeable performance improvement for many users.

That is all.

12 thoughts on “Performance Test Results

  1. Devlin

    From what I know, in-browser flash is very inefficient. I’ve crashed my browser by opening two flash tabs at the same time (Granted it seems to be worse on windows 8/8.1 than 7 or vista). So I would not be surprised if it runs upwards of 10x faster out-of-browser.

    I should mention that it runs fine, even in browser, if my PC is plugged in (on battery it runs at half speed on minimum settings), for a while, but then over time (total gameplay time, not session time) the game seems to slow down significantly, and going back to the starting aria doesn’t help, only a new game does. This is on the free version, I have not bought the steam version (though I’m planning on it, today).

    I use Windows 8.1, with 8GB RAM, with an intel i7 quad-core.

    Reply
  2. Jasiek a.k.a Yeti

    Have you thought about dropping Flash/Air for any future games? I read a lot of devblogs, reviewed more than a few games, and all I can see is a huge singpost that has “Flash optimalization SUCKS” :/

    Reply
  3. Kkots

    Good news. But do you also mean that you’re not going to go into every sprite in the game and replace it with an HD bitmap without smoothing? Because HD bitmaps without smoothing are the only ones that were running at 60 FPS for almost everyone. At least, you could do this to the sprites that are shown on the battle screens, because that’s the most graphically intense part. Doing this is really simple, as I imagine the process, but it’ll take a long time of boring, tedious work, since there are so many individual pictures to replace.

    Reply
    1. Matt Roszak Post author

      I don’t know. I don’t really feel like doing it, because yes, it would be boring to do. It would also mean I’d have to keep two separate versions of the game (vectors for online, bitmaps for offline), and would just generally complicate things. And in my opinion, the bitmaps without smoothing look pretty bad…

      Reply
      1. Elf Boy

        I suppose the HD bit-map w/o smoothing could be something like a replacement for low quality mode for your future games perhaps ❓

        Reply

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