[B3D News]

When a rumour started spreading down the Internet tubes about Assassin's Creed requiring 2GB of system ram, seemingly everyone jeered. Well, now it's official. Move over Crysis, you don't look so tough anymore.

Read the full news item

[Skrying]

That's just stupid. Why even bother at all with a port if your requirements are higher than what's required for Crysis?

[cbone]

Is a 2GB requirement that big a deal? They're practically giving DDR2 away now. If you can afford a game, you can afford to have 2GB in your system.

Needing 12GB to install the game is what has my eyebrow raised.

[AlStrong]

I wouldn't be surprised if the long load times on consoles are spent decompressing. hm...

[Tim Murray]

Originally Posted by AlStrong

I wouldn't be surprised if the long load times on consoles are spent decompressing. hm...

But the long load times are so great! "Whee, I'm chasing my tail!"

[Skrying]

Originally Posted by cbone

Is a 2GB requirement that big a deal? They're practically giving DDR2 away now. If you can afford a game, you can afford to have 2GB in your system.

Needing 12GB to install the game is what has my eyebrow raised.

Huh? 12GB of hard drive space isn't much at all. It's only a big deal if you were one of those very unwise people who bought a WD Raptor. 2GB is a very big deal because its the MINIMUM requirement, not the recommend or even "you'll get average performanace." It's the minimum and that's just out right scarey. The game doesn't even offer anything outstanding for that memory space either. I have 2GB of memory right now and upgrading to 4GB really has no benefit at all for me besides this game. I think many other people are thinking the same.

[Thorburn]

Originally Posted by Skrying

I have 2GB of memory right now and upgrading to 4GB really has no benefit at all for me besides this game. I think many other people are thinking the same.

I'd recommend at least 4GiB to anyone, especially with memory prices what they are at the moment.

I run 8GiB DDR2-800 (OCZ set of 4 DIMMs, cost me £150, can get it for £120 or so now) and Vista x64, applications such as Photoshop CS3 absolutely fly.

[Skrying]

Originally Posted by Thorburn

I'd recommend at least 4GiB to anyone, especially with memory prices what they are at the moment.

I run 8GiB DDR2-800 (OCZ set of 4 DIMMs, cost me £150, can get it for £120 or so now) and Vista x64, applications such as Photoshop CS3 absolutely fly.

No game out there requires more than 2GB, most don't even need that. So I don't see at all the point of having 4GB unless for other reasons (which are very few except for professional applications). Also, many of us have had are memory for over a year, such as me. I bought my 2GB when it was at a cost of $230 for just it. I've yet to find a single reason to upgrade beyond that. Nothing on my computer runs out of memory, the closest I've come was Hellgate: London on max details and with a slight memory leak. I'm glad you run 8GB though, even though I bet you've never tipped over 4GB in real usage.

[AlStrong]

They must be dumping the entire world into memory and not bothering with streaming of any sort.

IIRC, WinXP only behaves properly up to 3GiB of RAM?

[Thorburn]

Originally Posted by Skrying

I'm glad you run 8GB though, even though I bet you've never tipped over 4GB in real usage.

Vista does love to cache, right now I have 20MiB of physical memory 'free'. The more memory you have the more application data it'll draw in. You may not think you need more, but having tried it you won't want to go back.

One of the other big gains (for me) is I'm teaching myself various server applications so since I don't have room for half a dozen (built) systems in here I run a virtualised network with VMWare.

Running multiple VM's off one hard drive with virtual memory enabled on the guest OS means you get massive disk thrashing and terrible performance, this way I simply allocate each client VM 512MiB of physical memory and disable their virtual memory. The virtualised server gets 1GiB and virtual memory.

[Skrying]

Which is a professional application that extremely few use. I'd love to know who you recommend 4GB to, maybe these days because its so dirt cheap but relative to the amounts you actually need 4GB is way more than 95% of the gaming market needs.

[Thorburn]

Originally Posted by AlStrong

IIRC, WinXP only behaves properly up to 3GiB of RAM?

Windows XP (and Vista) x86 will function fine in systems with >3GiB of RAM, but you can only address around 3-3.5GiB.

XP and Vista x64 works fine with more and I believe WoW64 allows EACH 32-bit application to use the full 32-bit allowance, rather than having to share between 32-bit apps. (That was my understanding at least)

[Thorburn]

Originally Posted by Skrying

Which is a professional application that extremely few use. I'd love to know who you recommend 4GB to, maybe these days because its so dirt cheap but relative to the amounts you actually need 4GB is way more than 95% of the gaming market needs.

I'd personally recommend 4GiB to anyone building a new PC, it costs very little at present and brings about nice usability improvements in Vista.

You might not see the difference in canned benchmarks, but you'll see it in greater caching from the OS and reduced loading times.

To me 2GiB is the entry level now, there is no excuse to have anything less.

[cbone]

Originally Posted by Skrying

Huh? 12GB of hard drive space isn't much at all. It's only a big deal if you were one of those very unwise people who bought a WD Raptor. 2GB is a very big deal because its the MINIMUM requirement, not the recommend or even "you'll get average performanace." It's the minimum and that's just out right scarey. The game doesn't even offer anything outstanding for that memory space either. I have 2GB of memory right now and upgrading to 4GB really has no benefit at all for me besides this game. I think many other people are thinking the same.

I noted the 12GB requirement because the game didn't require any hard drive (or hard drive space, for that matter) at all to play on the 360. Just seems odd that it calls for all that space when I doubt that the textures/sound/video are going to be any better than on the 360.

We'll have to wait and see what happens. I doubt that the game would be a slideshow with 2GB, but super awesome with 3. It doesn't say DON'T EVEN TRY PLAYING THIS WITH 2 GIGS! Besides, who doesn't have at least 2GB in their rig?

[Skrying]

Originally Posted by Thorburn

I'd personally recommend 4GiB to anyone building a new PC, it costs very little at present and brings about nice usability improvements in Vista.

You might not see the difference in canned benchmarks, but you'll see it in greater caching from the OS and reduced loading times.

To me 2GiB is the entry level now, there is no excuse to have anything less.

Right oh... I've used a 4GB system multiple times in Vista, no difference.

[Thorburn]

Originally Posted by Skrying

Right oh... I've used a 4GB system multiple times in Vista, no difference.

Well then you are either incredibly imperceptive or the system was lacking in other areas. Either way it sounds like you shouldn't worry about playing Assassins Creed, it won't be a good fit for you.

Anyway, should we go back to talking about the game?

[pjbliverpool]

Originally Posted by cbone

I noted the 12GB requirement because the game didn't require any hard drive (or hard drive space, for that matter) at all to play on the 360. Just seems odd that it calls for all that space when I doubt that the textures/sound/video are going to be any better than on the 360.

We'll have to wait and see what happens. I doubt that the game would be a slideshow with 2GB, but super awesome with 3. It doesn't say DON'T EVEN TRY PLAYING THIS WITH 2 GIGS! Besides, who doesn't have at least 2GB in their rig?

The issue for me is less the fear of people not being able to run the game (since as you say, 2GB is pretty common these days). Its more about what it says for the port. As a console game this absoltely should not requirement 2GB as a minimum to run and from the sounds of it, spill over into 4GB.

Unless the PC version see's some major advantages because of this requirement then it bodes ill IMO. Shame, as I am seriously thinking about picking up the PC version.

[Thorburn]

Just noticed one thing

*Supported Video Cards at Time of Release:
ATI RADEON X1300-1950 / HD 2000 / 3000 series
NVIDIA GeForce 6600-6800 / 7 / 8 / 9 series

Spot the interesting bit

[AlStrong]

Geforce 9 is upon us!

and uh...X1300 & 2GB mem requirement....

[Richard]

Originally Posted by pjbliverpool

The issue for me is less the fear of people not being able to run the game (since as you say, 2GB is pretty common these days). Its more about what it says for the port. As a console game this absoltely should not requirement 2GB as a minimum to run and from the sounds of it, spill over into 4GB.

Unless the PC version see's some major advantages because of this requirement then it bodes ill IMO. Shame, as I am seriously thinking about picking up the PC version.

Thank you. Guys, the point is not whether 2GB is cheap enough, right enough or whether people should upgrade "cuz...". The point is that neither the XBOX nor the PS3 versions of the game use more than 512MB of memory. Even if you account for the texture memory duplication in the PC and that Windows does uses a fair bit of memory for itself... well, let's do the math:

These minimum system requirements describe a 256MB video card so let's overshoot this and say 256MB of system ram is duplicated; so for argument's sake we can simply ignore the PC's local video card memory. Now let's also assume Windows XP is using 300, no, 400 MB of memory just to run explorer and whatever applications MS wants to keep running at all times come hell or high water.

So, the PC version of the game requires 1600 - 1700 megabytes of the stuff, while the XBOX/PS3 versions have less than 1/3? Don't forget the fact that the PS3 even has less "system" memory available because of the split. And this is the MINIMUM requirement, i.e. probably not even running at the same quality as the console versions.

Worse still, someone will correct me but, I'm not aware that the PC version has any (noticeable) quality improvements over the console version that might require more memory so I can only assume the recommended 3GB is the required amount to enjoy the same quality level as the console versions so you're now entering the 6-times-as-much-memory-required-as-the-consoles-land which is mind-boggling.

[Squilliam]

They may be considering 1280*1024 as the minimum resolution? Thats 1.3 megapixels. Compared this to almost .97 megapixels for the PS3/Xbox? *conjecture*

I find it interesting that they consider a 2.4ghz C2 Duo to be the recommended equivelent? Am I right or am I just blowing steam?

Maybe they don't consider the pc market to be that important so they didn't spend nearly as much time optimizing the game for the platform?

[pjbliverpool]

Originally Posted by Squilliam

They may be considering 1280*1024 as the minimum resolution? Thats 1.3 megapixels. Compared this to almost .97 megapixels for the PS3/Xbox? *conjecture*

I find it interesting that they consider a 2.4ghz C2 Duo to be the recommended equivelent? Am I right or am I just blowing steam?

Maybe they don't consider the pc market to be that important so they didn't spend nearly as much time optimizing the game for the platform?

I don't think screen resolution has anything to do with the system memory requirments. I'm guessing its something like what Alstrong mentioned in that they are bypassing streaming, and/or a lot of compression. Perhaps that will lead to lower load times on the PC which would at least partially justify this.

My biggest concern is with the 3GB recommended tag. Sure 2GB is common but beyond that certainly isn't. I'm hoping (in fact expecting) that having "only" 2GB won't have a negative impact on the gameplay and that in fact having the third GB would provide very minor and non gameplay critical improvements.

Otherwise, as Richard said, you could be gunning along on a QX9750 and a pair of 9800GTX's and still have some aspects of the experience inferior to the console versions

On the CPU front, yeah the equivilency of the AMD and Intel processors seems a bit skewed (although they actually recommend a 2.2Ghz C2D). I find the minimum requirment of a dual core processor to be more interesting though.

[Squilliam]

Originally Posted by pjbliverpool

I don't think screen resolution has anything to do with the system memory requirments. I'm guessing its something like what Alstrong mentioned in that they are bypassing streaming, and/or a lot of compression. Perhaps that will lead to lower load times on the PC which would at least partially justify this..

You're right! Duh, that was dumb from me. What you say makes sense. Im actually curious what kind of system would be required to 40fps max it at 1920*1200 and 2560*1600. I haven't played it on the console yet so I might give it a go on the pc instead. If the control scheme sucks I can just use my xbox controller. (I sleep with my controller because rumble feels so good)

Originally Posted by pjbliverpool

On the CPU front, yeah the equivilency of the AMD and Intel processors seems a bit skewed (although they actually recommend a 2.2Ghz C2D). I find the minimum requirment of a dual core processor to be more interesting though.

It makes sense if you think of them using a three core processor from the xbox360. I wonder if this indicates an efficiency difference between the differing architectures? 2 cores at 2.6ghz equivelenting 3 cores at 3ghz?

[pjbliverpool]

Originally Posted by Squilliam

I wonder if this indicates an efficiency difference between the differing architectures? 2 cores at 2.6ghz equivelenting 3 cores at 3ghz?

In a way I suppose it does. But its more a symptom than an indication since its already well understood that on a core for core/clock for clock basis the Core 2 architecture is vastly more powerful than the PPE's in Xenon.

My understanding is that Xenos falls in line with the lower end AX2's which seems to be born out by the minimum specs of games that are ported from the 360.

[Squilliam]

Originally Posted by pjbliverpool

In a way I suppose it does. But its more a symptom than an indication since its already well understood that on a core for core/clock for clock basis the Core 2 architecture is vastly more powerful than the PPE's in Xenon.

My understanding is that Xenos falls in line with the lower end AX2's which seems to be born out by the minimum specs of games that are ported from the 360.

I was thinking more about the architecture differences a minute ago. Consoles are heavy on flops and light on ram so it could have something to do with texture/game engine compression/optimization. I was going to just edit my post but.. PC's generally have more ram and less powerful CPU's on average. So maybe they were just taking advantage of the different advantages?

PCs > consoles!!! 9800pros for everyone!!!!!