(I wasn't sure if this belonged here or the lounge)

Hello, I am not new to development by any means but I have been thinking more and more seriously about hiring an artist to take my game development to the next level; ie going indie, as art is always what holds me back.

That being said the more I think about it the more I realize I have a fear about releasing a game for the PC because of all the different hardware configurations etc. Is this fear something to genuinely be concerned about? I mean have any of you who have published games for the PC really had any major problems related to different hardware configurations? I can only image you have because of the wide range of hardware.

So many questions come to mind when I think about this;

How did you deal with it?

How do you test for something like that? - surely you can't buy every rig

Maybe I am just lacking an understanding here, and this problem really isn't that big of an issue. But I do hear concerns along the same lines for Android development because of all of the different hardware configurations and again this is a market I've been thinking about developing for.

In my portfolio I have given away games that I have built while learning (all windows only at this time sorry), but I have never heard of any problems from all of the people that have downloaded them, so this makes me think that maybe this is a non-issue...but then again maybe people are just lazy and don't bother to report problems. Again though, everything I have released that ran XNA though I also made sure to use the Reach profile since I wasn't using Shaders etc so I misewell target lower end rigs.

So is the answer really, know what your games requirements are and only support hardware that falls into that category? It cannot be that simple.

I would love to hear from people, especially some that have released games.

Thanks for your time

The issue of platform support mostly depends on who your target audience is, as I assume it's more a problem of hardware performance and age rather than the actual specific vendor & model combinations.

Personally, I try to define my target group for my games quite early on so I can define target specifications.
This means you just select a set of minimum specifications, and throughout your development process you try to make sure you have a test rig with these specs available so you can test whether your game runs smoothly every step of the road.

When you're working on a PC (as opposed to mobile devices) it'll also be easier to make your game more scalable according to the hardware it's being run on. I like to use data-driven approaches for configuring game systems. This way you can define multiple configurations for things like rendering, audio, physics, etc., one for each 'performance level' you want to support.

OS is usually much more of a concern IME than hardware.

Windows vs Linux makes a much bigger difference than ATI vs NVIDIA, or Intel vs AMD, or ...


if running on lower-end hardware is important though, it isn't too hard to find a 5-10 year old or so laptop using an Intel graphics chipset or similar and test on this.

if it works and the performance is usable on something like this, it is probably going to be usable on most things which are newer.


sometimes it does diverge enough that one might end up with "generational splits" in the renderer though, like as-is:
there are lingering parts of the renderer that basically target OpenGL 1.x, and some paths specific to this (faster, less features, but less pretty);
and, some branches which depend on newer features (such as shaders, FBOs, and HDR);
and, more recently, trying to support OpenGL ES 2, which in many ways is nearly mutually incompatible with OpenGL 1.x;
...

so, it may make sense to set a lower limit (such as "desktop PCs from the past decade" or "laptops from within the past 5 years" or "requires at least half-way decent graphics hardware" or similar).

Thank you all for the valuable responses, I appreciate it.