5 ms·

The caveat is that it wouldn't be retroactive, at _best_ (to say nothing of how they'd need to quantify comparison between extremely different hardware types) -

The caveat is that it wouldn't be retroactive, at _best_ (to say nothing of how they'd need to quantify comparison between extremely different hardware types) - currently the hardware requirements are freetext fields with no constraints, which is how you get things like the requirements on [1]. [1] - http://store.steampowered.com/app/391570/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/391570/

stephengillie 10y ago
Steam could have some sort of automated benchmarking service - start with a server with a decent video card, and post the specs. Hire a gaming bot maker to make some kind of testing AI, and let it just play through games and automatically post the FPS statistics. Or maybe someone could start an independent startup that provides this automated benchmarking service. I guess it's a legit excuse to learn how to write a gaming bot, as a weekend project.
- rincebrain 10y ago
  Sure, but you'd still need volunteers to run (and not cheat) their benchmarking service on the long tail of far too many hardware variants for them to purchase and keep in a dark room somewhere, as well as some way for vendors to set the minimum requirements in a useful manner (e.g. ideally a one-dimensional scale per type of requirement), or it's not going to get used. I think it's certainly doable to some approximation of correct, and that Valve is probably in the best position of all the game distributors to do it with their existing HW survey infrastructure (and quantities of app on their platform) giving them a large background in what they're looking to quantify, and for whom. I just wanted to observe that it's far from trivial, and would still involve some level of crowdsourcing data (or paying someone like PassMark to use their single numbers for performance of given pieces of hardware as a scale for vendors to map things against, though the different workload numbers show that making this comparison isn't simple...)
- w-ll 10y ago
  Steam had a benchmark in CS:Source and i'm disappointed they haven't added a more modern one. I know they track hardware data, but I like to do comparisons when I upgrade and using various other benchmarks and tracking/comparing results is hit or miss.
  - untoreh 10y ago
    Openbenchmarking.org is not good enough?
x0x0 10y ago
They could either use a bit of their cash to pay a handful of contractors to hand tune up the requirements for their estimated 8k apps [1], or just do a two day best-effort programmatic match and issue an order to every seller to update the guess. It's very manageable for a business to do. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/41rbhi/how_many_games_total_are_there_in_the_steam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/41rbhi/how_many_game...

stephengillie 10y ago

Steam could have some sort of automated benchmarking service - start with a server with a decent video card, and post the specs. Hire a gaming bot maker to make some kind of testing AI, and let it just play through games and automatically post the FPS statistics. Or maybe someone could start an independent startup that provides this automated benchmarking service. I guess it's a legit excuse to learn how to write a gaming bot, as a weekend project.

rincebrain 10y ago
Sure, but you'd still need volunteers to run (and not cheat) their benchmarking service on the long tail of far too many hardware variants for them to purchase and keep in a dark room somewhere, as well as some way for vendors to set the minimum requirements in a useful manner (e.g. ideally a one-dimensional scale per type of requirement), or it's not going to get used. I think it's certainly doable to some approximation of correct, and that Valve is probably in the best position of all the game distributors to do it with their existing HW survey infrastructure (and quantities of app on their platform) giving them a large background in what they're looking to quantify, and for whom. I just wanted to observe that it's far from trivial, and would still involve some level of crowdsourcing data (or paying someone like PassMark to use their single numbers for performance of given pieces of hardware as a scale for vendors to map things against, though the different workload numbers show that making this comparison isn't simple...)
w-ll 10y ago
Steam had a benchmark in CS:Source and i'm disappointed they haven't added a more modern one. I know they track hardware data, but I like to do comparisons when I upgrade and using various other benchmarks and tracking/comparing results is hit or miss.
- untoreh 10y ago
  Openbenchmarking.org is not good enough?

x0x0 10y ago

They could either use a bit of their cash to pay a handful of contractors to hand tune up the requirements for their estimated 8k apps [1], or just do a two day best-effort programmatic match and issue an order to every seller to update the guess. It's very manageable for a business to do. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/41rbhi/how_many_games_total_are_there_in_the_steam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/41rbhi/how_many_game...