Below Zero system requirements question
Calarand77
lurking in general forums Join Date: 2016-01-22 Member: 211786Members
lurking in general forums Join Date: 2016-01-22 Member: 211786Members
Hi, everyone, long time no see. It's good to be back and excited for the new game. I really missed this community.
Anyway, I know no one can really tell me now, at the earliest stage of early acces, how the reqirements are gonna change for the full game BUT... I am not tech savvy and I'd like to ask those of you who actually know how stuff works - does it make any sense for me to buy Below Zero? Asking because I saw recommended requirements for Below Zero and my heart fell. I have an old comp and I absolutely can not afford any upgrades right now. This is what I have: i7 4550 @1.50GHz, GTX 770, 16 GB RAM, no SSD. It played Subnautica fine with a mix of mid and high settings, it wouldn't give me 60FPS but I'm fine with anything above 30 really. I do however need anti aliasing and textures on high or my eyes will bleed. So, any thoughts/opinions for me, please?
Anyway, I know no one can really tell me now, at the earliest stage of early acces, how the reqirements are gonna change for the full game BUT... I am not tech savvy and I'd like to ask those of you who actually know how stuff works - does it make any sense for me to buy Below Zero? Asking because I saw recommended requirements for Below Zero and my heart fell. I have an old comp and I absolutely can not afford any upgrades right now. This is what I have: i7 4550 @1.50GHz, GTX 770, 16 GB RAM, no SSD. It played Subnautica fine with a mix of mid and high settings, it wouldn't give me 60FPS but I'm fine with anything above 30 really. I do however need anti aliasing and textures on high or my eyes will bleed. So, any thoughts/opinions for me, please?
Comments
@Calarand77 do yourself the biggest favor you'll ever do and get a 1TB 860 EVO or similar. Use Samsung's transfer software to put your OS on the SSD, then keep programs that open on startup (like say, Steam and Spotify) on the SSD with the OS, and any games that need the extra speed (like Subnautica and any game you play all the time that has high loading times). Put everything else on the normal spinny disk and use symbolic links to map them to your SSD.
For example, I have all of my user profile folders (Documents, Downloads, Videos, Music, Pictures, Saved Games) moved to
Do that for every folder you need to put on the spinny disk. It's mklink <Link> <Target> and /d means it's a directory instead of a file. TAKE NOTE, you cannot have a directory / file of the same name as <Link> where you want the link to be (so, for example, you cannot have an empty folder called Documents in \Users\jr2\, you would need to actually move the folder to the target location, not just its contents).
There is GUI versions of mklink you can use, but I'm not familiar enough to recommend an easy one to use, but this one seems alright:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/symlink-creator/ (EDIT: Downloaded and tried, I'd use this one as it shows you the command it will execute and this is helpful)
I have this one installed (but haven't used it as I'm comfortable with the cmd environment)
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html
So I guess I could potentially run the new game with what I have... with whatever caveats having a slow drive brings. Definitely got something to think about. Thanks for the replies, guys!
That's good advice, but only for technically minded people who have some computer knowledge. Everyone else should not monkey around with symlinks. I don't even use them and I worked in IT for decades, they are unnecessary unless you have a specific need for what the do. A 1TB SSD is plenty big enough for an OS, apps and games as long as you keep your actively installed list to a reasonable level (say about 20 or less, how many games do you need to play at a time? I have 19 now and my 1TB SSD is only around half full) and uninstall or archive the ones you aren't expecting to use again, or for a long time at least. Everything else can be archived to HDD rather than needing to be kept in the "live" arena via symlinking.
@Calarand77 You will be fine with your current computer. It won't scream through the game but it will handle it. I don't know why you believe you need AA (unless your screen is lower res than 1080p), but that GPU should not have a problem giving you at least up to 1080p. Not having an SSD will give you slower content loading times, but that's all it will do, and since you've played Subnautica you would be familiar with this fact already. Fiddle with the other graphics settings if you need to, like Bloom, Lens Dirt, DoF, Motion blur (which is a myth dev studios really need to expunge from the entire gaming universe), ambient occlusion, screen space reflections and dithering.
Thank you so much for this idiot-friendly explanation, I really do appreciate that!
I mean, you're right, but that ^ is my reasoning. You can fool around with the Windows registry to get it to store those folders somewhere else, but that seems more complicated than a rather simple command line (from my point of view, anyways).
I suppose it will make more sense to you when I say my user data (Downloads, Videos, Pictures, Music, Documents, Desktop) totals 450GB at this point. That's half my SSD right there, and a whole crapload of data that I couldn't really re-acquire very easily if lost (some of it is from old websites that no longer exist and / or software that is no longer distributed etc).
@Calarand77 @GlassDeviant a cheaper alternative to an SSD that might help with load times until you can afford an actual SSD can be had by using a fast (look up the specs) USB 3.0 flash / thumb drive as a Windows ReadyBoost drive, see explanation here: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/is-readyboost-still-an-effective-tool-in-windows-10/
You can get a really fast (200 / 150 MegaByes per second read / write speed) 128GB drive here for $35 (you can click the 64GB version for $22). The $50, 128GB Pro variant is, of course, much faster (420 / 380 MB/s Read / Write).
I got that flash drive as the pick for top speed from this list on LifeWire.
Actually, I take that back, with that kind of capacity and speed, even with the 64GB variant, just make a Steam Library on the thing and put Subnautica on it and you'll see a night & day difference, I think.
Although... actually it would probably be the best to delegate ~32GB for ReadyBoost on the drive, and then install Subnautica to the remaining space, then your system might get some performance increase booting up as well.
@GlassDeviant what do you think?
Sadly, my system doesn't seem to be capable of that - I bought the game and even on lowest settings I couldn't get more than 20 FPS in the surface areas. It was slightly better underwater, but only slightly. And all that on lowest settings that look like garbage and murder my eyes. So I refunded the game and all I can really do is hope for some epic optimization to happen for actual launch.
Yeah, I think that would give you a pretty significant boost, but it's not for the faint hearted. For someone like Calarand77 it's a lot of unnecessary complication and expense (for whatever reason he's disinclined to spend a single cent on his computer) to get a few seconds quicker load time at the start and less as progress through the game necessitates. For someone willing to spend a few bucks and go to the effort, and who understand what's going on not just at a superficial level but also in depth (no pun intended), sure and have fun.
It's kind of like taking a machine down to bare metal, installing Linux on it, then creating a Windows 10 VM for your gaming. Sure there may be reasons a person would have/want to do that, but if the machine exists primarily for gaming it's pointless, though possibly fun and entertaining for those of us who get off on that sort of thing, myself included. I did it once (with Win7 rather than 10) and it had a negative impact because of the abstraction layer (if I have the correct term there). I have no idea whether there have been advances to compensate for the problem.
Personally I wish I was wealthy and could just hand out 2TB SSDs like candy, they are just so much better than HDDs for anything but mass archival storage. As it is, I scrape by with one 1TB and manually offload datafiles (the aforementioned downloads, music, videos, pictures, etc.) of which I have ~14TB to HDD.
Edit: Just an aside, if you happen to have a fast (7200rpm), small, spare HDD just lying around, you can create a dedicated swap file that will essentially just be a place for the OS to offload a lot of its overhead. I do this even on my PC which has an SSD that is new enough to not have to worry about the wear (or whatever term applies), partly just out of habit. I haven't taken the time to see if it ever even gets used, it's just there.
For swap, since SSDs are now sturdy enough, I just leave it on the primary SSD. By the time it wears down enough to need replacing it will be time to upgrade it due to capacity anyways (hence the 250GB SSD I also have in the system besides the 1TB, currently not being used for much, actually).
Know what would be amazing? A bunch of NVMe SSDs in RAID-5 *drools*
But how would you get more than one or two into a single computer? As far as I know you can plug one into the special slot if it exists on the motherboard and there is apparently a standard PCIx (?) card that you can get which will let you add another but you can't use more than one for some reason I forget, for a max of 2.
Maybe someone will come up with a special card that takes 4+ and lets you set up your own custom RAID configuration (I prefer 4E), if they haven't already.
Edit: Yep, Intel and HighPoint makes them. Drool! Only about $400, plus the cost of the NVMe drives. Maybe after I win the lottery.