Mass Effect - PC Specs @ Community Forums

If you're curious as to what it will take to run Mass Effect on your PC, Bluesnews posts a link to the Mass Effect Community Forums listing the following minimum and recommended specs:
Minimum System Requirements for Mass Effect on the PC

Operating System:
Windows XP or Vista

Processor:
2.4+GHZ Intel or 2.0+GHZ AMD

Memory:
1 Gigabyte Ram (XP)
2 Gigabyte Ram (Vista)

Video Card:
NVIDIA GeForce 6 series(6800GT or better)
ATI 1300XT or better (X1550, X1600 Pro and HD2400 are below minimum system requirements)

Hard Drive Space:
12 Gigabytes

Sound Card:
DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card and drivers
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Recommended System Requirements for Mass Effect on the PC

Operating System:
Windows XP or Vista

Processor:
2.6+GHZ Intel or 2.4+GHZ AMD

Memory:
2 Gigabyte Ram

Video Card:
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX or higher.
ATI X1800 XL series or higher

Hard Drive Space:
12 Gigabytes

Sound Card:
DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card and drivers – 5.1 sound card recommended
More information.

Hard Drive Space:
12 Gigabytes

That's a lot of space for a game.

Yes, it is.

I fear that with lots of HD space available, developers don't even try to compress data. This would just consume time, and therefore costs. I fear.

They also don't even care to optimize the game at all either since the specs would be lower if they did.

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
I fear that with lots of HD space available, developers don't even try to compress data. This would just consume time, and therefore costs. I fear.

I think that no compression is a good thing, because this can allow for lower system requirements, as the CPU doesn't have to spend calculating cycles on decompressing data. Or am I wrong in this regard?

I think that no compression is a good thing, because this can allow for lower system requirements, as the CPU doesn't have to spend calculating cycles on decompressing data. Or am I wrong in this regard?

Depends on the compression scheme used. Some compressed textures can be decompressed directly by the graphics card.

Anyway, without compression the files are larger and will require a few more CPU cycles to process anyway. The CPU still need to move them from the hd, to memory, then to the graphic card. Hence why using dds files is better then using raw bitmaps in games, dds are smaller and doesn't need decompression by the CPU.

My understanding, as someone who has heard programmers talk but is not anywhere near being one of them, is that making the game big like that lets them avoid the LOD-popping, which a bunch of people complained about. Of course, if the game ships with big-ass LOD-popping, that will put a few holes in this theory.

That's why I say that Oblivion is a photo shoot game. It looks nice in stills .

Originally Posted by azarhal
Depends on the compression scheme used. Some compressed textures can be decompressed directly by the graphics card.

Anyway, without compression the files are larger and will require a few more CPU cycles to process anyway. The CPU still need to move them from the hd, to memory, then to the graphic card. Hence why using dds files is better then using raw bitmaps in games, dds are smaller and doesn't need decompression by the CPU.

OK, I take it that there is not easy answer here. Of course, I agree with the dds point.

The specs look pretty reasonable to me and it's much easier to make a bit of space than get a new video card or CPU, so I'm pretty happy with these.

Hm. I wonder why a 6800GT is (officially) required… The Witcher runs great and looks very nice on my 6600GT. From the screenshots I've seen Mass Effect didn't seem a particularly pretty and/or graphically demanding game…

I was just thinking of a simple ZIP-compression of the data on the HD … picture files, config files, etc. … Nothing else, originally.

Originally Posted by Elwro
Hm. I wonder why a 6800GT is (officially) required… The Witcher runs great and looks very nice on my 6600GT. From the screenshots I've seen Mass Effect didn't seem a particularly pretty and/or graphically demanding game…

Maybe you looked at the wrong screenshots? xbox360 mass effect looks significantly better than The Witcher, and they were going to improve graphics for the windows port

Hopefully they get rid of the popping of texture that ruined my experience of the Xbox360 version. And I just played through ME for XBOX360 and started anew on The Witcher, and the witcher is a looker, the Xbox360 version of ME is not.

ME has great character model, which looks really good. But other than that.

Well, lets wait and see how the PC version looks and works! Hopefully that upped the ante in regards of graphics. If not alot of graphic impressed people will be dissapointed.

(But judging of some screen shots on the pc version i have hope - as long as they remove the horrible popping of textures!)

Aside from the character models, I didn't mind the look of the Normandy and the Citadel, myself. It that doesn't qualify as great graphics these days, I must be running behind.

Originally Posted by drum
Maybe you looked at the wrong screenshots? xbox360 mass effect looks significantly better than The Witcher, and they were going to improve graphics for the windows port

Anyone know if it does dynamic terrain loading? That'll add a significant amount of overhead.

Here are the system specs for the witcher

http://www.thewitcher.com/community/…uirements.html

As you can see the Nvidia 6600 is the lowest card you can have if you want to play the witcher. I don't exactly know what the 6800GT has that the Nvidia (extreme) 6600GT 128MBDDR3RAM card (chipset) doesn't have? besides 256MB ram compared to 6600GT card (chipset) ?

The demo for the witcher also runs great on my 6600GT at medium settings, so I just thought that I would be able to play Mass Effect on low to medium settings as well.

As far as I can remember, the 6600GT doesn't have less features, but it is a bit slower that the 6800GT (which I have). So I wouldn't say that it requires a 6800GT to run; it's just that they put that up as the minimum as far as speed goes. Kind of like the CPU speed that they have as minimum.

Taking up less hard drive space would be ideal, but if they have to cut development time in one area, that's the area that I'd rather they do it. HD space is cheap and plentiful. 2 GB of RAM for Vista and 1 GB of RAM for XP. Same as Assassin's Creed. Ouch. (Boy Vista sure is great for gaming, isn't it?)