Left 4 Dead Official System Requirements

Marler said:
Will the game play on Quad-core then?
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Of course. TF2 runs perfect on my quad-core.

Although, I don't know what he means by quad-core not being supported... does it mean it just wont run as fast as would be possible with a quad-core?
 
scotland1 said:
No quad core support :(
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That's not what it says.

Marler said:
Will the game play on Quad-core then?
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Of course. And with Valve's Hybrid Threading it should run better than a comparable Dual Core System. Source 2007 (i.e. Ep2, TF2) has buggy 'support' for multicore processors, code that was written for the Xbox version. Being buggy it's turned off by default on the PC so Source 2007 games on the PC only use a single core on a multicore system. So it'll be nice to get proper multicore support into the PC Source Engine and hopefully we'll see TF2 et al updated with it.

The_E said:
8 gigs???? zomfg! i guess its worth it...
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Dunno why people are so surprised. TF2 takes up 7 GB of hard drive space and Ep2 takes up over 8. Modern hard drives get crazy good $/GB anyhow.
 
Damn, they dropped DX8 support? For some reason I couldn't run the games released with the Orange Box with 9 but I could for the previous source games.
 
Lucid said:
I have a AMD Athlon 2800+ 2.09ghz D:
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I have an Athlon 64 3800+ (2.4GHz), 3GB of RAM and a 256MB x1900 XT. It runs OB games, Bioshock and Stalker SoC at decent levels of detail, so why should I need to upgrade for L4D if L4D doesn't even look that much more impressive? True all of those games are older, but they also all scale down well. Valve made a big deal a few months ago about how developers should be looking to make their games scale down well, and since they partied-up with Turtle Rock they don't seem to have followed through on that judging from the system reqs.

Why must there be such a chasm between the OB reqs and the L4D reqs? What's eating up all the CPU power in L4D? The AI director? If it's the graphics then I have to say they haven't put much effort into making it scale down well.

Mellish said:
Kay I'm not good with comps. Will it run fine on this?

2 gigs of ram

Radeon 2400 HD

Intel pentium dual 1.6 ghz
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Touch-and-go since I don't know what the equivalent required dual-core speed is if the single-core Intel requirement is 3GHz.
 
I'll just wait for the demo and see how that runs before speculating.
 
Crispy said:
Valve made a big deal a few months ago about how developers should be looking to make their games scale down well, and since they partied-up with Turtle Rock they don't seem to have followed through on that judging from the system reqs.
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You'll find that the specs aren't that bad. The most impressive thing in there is the amount of space it requires. They might scale back, sure, but they're certainly not going to sit around for the luddites.
 
Druckles said:
You'll find that the specs aren't that bad. The most impressive thing in there is the amount of space it requires. They might scale back, sure, but they're certainly not going to sit around for the luddites.
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I direct your attention to the Valve Hardware Survey, carried out in May earlier this year:

1,046,551 luddites (58.89%) had a single-core CPU
652,548 non-luddites had 2 CPUs (36.72%)

Only 13.78% of the total had Intel processors exceeding 3.0GHz and the AMD figure was even less at 1.7% of the total.

Even if you factor in the 5 months between that survey and the current PC specs of today's Steam users, that's still an awful lot of 'luddites'. If the L4D figures are the minimum specs, I think Valve are going to be losing out on a hell of a lot of business from PC users, in many cases it may even lose out to 360 sales.
 
Well, first off, we don't know if those are the, "recommended" specs, or the "minimum" specs. My guess is that they are "recommended", but either way, even IF they were, "minimum," you could probably run it on a weaker machine.
 
Guys. this game has stunning graphics and a lot of stuff on screen, so the specs don't seem that bad to me. Raising the requirements is understandable. Having Vista exclusives: that is lame and stupid (Alan Wake, I am looking at you).
 
I'm not very good with specs so will it run on: P4 3.2 ghz and a Geforce 8400 GS ?

gimme a PM plz.
 
V.C. Sniper said:
The godly Mike Booth has confirmed that these are MINIMUM requirements.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=8210805&postcount=180
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In this case I am now much more likely to get it on 360 and play with people in the office than spend money on a new CPU and GFX card and get it on PC to play with my Steam friends.

To me that is poop business sense, especially as I'd be willing to pre-order and Beta test as I did with TF2. Not trying to big myself up, just stating that I'm almost definitely not in the minority - a lot of households have 360s these days.
 
Have faith in Source engine, mates. It's fast, smooth, sweet and scalable.
 
I dont see why Valve alone should be martyrs to rock bottom system requirements, when the rest of the genre has been pushing heavy specs for so long, these requirements arnt high at all by todays standards, I would say they are comparable to playing COD4 at a stable fps, you cant expect to use the same PC forever.

And of course the 360 is an alternative option.
 
Gyur.

Seems I'm going to have to wait for a demo.
 
Yeah.... I will try the demo. I am not too pleased, especially since I don't see too huge of an improvement over Orange Box. Most likely, I will be able to run it on low, or using some command prompts to make the graphics even Lower than the GUI allows you to go.
 
Or it'll run just fine on your computer.
 
Lobster said:
I dont see why Valve alone should be martyrs to rock bottom system requirements, when the rest of the genre has been pushing heavy specs for so long, these requirements arnt high at all by todays standards, I would say they are comparable to playing COD4 at a stable fps, you cant expect to use the same PC forever.
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I bought the OB on pre-release principally because Portal and TF2 didn't -require- high specs. When I had the cash for a system upgrade, I upgraded so I could play Ep2. If TF2 had the same non-existant downscalability that L4D seems to have, I would not have bought the OB at a release price; I would have waited and Valve would have got less money from me.

COD4 didn't interest me enough to save up for a PC upgrade (plus everyone I know has it on 360 including my flatmate), neither does L4D thus far, which is a pity as the absolute most fun to be had with L4D will be that first playthrough where everyone is new to the game. Most of the uniqueness of L4D isn't the graphics, it's playing with others, which means downscaling should not heavily affect the overall gameplay quality that drastically and should be included as a feature to bring more players together.
 
In terms of a graphics card, I don't think L4D will require anything more than Episode 2, but there is no way of telling how much extra weight the extra AI features etc put on the CPU, which may have something to do with the higher specs.

TF2 has different goals from L4D, most of the game is entirely geared towards its gameplay, if it looks a bit naff on a low end system it doesn't really matter because the easy to watch art style does its job.

One of the things they keep pushing with L4D is that they are trying to merge the multiplayer side with the more atmospheric and immersive world of the singleplayer side, thus the requirements are gonna be on the Ep2 level more than the TF2 level, ... if I'm making any sense at all that is.

COD4 didn't interest me that much either, I used it as an example because I assume it sold equally well to the orange box while needing a meatier rig to play it properly, I got both games at the same time on my old setup, everything in the OB ran perfectly for me, but COD4 was choppy as hell even on low settings.

We dont fully know how well L4D will run on lower setups until we get a version to try out, but I guess alot of people will go off the official recommendations.

In a perfect world people would only have to upgrade at the same rate as each console generation, but it never really works out that way, It would be nice if developers always took into account the lower end, but it just doesn't realistically happen in the FPS genre, outside of what Valve already does.
 
Crispy said:
I direct your attention to the Valve Hardware Survey, carried out in May earlier this year:

1,046,551 luddites (58.89%) had a single-core CPU
652,548 non-luddites had 2 CPUs (36.72%)

Only 13.78% of the total had Intel processors exceeding 3.0GHz and the AMD figure was even less at 1.7% of the total.

Even if you factor in the 5 months between that survey and the current PC specs of today's Steam users, that's still an awful lot of 'luddites'. If the L4D figures are the minimum specs, I think Valve are going to be losing out on a hell of a lot of business from PC users, in many cases it may even lose out to 360 sales.
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While I applaud you tryint to work out the survey, what you don't realize is that those core speeds are with dual core and single core users combined.

ie, that ~41% of people who have more than one CPU are also in that list, however multi-core processors have much slower speeds.

For example, I show up in the 2.2GHz core speed, even though I have two cores.

So, almost half of those low numbers on the core speeds are those with dual core's, and thus is not a fair assessment.

Valve has the information on hand about the core speeds of single core processors, which isn't easily apparent on the public survey, and they based their decision off that.

I have had a machine I bought like two or three years ago and it STILL meets the min spec.

Those are perfectly fine min specs. If your machine doesn't meet them, then you have a really old computer or something that you don't want to upgrade (or bought a cheap laptop hoping it would play games).

Also, the game will run on specs lower than those. How well it will run is really up to your config, however they're just setting everyone's expectations accordingly so somebody with an ancient P4 @ 2.5 GHz will try to run it and complain to Valve that it's not playing great.

The game really does need all of that power. With like 30+ high-quality models on screen, with intensive AI, it's a lot of work for any machine.
 
Also, not everyone who takes the survey wants or plans to play Left 4 Dead.
 
I can see why people might complain. My old PC with an Athlon64 3400+ processor was capable of running Bioshock on high once I gave it the right GPU. That essentially means that a 2.4Ghz - or 3.4Ghz Pentium equivalent - processor could almost match performance with an Xbox 360 as long as I kept the resolution comparatively low.

And yet for L4D - which IMHO is one of the least technically impressive big name titles to come out in a while - that rig would fall just within the minimum spec, not even the recommended one. I'll be very interested to see if Valve are exploiting CPU potential as much as they claim to be, because I still suspect that the graphics card will be the big deciding factor for performance, making this 3Ghz min spec choice seem a bit needless and unreasonable to some.

Having said that, if you're still gaming on a PC with a <3Ghz single core processor you're missing out and that's a fact. You can't expect to be invited to the party every time a highly anticipated new game is released nowadays. At the same time, I remember people posting ugly-as-hell screenshots of HL2 being run on woefully inadequate hardware, yet they were still enjoying it, so...
 
Laivasse said:
And yet for L4D - which IMHO is one of the least technically impressive big name titles to come out in a while
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I can disagree. In my opinion, the technical domain includes many things other than graphics: the director AI seems a *big* piece of procedural heavy weight code, compared to other dumb sexy shooters. The requirements have to necessarily include that.
 
PaoloM said:
I can disagree. In my opinion, the technical domain includes many things other than graphics: the director AI seems a *big* piece of procedural heavy weight code, compared to other dumb sexy shooters. The requirements have to necessarily include that.
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I would tend to agree. Even though I'm pissed that the specs are higher than I can currently afford, I don't think that processor-wise they're over the top.

My main gripe is that it doesn't look like they are making it downscalable for the GFX. Sure, lots of things on screen, but making all of those things less pretty to run on a less able GFX card should be an option. Afterall, the MAIN thing about L4D is playing with other people, not the pretties. The lighting, multiple-texture maps and so on may still be important in terms of the atmosphere of a 'horror' shooter, but they are secondary to how well the game can do co-op, combat and all the other core mechanics plus the ambitious AI director.

P.S. Iced, that makes the survey results quite misleading, doesn't it!
 
Why is everyone so shocked about the size? Sounds small too me, most games ive played lately are 9-15 gbs.
 
This is the problem when Valve make a great engine that runs on nearly anything, as soon as they push the mark people who are so used to running their games on old PC's are shocked to see that hardware has drastically updated. To me, the minimum specs really don't seem to be that hard pushing for a game of it's time. I've managed to get TF2 to run on a PC with a single core 2.2.GHZ Processor with only an on board graphics card and had it run on minimum settings. Now I'm not saying you will be able to do the same for L4D but never the less I don't see them making a game that will no run on low end systems. The majority of games that come out these days normally require a lot more than what Valve are asking so it's doubtful that they will lose sales because of this and anyone who really wants to play the game would upgrade to play if necessary, well at least I would.
 
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