How strict are the min specs?

**ddbrown30** · February 25th, 2021, 01:33

I took a look at the min specs for FGU and they are surprisingly greedy. 2GB of VRAM is surprisingly large and won't be hit by lower end computers. How strict are the requirements, especially the VRAM? I'm looking at picking up a cheap PC specifically for running FGU and the VRAM is the piece that I'm finding tough to hit (even though they are DX10 and SM 4.1). Does anyone have experience with a running FGU on a lower end graphics card?

**damned** · February 25th, 2021, 02:00

FGU runs awfully on my older i7 HP laptop with a crappy integrated GPU.
I rebuilt an old PC with an older i5 but installed an SSD and a cheap 2GB GFX card and Unity runs well on it.
I think the GFX card is pretty important.

**DCrumb** · February 25th, 2021, 02:12

Think about FGU as if you are running a video game. The base engine (Unity) wants at least that much memory.

**ddbrown30** · February 25th, 2021, 03:41

Sure, but are we talking OOM crashes, missing textures, slow performance, or something else? There are so many ways that a lack of VRAM can present itself which is why I'm hoping to find someone who has actually tried.

**LordEntrails** · February 25th, 2021, 04:02

Don't know about the VRAM side. But their were reports recently from one user (player) having crashing and connection stability problems. In the end it was probably because they did not have sufficient RAM (2GB). Not what their GM wanted to hear, but was probably the cause as nothing else could resolve the issue.

**damned** · February 25th, 2021, 04:02

It was so slow to use on my laptop that I stopped trying.
I havent tried in some months so it may have improved.
On my specific setup it was unplayable.
(older) i7, 8GB RAM, SSD HDD << all good
onboard Intel GPU << no good

**Weissrolf** · February 25th, 2021, 07:19

I am the GM with the 2 gb RAM player and I am very much aware of the limitations (which was off-topic in the other thread). His computer suffers a lot from using FGU (+ Chrome for Discord), but it does generally work. No idea what GPU the player is using, but I can find out (concerning VRAM).

Problems he experiences:

- Disconnects, especially when first/second/third connecting to my server session with many new assets and extensions being uploaded to him.
- Whole Windows slowdowns, very likely due to swapfile operations when memory gets too low.
- Windows freezing and whole internet connection crashing.

Workarounds to improve the situation:

- Use FG Classic if you don't need line-of-sight.

- Use Discord/Teamspeak/whatever from a mobile phone to free up memory and CPU cycles on the computer.

- GM should unshare any image not needed for actual game-play, this keeps them off the player's computer/memory. Lately I started unsharing all those "this is what your enemy looks like" images right after showing them around. I also cleared up old shared images to be unshared. Don't go overboard with this, because unsharing images likely also deletes them from the player's cache, so reloading it later takes up bandwidth again.

**Weissrolf** · February 25th, 2021, 07:42

Lots of extensions loaded and the screen filled with windows:

Memory consumption of Classic would likely be less than 0.5 gb in this situation. So think hard if you need LOS.

Using a layer of rain FX causes slowdowns on another player's computer (NVIDIA GeForce GT 320 : 978 mb), so you may end up not using some of the fancy Unity stuff.

**ddbrown30** · February 25th, 2021, 14:59

That's a lot of great information. Thanks for your help.

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