System Requirements for AI War

[x4000]

Windows System Requirements
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Windows 2000 or later, 32 or 64 bit

1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended)
1.6Ghz CPU (2.4 Ghz recommended, Dual Core strongly recommended for Host)
Hard disk space: 300MB
Graphics card must support 1024x1024 textures (most 32MB and up graphics cards do), 1024x768 or greater (32 bit color recommended)
Wheel mouse is recommended but not required.
Broadband Internet Connection or LAN required for multiplayer.

Mac OSX System Requirements
----------------------------
Mac OS X "Panther" 10.3.9 or later, Intel or PowerPC based

1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended)
1.6Ghz CPU (2.4 Ghz recommended, Dual Core strongly recommended for Host)
Hard disk space: 300MB
Graphics card must support 1024x1024 textures (most 32MB and up graphics cards do), 1024x768 or greater (32 bit color recommended)
Wheel mouse is recommended but not required.
Broadband Internet Connection or LAN required for multiplayer.

DON'T MEET THE HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS?
-------------------------------------
In General:  The combination of your CPU speed, motherboard bus speed, RAM speed, amount of RAM, graphics card quality, etc, will all have an impact on performance.  To see how well your specific combination works, try playing the demo.  The tutorials are NOT a good indicator of how the actual game will run, since there is so much less going on in them.  If your hardware is below the minimum specs, please make sure that the demo runs well on your machine before you buy the full game.

- On Windows XP, you might be able to get by with 512MB of RAM, but it will be less than ideal.

- You can play with a processor that doesn't meet the above requirements, but you will experience more lag.  How much lag depends on your bus speed, RAM speed, graphics card, etc (since a poor graphics card puts more load on the processor).

- You MAY be able to play the game across a non-broadband (modem) connection, but depending on how many players you have in the game, and how many commands are being issued at once by the players and the AI, your performance may vary.  We've been able to play it without lag across a 3G AT&T phone (with data plan) used as a modem, which surprised us -- so you may be able to work something out.

- In general, you can use lower performance profiles, smaller maps, smaller unit scales, and disabled special effects to make the game run on pretty old hardware.

[T-Bone Biggins]

I played it on my Asus EEE PC 4G Surf with XP. I upgraded it with 2gb of Ram and overclocked it by 10% over default, but alas the tiny CPU only mustered something slightly quicker than a slideshow. Hence read the minimum specs before you buy 

[x4000]

I played it on my Asus EEE PC 4G Surf with XP. I upgraded it with 2gb of Ram and overclocked it by 10% over default, but alas the tiny CPU only mustered something slightly quicker than a slideshow. Hence read the minimum specs before you buy 

Or better yet, play the demo first and make sure that it all works right -- sometimes graphics cards have issues with games, even though AI War is very widely compatible.  T-Bone, you had another computer to also play the game on, right?  You were getting enough into it that I take it you have a more powerful PC to play it with.

[T-Bone Biggins]

I am currently on my 7 year old gaming PC I made when I was 13. I recently built a budget gaming PC. On this current PC I can sometimes feel a load lag when I first enter systems with tons of ships, but it lasts only a few seconds. Both PC's run generally good. My brother's PC is identical as mine except his case and video card brand, gets almost same 3dMark scores I do. My buddy's PC also runs the game fine and it gets half my score with my new PC on 3dMark.

Old PC Specs:
AMD Athlon 3000+ 2.2Ghz
EVGA Nvidia GeForce 7600GT 512MB
1534MB PC3200 Ram
SoundBlaster Audigy 2 24-bit Sound Card
Ancient 90's monitor running 1024x768

New PC Specs:
AMD AthlonX2 5000+ Black Edition 2.6GHz x 2
EVGA Nvidia GeForce 9500GT 512MB
3GB PC5400 Ram
Onboard soundcard
Samsung monitor running 1440x900 native

Brother's PC Specs:
AMD AthlonX2 5000+ 2.6GHz x 2
PNY Nvidia GeForce 9500GT 512MB
3GB PC5400 Ram
Onboard soundcard
Samsung monitor running 1440x900 native

Friend's PC Specs (Dell XPS 410 rebuilt with aftermarket motherboard, vidcard and case):
Intel Duo 2.4GHz x 2
ATI Radeon X1600
3GB PC5400 Ram
Onboard soundcard
Dell Monitor running 1680x1050

[x4000]

Awesome, thanks for all the data there.  Those machines are all well within the system requirements, so they should indeed all do fine.

[Kalzarius]

- On Windows XP, you might be able to get by with 256MB of RAM, but it will be less than ideal.

I recently tried this out on one of our family's laptops, which has 512MB of RAM and a dedicated RADEON video card (which has its own memory and doesn't need to use the physical memory of the laptop).  The installer refused to install the program on a system with "less than 512MB of physical memory" (which as I mentioned above, the laptop has).  Is this a bug?

 - Kal Zarius

Edit:  This is with the current 1.004 from the download/buy page from Filefront.

[x4000]

Hi Kal Zarius,

Apparently this is a bug with the installer, it should work fine with 512 MB graphics cards.  For the next version I have now removed the check from being part of the install, and so it should work fine after that.

I'm uploading a new version now, and it should be ready in an hour or two.  I'll post a link as soon as it is up, or you can visit here:  http://dashboard.filefront.com/x4000/

And then look for the installer file AIWarSEtup1004V2 when that shows up (about 1 hour and 5 minutes from now, looks like).  I'll be out for a bit, but as soon as I'm back I'll post the direct link, in case you didn't already get it by then.

Thanks for your interest in AI War!

[Kalzarius]

It was the system RAM, not the video card that had 512 MB.  The video card is just a 32MB video card, but I believe that's still within the game's requirements.

I'll take a look at it later this evening or sometime tomorrow afternoon and tell you how it works out.

Cheers,

 - Kal Zarius

[Bridger]

Riuns nice on Win 7 RC 64bit

[x4000]

It was the system RAM, not the video card that had 512 MB.  The video card is just a 32MB video card, but I believe that's still within the game's requirements.

I'll take a look at it later this evening or sometime tomorrow afternoon and tell you how it works out.

Cheers,

 - Kal Zarius

Wow, apparently I needed to eat -- I meant system memory, but said graphics card.

Yeah, I knew what you meant, and you should be fine.  Here's the link to the latest version of the installer, which won't do any checks about system memory:  http://files.filefront.com/13859232

[Kalzarius]

Excellent.  It works just peachy on my 1.6GHz laptop with 512MB RAM and RADEON 32MB video card (I think it was RADEON 5700, but can't recall for sure from this old system).  I did encounter one odd thing, though.  I reloaded a campaign game after purchasing, and I found myself with 509 out of 255 in service MicroFighters.  What determines the unit cap and how could it have changed like that?

 - Kal Zarius

[x4000]

Excellent.  It works just peachy on my 1.6GHz laptop with 512MB RAM and RADEON 32MB video card (I think it was RADEON 5700, but can't recall for sure from this old system).  I did encounter one odd thing, though.  I reloaded a campaign game after purchasing, and I found myself with 509 out of 255 in service MicroFighters.  What determines the unit cap and how could it have changed like that?

 - Kal Zarius

Wonderful!  Do bear in mind that you may experience reduced performance on the larger maps, with the higher-level AIs, or with more than two or so people in multiplayer, on a machine that is below the minimum system requirements.  But especially with some of the recent performance improvements we've made, hopefully it won't ever be much of an issue for you.

For the MicroFighters, that was something that the cap was adjusted down on in the 1.004 release.  This was actually a performance thing -- we doubled their attack and health, and reduced the number that you could build by half, to keep the number of ships from getting so high with MicroFighters and a few other speicfic ship types (see the release notes for 1.004).  That's a one-time thing simply because of the upgrade between the two versions you had, and it won't affect anything (other than temporarily giving you a bonus with all those extra now-they-are-stronger MicroFighers ).

Thanks for playing, and for your support!

[netWilk]

- On Windows XP, you might be able to get by with 256MB of RAM, but it will be less than ideal.

Frankly, 256 MB is not enough to run Windows XP, never mind anything else, but I digress.

[x4000]

Yeah, it really depends.  I used to run it with 128MB of RAM, but then you're going into swap a lot.  Same sort of deal with AI War, it will stick you at least partly into swap and thus degrade performance, but depending on the machine and how the person is playing, it might still be runnable.  That's why I'm so happy that the demo is the full game, just not fully unlocked: what you see is what you get performance-wise.  If it's chugging in the demo, you can't run the full game, either.

[x4000]

As of today, I'm lowering the minimum CPU requirements from 2.4Ghz to 1.6Ghz.  2.4Ghz is still recommended for the larger maps in particular, but the game has had a lot of performance improvements since the original (the 1.004 and 1.011 releases in particular add a lot in that regard), so the combination of that plus the many smaller map types has led me to lower the minimum.  You can probably actually play with an even lower CPU, if you aren't the host or you have dual cores, but I think the experience is going to start getting more laggy on all but the 20-planets and below maps if you go much below 1.6Ghz.