Quote Originally Posted by simonpreston View Post
A minimum spec is just that: the bare minimum that the software will run on. But not necessarily play all that well (without a LOT of scaling down). But it'll work.
On the point of gamers being happy with shocking framerates (forgetting the PS4/XBone as they are relatively new) the thing you have to remember is that games are being developed for hardware that is almost 10 years old. They are trying to put next gen games on game consoles with the equivalent of a GeForce 7800 in there with a tiny amount of RAM. To get what they do out of those consoles is pretty impressive.
You could actually launch Gta V on a less powerful setup than that. I mean, if simply launching it is all we care about here.. There are definitely less powerful DX10 cards that I'm sure would actually load the game up.. Why the hell does anyone care what the lowest system is that can actually load a game, regardless of how well it can play it? We want to know what's the minimum system you can have a reasonable experience on with the lowest settings, at a resolution of around 720p for todays standards would be fair. What use is loading a game without being able to play it? That's why minimum requirements are usually such useless junk. They're trying to get as many people as possible to buy the game with hopes that they can run it. It's not just R* though, loads of games companies have been at it for about as far back as I can remember.

As for the consoles, the last gen systems are irrelevant to what I said, if that's what you meant. I mean, if they're trying to make a game run on an old console, then shouldn't it achieve a much better framerate on a new console!? But it's not the same game on the new console as on the old consoles. They keep doing the same thing they've been doing with consoles forever - pushing the visuals as much as possible with a huge sacrifice to the framerate. Again, not just R* that does this. It's sadly the standard for consoles.. 60fps should've been the standard for the current consoles. It's sad to be straight back to this sub 30fps crap again..

Not having a go at you But this is just how I feel about it all!