You know how recent versions of windows give you a score about your computer performance? It would be nice if we could ask for this score from within esenthel.

I'd like to make a good guess about the computer's performance if my program runs for the first time on a computer. So to choose video settings that are optimal for the computer it is running on.

For now, if a user has a very low framerate with the deferred renderer, it is very hard for him to get into the game menu, find the video options and switch to simple renderer. On the other hand if I should make simple renderer the default, players with a good computer are missing a lot of nice views before they find out they can switch to the deferred renderer.

Same goes for other video settings of course. So if there was a way to make an educated guess about the best setting on a particular computer, that would be quite nice.

Cheers,

yvan

you can guess the gpu from D.shaderModel, D.deviceName, screen resolution
also you can measure the initial FPS values during first seconds of the game, and auto-adjust the video settings (just some ideas )

That was my plan B, yes :-)

I just thought windows has a very good indicator right there, just before my nose.

http://vcpptips.wordpress.com/2009/10/21...nce-index/

In my opinion, the Windows score would be a little to loose for this. Instead, use Amount of Ram, GPU type, Number of Cores, CPU Speed, Harddrive Speed etc. Then you can customize them. The problem with this (seen clearly if you have ever played Descent 3) is that, after a few years, the game is no longer able to auto detect the hardware and gets crazy results. Descent, for example, says that I have 0 mb's of Ram simply because it can not read DDR3 and was designed back in the days of Windows 98. This could become a problem. However, an MMO that is updated reasonably should be fine.

Actually, if you running an MMO it would be interesting to analyze players PC's, store the data in the database, then also store the players settings and Average FPS. Using this you could calculate the best settings for similar PC's and keep a constantly updating form. This would not be as easy as just guessing though.