Performance - what are your standards?

[MissDanish]

I develop on a pretty high end desktop (Ryzen 7 2700 and Vega 56), but I have a shitty old laptop from when I went to school that I use for testing every now and then, it's like 5 years old at this point and runs intel integrated graphics. That's my minimum spec for the RPG I am working on, if it can run on that I am happy. Buying a cheap old laptop is probably a good idea if you are very serious about high performance, if you don't have one that is.

[Jason14]

Well i m not even gonna get 30 fps in my model...I hope i atleast get 20 fps..Have been unlucky in that though.

[Sulunia]

I'll just develop things as usual on my desktop rig, but if I want to know how performant is the code, I just run it on a Raspberry Pi2.
And I expect at least 60 FPS on a 720p, maybe more. If it's too slow, then I profile the code and try to figure out what are the bottlenecks.

I also test on entry level desktop machines when possible, though these usually run stuff better than the pi.

[Darlex]

So by that I mean how well does your game have to run (in terms of FPS) so you consider it stable enough to release?
Do you test on real hardware or on VMs?

I personally develop on an Fujitsu Lifebook 8410[1], running Linux with just the MESA drivers, but I barely test on Windows and Mac OS, since I don't own a Mac and rarely carry my Windows laptop with me.
I generally just see that my games run above 60fps at 800x600 and stay there for most of the time, as long as they don't lag during gameplay-critical moments.

[1]https://www.cnet.com/products/fujitsu-l ... 410/specs/

I code in a laptop...
CPU: Intel pentium gold (kaby lake)
Ram: 4 GB
OS: Kubuntu 18.10
GPU: Geforce 940mx
HDD 200 Gb (The first one was a 500 GB hdd but i distrohopped too much)
(Most love games run at 500 fps)
it works to me

For testing i use my another computer that runs windows 10
CPU: Intel celeron
RAM: 4 GB
HDD: 500 GB
(Most love games run at 200 fps)

And my android smartphone.. (i dont know the specs)
(Most love games run at 200 fps)

[Bananicorn]

I'll elaborate on what ivan said a little bit.

You shouldn't care so much about your framerate, the more important metric is frame time. Consider a scenario where you're running your game without vertical sync on a 60Hz monitor and your FPS is 300. That's 240 frames of headroom, right? Not exactly, you can render 300 frames per second, but it'll still feel laggy if any of those frames take longer than one display refresh, ie. 16.7ms.

That actually makes a lot of sense - some games feel a bit laggy even though they have framerates well above 60fps - thanks for the explanation!

Unfortunately in the world of Lua you have to deal with garbage collection, which is definitely something which can cause certain frames to have a spike in processing time.

And that's one more thing I love about Lua - we can call the garbage collector manually - so I'd do it right before/after loading a level, or when not much is going on - although it may not be feasible for every kind of game^^

[raidho36]

You can run garbage collector manually with very predictable performance cost. You can run a small step of garbage collection every frame, and when frame lags might be acceptable (when level changes, or at checkpoints, or during cutscenes or otherwise uneventful stretches) do a full garbage collection pass. Of course it helps if you don't generate much garbage in the first place.