Katawa Shoujo Forums

Main Rig:

AMD Phenom 9950BE @3.0 Ghz (X4 cores)
4GBs of 800Mhz RAM
Etc, etc, runs perfect, but this isn't really going to help anyone, so I decided to bust out an old friend.

HP Pavilion ZX5000 (Man, I used to love this laptop, it was designed as a desktop replacement, and I pawned it off my dad's eccentric boss who refuses to let his employees use computers that are 2+ years old. It seriously only set me back $50 in around 2004 for the following)

Pentium 4 HT @3.0 (Yes the desktop processor)
512MBs of 533Mhz RAM
Radeon 9200
60GB HDD

Now I have a bit of a revelation to share. I was entirely confident that this computer should be able to play this game without a hitch, as it can still even play modern games on low settings, but I found the snow to be unacceptably laggy.

Now remember, this laptop and I go way back, so I'm familiar with it's design quirks, which led me in the right direction for some quick troubleshooting.

I loaded up my 100% clear save from my main rig, and and watched only the snow scene, and the fireworks scene, and during both cases I surmised from monitoring my HDD's activity that the system has to repeatedly access the HDD several times every second.

My suspicions were confirmed after a small test. almost all laptop HDD's perform extremely poorly, especially during small accesses like these, because spindle speed is limited to 5200 RPM's, and nearly all HP Pavilion laptops from around the same timeframe as mine are even slower at around 4200RPM's.

Simple tech savvy knowledge dictates that flash memory is extremely FAST during small accesses like these.

I reinstalled to an ancient 256MB flash drive, (like barely USB 2.0 ancient) and -low and behold- performance increased greatly, still not perfect, but close enough that I almost think that the snow lagging is my imagination.

ANYONE who has problems with speed during the demo should try installing to a flash device instead, (flash drive, MP3 player, ipod, anything) because a slow HDD is a HUGE bottleneck in this game.

2.8 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU
4 GB of RAM
Windows Professional SP2 I believe
nVidia GeForce 9800 GT

Single core 3 GHZ, 8800GT, 2 Gigs of RAM.

Runs perfect with no slowdowns ever.

Desktop:
Alienware Area-51 X58 (2006 Model casing)
- Intel Core i7 Extreme - Overclock at 3.77Ghz
- Intel X58 Chipset
- NVidia SLi : x2 GeForce 295 GTX Black / x1 NVidia 9800 GX2
- Modified 4.5 GB (approx) of RAM + 1600 MHz DDR3
- Alienware stock Liquid Cooling
- Windows 7 Beta
Functionality: Perfect and smooth running, although sometimes in the prologue where you can see Hisao's heart beat erratically, the snow stalls a bit.

Tried it on an Acer Aspire One netbook using XP, just Rin's path.

- Intel Atom N270, 1.6 GHz
- 1 GB RAM, DDR2 533Mhz
- HD 5400 rpm SATA
- 1024x600 display

Having a resolution so small (but fitting) forces you to play the game in fullscreen mode. 90% of the time it worked just as it does on my main computer, so I'll list the places where it varied:

Events dropping frames very slightly:
- Snowflakes in the snow scene at the beginning.
- Medicine words cloud.
- Zoom out when you meet Rin.

Events slowing down:
- Fireworks scene; fireworks themselves faded slowly but not dropping frames, though the text was mostly stumbling into the screen a group of words each time instead of having the smooth revealing effect it normally has.

Another thing I noticed is the game had very small (less than half a second) freezes most times the backgrounds were changed, but I guess its due to RenPy not keeping them in RAM and having to read them from the HD every time or something.

All in all, the game is very playable in a little netbook like this.

2Gb RAM (Not sure about speed etc)
Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz
ATI Radeon 2400 256Mb

Works perfectly, even in the snow/fireworks scenes. No slowdown whatsoever.

I played it on a basic 2007 model Inspiron 1521 (downgraded to XP, of course) and it ran fine. It dropped a couple frames per second when I was on the fireworks part, but other than that, it was fine. This makes me wonder if you guys are running background programs or what, since my laptop isn't that good of a computer (just barely good enough to run Morrowind on mid-settings, almost good enough to run The Path on low settings).

Windows XP media center SP3
AMD Phenom x4 9500 @2.2ghz
2gb ram
Radeon HD 4850
Seagate 1.5tb hard drive

Needless to say, it works perfectly for me.

I played it on my net book and it worked well (lagged a bit on the fireworks).

1.6ghz Intel Atom
2gigs 667mhz corsair RAM
160gig seagate 5400 rpm HDD
Windows XP SP3
Some shitty integrated graphics.

It goes without saying my beast at home devours anything I throw at it.

4gigs of 800mhz corsair RAM
AMD Phenom 2 @3.4Ghz
ATI 4850 512mb
Windows XP SP3
WD 500gb 7200 HDD

e-peen, ect.

I forgot to mention my old computer that I originally had it on.

Nvidia GeForce 6200
728 Mb RAM
70GB HDD
2.2Ghz Intel Celeron
Windows XP Home Edition SP3

It was fail but it ran.

I should mention that the speed in ReactOS seems about equal to XP currently, and that's without proper video hardware drivers! (compared to my stripped-down XP WITH video hardware drivers)

While KS doesn't actually use GPU acceleration, at least in windows not having GPU drivers does cause graphical lag for various things (which happens in ReactOS currently)

I don't need to talk about my pc.

I had my pc for 5 years, so the only thing that I can say is...


I NEED TO BUY A NEW PC!

....only 5? My ~8-7 year old PC plays things fine unless you're talking about new high-end hardcore PC games (which I don't usually play - I'm not FPS crazy)

Duo2Cuo wrote:I played it on my net book and it worked well (lagged a bit on the fireworks).

1.6ghz Intel Atom
2gigs 667mhz corsair RAM
160gig seagate 5400 rpm HDD
Windows XP SP3
Some shitty integrated graphics.

It goes without saying my beast at home devours anything I throw at it.

4gigs of 800mhz corsair RAM
AMD Phenom 2 @3.4Ghz
ATI 4850 512mb
Windows XP SP3
WD 500gb 7200 HDD

e-peen, ect.

Processor: Intel Core i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz
Memory: 6 gigs of 1600mhz DDR3 OCZ RAM
Hard Drive:Two 640GB WD Caviar Black's in RAID 0
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 x2 in SLI
Motherboard: ASUS P6T
Case: CoolerMaster CM 690
Operating System: Windows Vista Ultimate

Far larger e-peen, etc.

...yeah okay on the *ahem* relative processor sizes, but the goal here is to see just how obsolete a computer will still run our beast.
So, no potato-powered webservers yet?