System requirements

[Martin Kafka]

It's not a big deal but perhaps it's time to slightly modify the official system requirements for DSJ4. With all the recent changes and upgrades to the hills, I'm afraid a 1.5 GHz CPU doesn't cut it anymore. Sure, you can still start up the game and enjoy most of the basic hills, but the limiting factor shows when entering an online game. I remember I was getting dangerously close to the 10 sec limit on some hills with my old i5-2500K, and that was a 3.3 GHz overclocked to 3.7 GHz, mind you. Maybe dividing the specs to minimum and recommended might give a better idea about performance to players new to the game. DSJ4 serves as a sort of benchmark where you can see how fast each player loads up a hill (in case they press Ready right away). It really helps to keep the pace of an Online session if there are players with modern CPUs. I don't think modern complex hills such as Oslo or Zhangjiakou will load in time on a 1.5 GHz CPU that hasn't been manufactured in, say, last 10 years. It would certainly be interesting to hear some feedback from players with various desktop and laptop configurations on what is their current performance on the more CPU-heavy hills.

Edit 30/10: Alright, false alarm I guess. I made some tests during the weekend on a 12 year old CPU and both Oslo and Zhangjiakou currently only take around 5 seconds to fully load so it's not that serious. Either some optimizations had been made either in the game code or hills themselves or I've been remembering it wrong. The 512 MB RAM requirement, however, is quite outdated. Using task manager, I measured values up to 520 MB of RAM consumption when loading these hills; moreover, Windows 10 alone take up more than 2 GB on a fresh, clean install, which is also the official minimum requirement.

TL;DR: 3 GB of RAM should be the bare minimum for DSJ4 on Windows 10 and 5 GB on Windows 11.