Also, I'm not farmiliar with AVX or Ark (sorry for the ignorance, still in the beginning of my market research) could you expand on what these are and why they're important?

AVX is intel's newer SIMD instruction set, and Ark is intel's database/website for CPU specs.

Personally if you go integrated graphics i'd get a broadwell minimum CPU because GPU Virtual address space support was improved past 2GB in broadwell.

If you go with dedicated a 960m is a good starting point.

System RAM - if you multi-task you'll appreciate 16GB, and some people have commented 16 min for dev purposes... I don't use Unity but IIRC you'll have the Unity editor and Monodevelop open at the same time. You'll most probably have a browser, documentation open as well. Content creation requires more RAM as well so 16GB is a good investment.

I see, thanks.

but in terms of GPU, are you saying Integrated graphics on a broadwell processer would perform better than a discrete 920/940m? or that they would just be so marginally better that it's not worth investing in one?

or that they would just be so marginally better that it's not worth investing in one?

This, pretty much. By the time you get up to a 960m or so the difference will become noticeable, but the newer Intel Iris Pro GPUs compete handily with a 940M.

but in terms of GPU, are you saying Integrated graphics on a broadwell processer would perform better than a discrete 920/940m? or that they would just be so marginally better that it's not worth investing in one?

I quickly looked up some benchmarks and saw 2 benchs where a Skylake iris 540 integrated graphics seems to perform like (slightly better - only found 2 comparisons, I suggest you look up some benches yourself) an 940m. So if you go integrated and can afford it go skylake. However again I would suggest Broadwell over Haswell if you can't get/afford Skylake. Skylake uses new memory so 16GB of RAM might be more expensive, but discrete graphics would likely be more expensive. (remember integrated uses system ram for graphics memory so some of that 8GB will be used for graphics so it might be wise to go 16)

edit - the iris 520 is what you'll get with the midrange skylake notebooks not the iris 540. The iris 520 had about 20 less fps than the 940m in one of the benches I found.

i dont think it is a good idea to buy a strong computer for game developing. remember, the mass of the users will have relatively old computers, and your game must run properly on them. ifs better to buy some cheap testing machines with intel, nvidia, amd, sis and s3 graphics, if you want hardware 3d. you may need a few cell phones with different chips, if you want to develop 3d apps for android. i personally having amd, intel, via, vortex86, and even cyrix processros as testing systems, and having a few things with ARM chips and linux and/or android.

remember, the mass of the users will have relatively old computers,

Yes, most users have old computers but this factors in grandma who only emails her cousin in Australia once a week and uses cortana to find baking recipes.

Is grandma a gamer and do you include her in your demographic?

To get a good idea of the kind of pc your actual target market owns, you need to look at the steam hardware survey, which will show you that for any real game you shouldn't be targeting a ten year old dell with an ancient graphics card because generally gamers who will buy your game will own better.

That is unless you've written the next candy crush to appeal to grandma, in which case it should be a smartphone app, right?...

Edit: also remember making a game is more taxing on computing resources than playing it. You'll need more ram and more cpu than the kind of pc you aim to target. Remember you'll be running your development environment, graphics creation tools at the same time as your game...

Is grandma a gamer and do you include her in your demographic? (...) That is unless you've written the next candy crush to appeal to grandma, in which case it should be a smartphone app, right?...

basically yes, you answered your own ironical question in the way you not wanted to. the stereotypical ~20 year old lifeless gamer kid as a mass-market force simply not exist any more. so releasing versions for cell phones are very important, and pc versions also must work from very small machine demand. i would say everything above 600 mhz and 256 mbyte RAM must be supported, if it is technically possible (both on x86 and arm side), while the thing should be able to scale up to current 10 core arm cpus and 16 threaded intel desktop cpu-s and/or gpu-s to offer better ergonomy for the power users too.

its not like my softwares would be able to fullfill this requirements at all, however, in the last 1 year, i started to make serious steps to achieve this with some partial successes.

i would say everything above 600 mhz and 256 mbyte RAM must be supported,

IIRC windows has had greater requirements at least since XP especially in the RAM department. Also you don't have to test your game on the same machine you develop on. While I in a way basically agree with you I think 600mhz and 256 is a little on the low side.

IIRC windows has had greater requirements at least since XP especially in the RAM department. Also you don't have to test your game on the same machine you develop on. While I in a way basically agree with you I think 600mhz and 256 is a little on the low side.

Windows XP officially needs a 233 mhz Pentium1 (or equivalent) CPU (300 mhz recommended) with minimum 64 mbyte of RAM (128 mbyte recommended).

dont foget that windows xp is from 2001. (i even used it sometimes back then on pentium1-166 mhz, it still runned good).

in phones, 600 mhz and 256 mbyte RAM was usual in the past years. today, the lowend is around 800 mhz and 512 mbyte RAM, but older phones are still in use, so i dont know.

there should be a line, where it is certainly a bad idea to go below. but the question is - is this limit an ecsact number, or not?

a 600 mhz duron cpu is more than twice as fast as a 800 mhz VIA c3, while tons of c3 was built into netbooks back then. lot of them are still in use, and they graphics chips are not yet even mentioned. first generation intel atoms are also very slow.

i meditated a bit on this question back then, and i decided that 600 mhz and 256 mbyte ram is the absolute minimum (for software rendered graphics), that should be able to start most of my software, even if it is far below the enjoyable speed. for simplier hardware accelerated softwares (like mario clones, etc), i would suggest otimizations to run at least on 25 fps on computers like this (and have an opengl 1.0 fallback so old integrated gpus could run it).

i would say everything above 600 mhz and 256 mbyte RAM must be supported,

IIRC windows has had greater requirements at least since XP especially in the RAM department. Also you don't have to test your game on the same machine you develop on. While I in a way basically agree with you I think 600mhz and 256 is a little on the low side.

A little on the low side?! It's not even enough to reliably run Firefox, any recent game engine such as ue4 or any windows beyond xp.

In fact it's the same spec as an iPhone 3gs which came out in what, 2009, or an extremely low end Chinese brand android tablet.

Saying that people rarely upgrade their machines and that they use a pc from 2001 are different things entirely.

I still stand by using steams hardware survey. Even casual gamer types and the "stereotypical grandma" probably use steam, as it's really the biggest pc games distribution platform.

If you look there you'll see people using between 2gb and 32gb, and that sis cards (lol, don't make me laugh) and s3 cards make up less than half a percent of the figures.

Part of releasing a game means doing market research and assuming everyone uses pcs from the dark ages that don't even have hardware T&L or even hardware 3D acceleration is just ignoring the real world, it's like being an amish when it comes to gamedev.

Whilst you're milking your cows and repairing wagons everyone else will be driving around in their electric cars. Meep Meep, goodbye! :)

Windows XP officially needs a 233 mhz Pentium1 (or equivalent) CPU (300 mhz recommended) with minimum 64 mbyte of RAM (128 mbyte recommended).
dont foget that windows xp is from 2001. (i even used it sometimes back then on pentium1-166 mhz, it still runned good).

Just to add in although going slightly off topic, these specs are for the RTM, and service packs especially SP3 add more to these requirements.

I've tried to run Windows XP with both 64 and 128mb of ram back in the day and it was PAINFUL. there wasn't enough ram left to load anything useful beyond the bundled apps like notepad and if you did it would swap all day long.

While I respect your opinion I still do believe it wrong from a game development perspective as we should be looking to the future not into the distant past.