Hardware checks.

[Irritant]

What are some good cross platform ways besides extension checking to gauge the quality of the GPU? Are there any good cross platform methods for checking the CPU?

[Irritant]

Sounds of crickets chirping....

[mh]

To be honest, there are so many variations between different GPUs, with different strengths and weaknesses in different areas, that I can't even think of a non-cross-platform way.

[Irritant]

Yeah, I'm thinking that my best option is to just have the game default to medium settings, and disable anything that isn't supported via the usual extension checking. Most people smart enough to be critical of graphics would think to turn things up in the menu...well...that might be too much faith in today's climate of low intelligence, lol, but it's better than having a bunch of people screaming about framerates and not being smart enough to change settings. Or worse yet, people not even bothering to scream about it and just uninstalling the game before bothering to adjust anything.

[Labman]

You could write an auto settings adjust thing based on the framerate of running a demo. Turn on or off settings based on what the average framerate is.

[Urre]

Games released late 90's did this a lot, run tests to set default settings, I've always wondered why that tactic practicly disappeared. I thought they'd figured out easier and more transparent ways to check this with newer hardware and whatnot, but from the sounds of this thread that doesn't seem to be the case...

Considering GPU, it shouldn't be very hard to add some checks for wether it supports specific features or not, and then simply run a demo like Labman said, to adjust fidelity of certain features like texture resolution or whatever.

CPU, I guess you'd have to run some physics tests or something, with gamecode.

[mh]

Feature support should be just a matter of checking the capabilities, assuming that the API you're using has decent capabilities checking, and that your driver doesn't lie. It probably makes sense to also run some code and do some error checking too.

Performance is a sticky issue, especially where OpenGL is concerned, and even more especially as OpenGL is allowed to provide software emulation of any part of the API but doesn't provide a means of determining if software emulation is used. I've been bitten by non power of 2 textures here in the past.

[Irritant]

I like the idea of loading a demo (perhaps in an FBO) on first run after the extension checks to test fps and then adjusting accordingly.