Maxis games generally aren't as hardware-intensive as, say, a Crysis or Call of Duty 4. The company's previous blockbuster hits include such games as Sim City and The Sims--both run well on rudimentary computers, often functioning happily with onboard video adapters. Spore, Maxis' latest creation, is no exception. All the game really requires is a video card that's capable of Shader Model 2.0. To put things into perspective, we're up to Shader Model 4.0 in today's video cards. The first Shader Model 2.0-compatible cards, such as the GeForce FX and Radeon 9000 series, both came out five years ago. Intel's GMA950, an onboard video adapter found on many laptops, will work just fine with Spore (unless you have an older MacBook). But quite often, minimum specifications don't lead to ideal or even desirable results when it comes to games. We decided to put Spore through the gauntlet to figure out just how small you can go on the hardware and still have a great gaming experience.
We found it difficult to find an in-game test sequence that could represent the whole game because Spore has several mini-stages, which are quite different. The cell stage has no other counterpart visually, but the space stage is an even greater departure from the land-bound tribal and civilization stages. Zooming in and out of planet views incurs the biggest loading hiccups, but we didn't want to base our test on a single 2-second zoom. In the end, we found that the creature stage provided an accurate representation of the game, and it also seemed the most taxing overall, especially when we had several models onscreen. Our test consisted of spinning around the nesting area for 30 seconds.
Spore has a built-in frame limiter that automatically caps off at 30 frames per second. Excess power clearly won't come in handy here. There's a good chance that the game will stay at a solid 30 frames per second if you have a PC built in the past two years and you don't go crazy on the resolution settings. We found that having a consistent 20 to 25 frames per second was more than enough to have a good time.
Settings
Spore doesn't need much for hardware but if you're going to run the game on an older computer there's a few settings that you'll want to dial back.
Video Cards
Newer GPUs won't have any problem running Spore, but older cards might struggle. We tested 20 cards from the past and present to help you decide how much is enough.
CPU
We broke out our Intel Core 2s, AMD Phenoms, and Pentium 4s to see how the game scales on older processors. We found that Spore doesn't seem to care about processing power and could probably run off the computational power of a graphing calculator.
Memory
Spore is equally ambivalent about RAM--the game is happy with any amount. We tested the game with 1GB, 2GBs, and 3GBs of RAM. Even the 512MBs of RAM on our minimum spec machine ran Spore without a hitch.
