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@Riot Baconhawk: Does the QA team test on systems of lower quality as well?

mi ramfan·6/19/2014, 4:14:24 AM·4 votes·1,437 views

I play League on a (surprisingly decent) laptop that I got for $450 last year on ebay. Its parts are pretty good in general, but being new to computer shopping at the time I bought a laptop with great RAM and a great processor but a crappy integrated GPU.

Now I can't replace it, and I don't have the money to buy a new computer, and every patch my FPS and graphical performance on League gets worse and worse with no rhyme or reason.

I guess my question is:

What kinds of systems do you normally run QA testing on? Do you spend the vast majority of your time testing League on $2000+ gaming desktops (usually not worth investing in for anyone but the hardest of the core), or is the balance more in favor of us $500 desktop-substitute laptop guys?
Every patch, there's a group of players (usually changes from patch to patch) who takes some kind of hit in performance. Based on support tickets that have come in, how many of these performance drops did you warn the programmers/animators about beforehand?
Do you have any intention of supporting players who are stuck with average to subpar GPUs, or should I be looking to invest in a $1000 machine to run this game come 2015 or so?

6 Comments

RiotRiot Baconhawk6/23/2014, 12:06:58 AM5 votes

Hi, and thanks for asking these questions. I'll answer the best I can. :)

The short answer is, we do everything we can to ensure that League can run on what we call "minspec" machines. These tend to be older/lower-end computers (think Windows XP, two gigs of RAM, etc). If something doesn't pass this compatibility testing, we are almost guaranteed to send it back to development (although I can't think of a time we let something through that didn't pass). So yes, you should be able to play League on your laptop (though it may not be as fast or as FPS-luscious as a nice shiny-new PC with a few Titans).
As far as your question about performance drops after each patch for a certain subset of players, we've found many times it has to do with graphics drivers needing updating and specific graphics compatibility more often than not (that's not to say there aren't other culprits). But even though we do have extensive testing capabilities and a wide range of machines to test on, we obviously don't (and can't) have every configuration possible, so some anomalies can occur, which we try to address as best as we can, within our capability.
Funny enough, GPU isn't the main factor in running the game--specifically because we want to make sure it's able to be run on lower-end computers (read: machines with integrated graphics, even). RAM and processor are equally important. We definitely hope you can use the same machine to run League today and in 2015--and beyond. Even as we update textures, give Summoner's Rift a facelift and create newer and fancier champions, the graphics should stay at a level that supports gameplay and doesn't usurp it, especially at the cost of performance. That's our goal, anyway!

Hope this helps. :)

cawws and perches on an above branch

Vortex IV6/23/2014, 12:33:40 AM1 votes

There's been flashing and random lines/vertexes appearing on the radeon HD 7xxx series cards for over a year and Riot has completely ignored it even though it's persisted through every single patch since i've played the game and i'm always to date on my drivers.

Since Riot seems to have abandoned supporting certain cards/companies i'm pretty sure this summoner's rift update is going to make the game unplayable for A LOT of people.