When you think of FPS games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Quake, Counter-Strike, and Overwatch, you might think that you need a powerful PC with a high-end GPU if you want to squeeze out the best performance possible. To a certain extent that is true, but in Overwatch’s case, it isn’t completely necessary.In a report from PC Gamer, during GDC in San Francisco that was held earlier this month, Blizzard’s senior software engineer Ryan Greene revealed an interesting piece of trivia about Overwatch, and that is according to the most recent numbers, 22% of Overwatch PC gamers are actually playing the game using integrated graphics.
According to Greene, Blizzard had actually approached the game by designing for the “minspec” crowd in mind, meaning that the game would be optimized for gamers who might not have the need or cash to get the most powerful gaming rig possible. The goal was to have the game run at a very respectable 30fps on the “minspec”, while the recommended specs should allow gamers to hit 60fps.
It seems that not everyone was onboard with the idea at the start, but the results changed their mind. Greene was quoted as saying, “Not everybody was excited at first, but as we got going on it, people really felt the value in it. We set up playtest labs with various machines all configured with different hardware. We got different people to play on it, and they were surprised at how well it ran, and how much it felt like Overwatch.”