Gushing About VALORANT's CRAZY Low-Spec Requirements and What They Might Mean for Hytale

Man, I notice a lot of things I do are motivated by Hytale.
The reason why I watched John Wick is because of that "Kweeanu Leaves" thing.
I got into Dungeons & Dragons because of Noxy and Oscar Garvin. Oscar even has a D&D soundtrack!

DISCLAIMER: This post is either based on pre-release information or how I imagine Hytale to work. It may not reflect the final game, so this post is just for fun.
I only played through one Unrated match and one Spike Rush match, so I apologize if I miss some details.

Remember when Simon and Noxy dropped a bombshell on April 16, 2020 with their announcement of Riot Games acquiring Hypixel Studios?
The key points to take for the purposes of my blog post are:

• Hypixel Studios is still in charge of Hytale development, though with Riot Games as the parent company, Hypixel Studios benefits from Riot's insanely large amount of funding and technical expertise.
• Even before acquisition, Riot Games was already a major investor of Hypixel Studios. Some Hypixel Studios members, including Noxy, were formerly from Riot Games. (See Noxy's LinkedIn profile; he was an NOC technician. Yeah, xtreme stalker vibez.)

Anyway, VALORANT was such a big deal on Twitter among Hytale personalities that Noxy (jokingly?) asked for beta keys and the Riot Games CEO replied, "I will trade [VALORANT] beta keys in exchange for Hytale beta keys." yes plz. (intentional bad grammar)

Kweebec Corner Tweeted about asking for VALORANT squad members.

It wasn't until I saw ads of VALORANT on YouTube that I thought, holy wow, this game must mean Serious Business, and so I began doing small amounts of research on the game, starting with the official website. And gosh-dang, those hardware requirements are really freaking low. You're saying I can play at 30 FPS with a freaking integrated GPU!? With such good-looking graphics? (I'm used to playing low-poly 3D games)

Guess what Hytale requires for 30 FPS? Yes, also an integrated GPU. And that comes with many of the crazy graphical effects from the graphics update, including real-time shadows and lighting.

For VALORANT, the high-end e-sports standard of 144 FPS requires...drum roll, please...a GTX 1050 Ti. Why am I surprised? Because my dad plans to buy me a budget gaming laptop with such a graphics card for game dev purposes. I watched some tests of the GTX 1050 Ti and they can run GTA V at 75+ FPS and Minecraft at 350-500 FPS.
Imagine just how overkill this laptop would be for Hytale. Oh well, I don't care--I like to be Crazy-Prepared.
(This post was drafted on June 9, 2020. The stores didn't have the exact model I wanted due to the firetrucking pandemic, so I went a little higher with a GTX 1650. Well, it's mine now.)

Put It to the Test!

I tested VALORANT's shooting range with the following specs:

Acer Aspire S5-371 (it's an ultrabook)
Intel Core i7-6500U @ 2.50 GHz
4 GB RAM
Intel HD Graphics 520

I chose the shooting range so I don't have to fight other players. I graduated from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy so I really need to polish my gun skills first.

I mainly tested at the lowest-quality settings available since I wanted to make sure I can effectively play Hytale even at the lowest settings when it comes out.
Also, this is my mom's PC. I don't want to do permanent damage to it.

While staying still, not practicing, and not shooting, my FPS ranged from 55 to 70. RAM usage was around 1,400 MB (though the recommended RAM capacity is 4 GB).

To push the game to its limits (as far as I knew), I went on practice mode in the shooting range so there were lots of bots on-screen then I equipped the Stinger, a submachine gun with the highest fire rate at 18 rounds per second. I turned infinite ammo on and fired continuously.
Here's what I got:

Yes, I played Sage because I wanted to play a healer like I used to.
I enjoy some play styles that are typically considered Boring but Practical.

FPS stayed at around 48 most of the time, but sometimes it dropped to 39. It didn't affect my aim.
When playing the Bytesize modpack for Minecraft, I usually have between 30 and 40 fps. It's manageable for the most part even against Lightning Bruiser mobs like zombie pigmen.
Good thing I'm a melee-focused fighter so I don't have to deal with the many particle effects of a gun with More Dakka.
I don't know which D&D spell has the most "dakka", but a max-level magic missile shoots up to 11 missiles at the same time. Good thing it's really hard to cast and a meteor swarm usually does more damage (38.5 magic missile average vs. 140 meteor swarm average) at the same cost.
(I didn't know at the time that Brimstone had an ability that increases fire rate, so I did that in a later test and got the same results.)

There are 10 bots in the screenshot, which is the same as the maximum number of players in a single VALORANT match.

(Unfinished paragraph)

Probably the closest thing we have to a massive army.
Dang, what kind of PC rendered this beast of a scene?
If only the trailer was in 4K...
Screenshot from the Hytale announcement trailer

For comparison, there were 9 units in the Hytale graphics update: Propzie, NinjaCharlieT, and 7 skeletons (though the objective was to kill 12 skeletons and 3 of those skeletons didn't count towards that objective). The December 12, 2019 progress update had a "kill 2 Trorks" objective, while the Edge magazine article mentioned killing 10 Trorks.

I'm wild-guessing there were about 90 players in the Hytale trailer's Mega Walls scene (shown below).

In a typical Minecraft playthrough, I can have a group of 100 animals and not suffer a major FPS drop. Taking farm animals into consideration is important since not all fights occur in the field.
I think spawning 200 Minecraft mobs causes a noticeable FPS drop, while 300+ would drop it to unplayable levels. In comparison, Thomas Frick stated that Hytale warns the player when they want to do something like spawning 10,000 goblins because doing so may cause the game to crash or otherwise lose a lot of performance.

In the same practice situation but with the highest-quality settings, my FPS dipped to 15.
Probably not a big deal for mundane Hytale scenarios like farming, but I wouldn't dare fight a single Minecraft zombie in 1.9+ with that frame rate. Makes me wonder if this potato PC can still display the sunshafts in the graphics update without dropping below 30 FPS...

Probably the closest thing we have to a massive army.
Dang, what kind of PC rendered this beast of a scene?
If only the trailer was in 4K...
Screenshot from the Hytale announcement trailer

To give you an idea of what the graphics quality looks like at its lowest, take a close look at the objects in this shot:

The basket contains 4 more of the same green bottle model (not visible from this angle).

They may not look super detailed, but I appreciate how VALORANT can render these mundane objects while still running at 60 FPS.
For comparison, here's a similar "messy" shot from Christmas 2019 which was used for the Hytale OST track "Old Craft":

Loads of gifts, a "well-dressed" Christmas tree, particle effects in the fireplace, dynamic colored lighting, mobs, a Kweebec plushie, the list goes on.

This opens up a lot of possibilities for decorating prefabs, dungeons, and build projects without being PC killers like the Minecraft builds I see around the Internet. I mean, even the vanilla Minecraft jungle biome is a PC killer.
You bet I'll poke around every loose pebble in an enemy faction's home cave to find a secret button.
And I expect interior design specialists to impress me.

In conclusion, I'm impressed with VALORANT's low-spec requirements, seeing how I can shoot at my normal accuracy even with More Dakka and the pretty good model and texture quality. I get similar frame rates in typical Minecraft battles, which makes VALORANT look even more awesome because it's not a voxel game. With this feat of Riot Games's, I can see them helping Hypixel Studios make Hytale reach the same crazy good performance as VALORANT, if not better.

But frame rates are not the only thing I want to gush at with regards to VALORANT.

This ain't your ordinary shooting range, soldier.

There's a challenge difficulty which, in the skills test (not practice mode), affects how long a bot stays on-screen before it disappears. This is useful for practicing quick reactions. In a Hytale context, this can be useful in archery and using my favorite Fire Emblem ranged weapon: the javelin.

I destroyed 3 out of 30 bots in Medium difficulty.

Bot armor reduces damage dealt to the torso and limbs but leaves the head vulnerable, encouraging the player to score headshots. In harder difficulties, this makes the bots effectively Nigh-Invulnerable since even weapons with More Dakka can't destroy the bots before they disappear, so headshots are the only reliable way to destroy them.

Aim sensitivity can be changed by shooting the respective targets, allowing the player to test their aim on the fly without pausing the game.

Outside of this particular practice room, there are more targets nearby: one of which is a typical archery target and another is an invincible damage-counting bot. The player can change the distance of these targets. There's a display which shows what parts of the archery target were hit regardless of how far the actual target is. The bot displays how much damage was dealt to it as well as how many bullets hit.
The current archery targets from the deadeye pigeon clip and the throwing spear clip do not have such features, but I'd like to see them in the future. Maybe even have the target flash or make a unique sound if the bullseye was hit...
A feature similar to the damage-counting bot would have me testing melee attack combos similar to the Tekken games. Even better if it fights back but can't do real damage so I can practice defensive moves.

There are floating drone targets further outside. I suppose they can help the player get used to targets coming from various heights...especially if said targets are deadeye pigeons about to be shot down by a bow. Add lightning or ice and it's 4x super effective!

Why I Graduated from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy

Let's say I'm completely out of practice with anything that requires quick mouse movement, including but not limited to first-person shooters. (I'm actually worse at Minecraft PvP than shooters, though.)

I did not use any special abilities for these tests.

I was lagging since I was using my paternal grandma's underpowered, inconsistent Wi-Fi connection. Testing in my family store is more reliable, but since I'm the only Battle Butler Lightning Bruiser Engineer in the house who can also do Le Parkour, testing in the store would prevent me from quickly responding to calls for help from my family.

The challenges with difficulties have 30 bots.

Unless otherwise specified, I used the Ghost, the silenced pistol which can kill in a single headshot. This encourages accuracy and ammo saving over sweeping everything with More Dakka or cheesing aim with a sniper rifle scope.

Easy difficulty. Not bad, but I certainly could've done better.

Medium difficulty. Yeah, this is very Stormtrooper-y.

I used More Dakka with the Spectre submachine gun 'cause I couldn't get a single hit on Hard difficulty with the Ghost for 7 rounds in a row.

All the screenshots I used in this post, plus some bonus testing screenshots, are available in this ZIP file.
If I put too many screenshots in this post, it would look way too long.