Live dealer games and operating system requirements

When it comes to a smooth, continuous and high definition live gaming experience, it’s not just about your Internet connection speed. I found this out during the week.

In a nutshell, latest release live games work much better played on a PC running Windows 10 than Windows 7.

So if you have a humming connection, but still get annoying freeze frames, it might might be time to upgrade your operating system…or better yet, get a new PC!

Microsoft Windows 7 issues…

My old laptop runs Windows 7. Earlier in the year I bought a new one that runs Windows 10, in anticipation of old faithful dying.

She’s been on her death bed for months…long start up and shut down times, regular  crashes, overheating to the point where it’s too hot to sit on your lap and a whole bunch of machine coughing and spluttering noises.

But she refused to die. And being an old t-shirt kind of guy, I refused to swap her out for the new machine. Besides, Microsoft does have a habit of making new operating systems less user friendly than preceding ones, so I wasn’t super keen to but heads with Windows 10.

What I have noticed over the last few months however, is a noticeable deterioration in video continuity playing the new release live dealer games, Evolution Gaming’s widescreen HD format in particular. Deal lag, video freeze, and auto-defaulting from full screen video to small screen inset video was becoming more regular and more annoying. Puzzling also given my connection speed is somewhere around 80Mbps download and 50Mbps upload.

Wasn’t a browser problem…no joy switching from Chrome to Firefox to Explorer.

When I caved and fired up the new machine…voilà, all issues gone.

Minimum System Requirements

Doing a sweep around a few of the larger online casinos (or indeed provider websites), few offer much guidance on ideal system requirements for their live games.

Bet365 have this to say about their browser based casino games:

Minimum PC Requirements:
1.6GHz CPU Dual Core and above.
1GB RAM and above.
16MB Video Card (1280×800 or above resolution, 16-bit color).
Microsoft Windows XP SP2 or above.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 or above, Mozilla Firefox 19 or above, Google Chrome 25 or above.
Adobe Flash Player 11.0.1.152 or above.
Network Bandwidth of 750Kbit/s.

Minimum Apple Mac Requirements:
G5 or Intel based processor, 1.5 GHz.
At least 512MB RAM.
Mac OS X 10.6 or above.
Mozilla Firefox 19 or above, Google Chrome 25 or above, Safari 6.0.4 or above.
Adobe Flash Player 10.2.159.1 or above.
Network Bandwidth of 750Kbit/s.

Party Casino offer this:

Windows 2000/XP/Vista or 7 or above
256MB RAM
800 x 600 px screen resolution
256 colors
Sound card (optional)

Bear in mind these are minimum requirements.  If they were to publish optimum requirements specific to live games, they should probably be advising Windows 10.