What site can I use to find if games will run on my computer?
What site can I use to find if games will run on my computer?
I googled it, and the top result wanted to download/install a PuP.
YouTube. I know it sounds goofy, but often you can search something like "Baldur's Gate 3 gtx 1060 6gb i7-4790K" (or whatever your specs are) and you will get tons of videos of people running it on their systems. If you happen to have common parts, you will not normally have trouble finding a benchmark for a rig very similar to yours for most games, but even with more niche hardware, you can usually find something helpful, even of it's just like a similar GPU or another laptop with the same chipset, or whatever your case may be.
Beyond that, Steam's hardware requirements on the store pages of games and pcgamingwiki are great resources.
I'd also say you can look on protondb--it's for Linux gamers, so the results may or may not be applicable if you have a Windows system, but in most cases, if there's a report that something runs well on Linux machine with the same hardware as you, it's going to be very similar on Windows. The other way isn't so applicable, though--just because something runs poorly on a Linux rig doesn't necessarily mean it will also run poorly on Windows, as the problem could be with the compatability layer and not the hardware.
None of these are a perfectly elegant solution, but they are typically reliable enough.
Note that ProtonDB is specifically for a Windows compatibility layer on Linux. If a game is Linux-native, one won't need Proton.
https://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri <- Automatic detection
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com <- figure it out manually with the wealth of information
I just, uh, borrow them from a friend to see how they work on my rig, nothing else will give you a better representation, everything else will just be a guess.
A caveat to this is that sometimes your friend's games run better since he/she removed the power-hungry annoying part that prevented you from borrowing it.
My friend also set up a custom accessibility control scheme so he could play games with his hook hand and issue voice commands via his parrot
Check Steam. It lists minimum system requirements on each games store page at the bottom.
As someone who released a game on Steam, I had no idea what to put in as the minimum requirements. I basically said "screw it" and put in the specs of the PC I started developing it on because I had no way to test it on anything else.
Starfield CPU requirement is "Intel Core i7-6800K or newer". I ran the game at nearly constant 60FPS on an (unsupported) i7-4790K.
Sometimes the requirements are bullshit.
Minimum requirements means that it will need that hardware to hit the target FPS at target resolution.
It doesn't mean you can't run it on anything lower spec. Just that it's not guaranteed to work at the target FPS and res.
Think you’d have to give a site too much permission on your system for comfort. Every game tells you the minimum/recommended spec. Safest just to look at that.
If it's a bigger game, I can usually find benchmarks for a similar machine as mine on YouTube.
There's one called can I run it, or something like that. It's probably the top result you're talking about. It always tells me I can't run games that run absolutely fine, so I wouldn't put much stock into it anyways.
Thank you guys for all of your responses!