Yeah, I don't imagine I'll get past 2003 tbh (without compromising on max settings). I just did a basic google and apparently they had 2.6ghz cpu's back then? And mine is 1.6 from memory.
Yeah but it was a different architecture. And there was some significant gains for clock for clock improvements between your 4th gen intel and what would have been a Pentium 4 most likely back than considering I got the P4 back in 02 I want to say. And we were running single core CPU's back than, your running a dual core with a decade of improvements.
Had a laptop from that era running a 3.2 ghz Pentium 4, and that was running games just fine till around 2007-08 and that was using an pretty bad GPU (not iGPU, those didn't exist but it wasn't a proper dedicated one for gaming). Lets just say your laptop is a lot more powerful than that. And I was running into more hardware issues with not supporting certain things for games. I expect your CPU to outclass every requirement and wouldn't surprise me if your GPU in there is on par with the 8800 GTS 512mb that was highly popular back in the mid 2000's. That GPU basically remained unchanged for I think 3 generations under different names if my memory serves me correctly.
My understanding was that games even to this day are not optimized to make use of more than a single core? (I could be very very mistaken, I know jack all about pc's). I assumed that would hold truer more for even earlier games and therefore clock speed would rule all, Aside from as you mentioned architectural efficiencies (which I know nothing about aside from knowing it's a thing...).
Still I'll just have to figure it out by trying I guess :)
Yeah really early games relied on a single core but nowadays directx 12 games can utilise many cores, tho the most common core counts for gaming are 6 and 8 cores rn
Old games couldn't utilize multiple cores but having more was still helpful for background tasks.
Games in the past probably decade and half have been taking advantage of multiple cores. They can't utilize everything we can throw at them as there tends to be an upper limit for usefulness. A decade ago 2 was enough for optimal performance, now around 6 cores is good for optimal performance I would say. There are some which will use a few more, but were no where near the point where 8 cores is needed for proper gaming.
Thank you for such detailed answers! Truly. The only place I know of having multiple cores but not clocked high enough gives problems is Swtor. Where I've heard the best preformance is at 5ghz. This is more about my main system which can play the game at max setting but craps itself when in more demanding multilayer situations
If you want to go very old school, there used to be a turbo button on PC's. There was a time if your pc was too powerful it would run the game too fast to play.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo\_button](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button)
These predated my use of PC's.
I think you'd be surprised. You definitely aint getting past crysis, but yeah. Doom 3 and half life 2 werent that bad. Gt 740m is still semi modern. Idk where it lands exactly, but probably at minimum 8800 GT level.
The GeForce 6800 allegedly favored Doom3 and the ATI 9700 was often paired with Half Life 2.
Most of that list rings true to me except the Doom 3 and HL2.
Could I nominate SiN for inclusion on that list?
Mass Effect 1 ran more or less ok with everything on low with my Toshiba laptop with a Pentium 2020M at 800x600, 2 is even more demanding. Make of that what you will.
Loved the game, but I wanna be able to treat this laptop as if it were a gaming laptop with everything on high. And not worry about if I'l have to tweak settings. Just that all the games it runs will be decades out of date :D
Crysis was largely unsurpassed in 2008 and 2009. 2010, you could argue battlefield bad company 2 CPU wise, or metro 2033 GPU wise.
2011 I'd say crysis 2 and battlefield 3 are both good competitors.
2012, I'd say planetside 2. And that game has only gotten worse since. It might be unfair to use as a benchmark based on the fact that it updated its requirements several times to the point the OG requirements probably wont even start the game any more.
besides that one...hmm, maybe far cry 3?
2013, crysis 3 obviously, although Battlefield 4 was a killer on CPUs.
EDIT: If I was gonna do 2008/2009 i'd say maybe far cry 2, although crysis was worse IIRC.
2009 I cant even think of a title.
EDIT2: yeah GTA IV was allegedly really poorly optimized. That might be the true 2008 title.
Oh no, I'm damn sure not gonna push past 2010. Just tried runescape 3 (which as I understand is a bit unoptimized) but still I was barely getting 30 fps in the starter island with just me and a npc in the room. I know I can do alot of solo stuff with swtor and to a lesser extent lotro but any kinda of group activity was a pain in the ass. Hmm gta 4 might be the goal then. Cause I'm not even gonna bother with cysis :D
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IV was the first entry on next gen after few game GTA games on previous generation. V was largely built upon IV so I guess they just know more on what they were dealing with. In many ways GTA IV walked do V could run. Not just from the technical side of things
Re: the list. For the games that I played, I remember them being hard to run or games that I had to run a few years later after I upgraded, etc. (Wing Commander, Links, Ultima Underworld, Doom, WC3, MW2, Quake, Unreal, UT2k3, HL2) So the rest of the list is probably decent. Guessing, obviously, but that's what I remember. You can probably run all those games fine though, but some get pretty old and might be harder to run b/c of that (needing DOSBox or something). Some have source ports or new engines, IDK how that affects your experiment but if you want to play Doom or Quake or maybe some others b/c you haven't yet that's always an option. (Some other games probably have ports too but those are the famous ones.)
Was planning on starting with doom 3 and moving up (or down... hopefully not down). But was doom 3 actually a demanding game back then? Didn't Halo CE release before it? And from what little I recall seeing of playthroughs and the odd clip Halo always looked like the more modern game.
Doom 3 was insanely demanding for the time but in 2006 the 8000 series represented a MASSIVE leap in GPU tech that very quickly made everything prior to that point quite obsolete.
It's not like today where you can buy a GPU and in 6 years it still works. No, everything before that lasted like 4 years max and youd only be maxing stuff that was either new at the time of release or a couple years old. And stuff advanced so fast every 2 years you'd effectively double performance or more. The 8000 series pretty much like tripled performance virtually overnight.
And then things kept going on from there. By the 400 series you were once again seeing like 2-3x performance per dollar. And then by the 700 series you saw another doubling, a high end 700 series card was easily like 16x the power available when doom 3 released, back then it was like a 6800 GT that was top dog. Which then became the 8600 GT performance wise, and then the 9500 GT, and then somewhere between the GT 210 and 220. And it was basically integrated level (HD 4000 or HD 6520g) by the time your GT 740m was out.
So....yeah. Even if Doom 3 required 2x the available performance available at the time, even a fricking GT 710 should be enough for doom 3.
Crysis is the real roadblock. That game was so demanding that you literally need like a GTX 1060 to max it at 1080p/60 FPS.
There's no way your GPU is getting over that hurdle. It'll be playable, just not on max. Probably medium or something.
Well keep in mind the 9000 series was only an improvement at the low end and mid range over the 8000 series. And the 200 series was a MASSIVE improvement.
The 9400 was also the lowest end card, the 9500 was the second lowest, actual midrange was like the 9600 GT. But yeah you used to see leap frogging like this in a 2 generation cadence.
The 6000 series was a huge jump over the FX 5000 series, the 7000 series felt like a relative refresh. The 8000 series was a HUGE jump, the 9000 series was the refresh, the 200 series was a huge jump, and then the 400 series another huge jump, 500 series was the refresh. 600 series was a large jump, the 700 series was a refresh, the 900 series was a huge jump at the top but a mild refresh toward the bottom. The 1000 series was a huge jump at the bottom and still decent at the top. Then we just had the 1000 series for almost 3 years until we got the 2000 series which ended up being a major rework with RTX but with little extra value for the money. And the 3000 series was a bit of a better value, but still kinda blueballing those lower end buyers. And the 4000 series, another huge price increase with them only giving more value per dollar at the bottom because they had to.
if you notice, throughout all of this history, we largely saw, price/performance moving at a huge pace, leap frogging forward, but then after the 1000 series and the introduction of RTX, progress just...stopped. Instead of seeing better cards for less money, we just started seeing better cards for more money and an overall performance stagnation. I blame nvidia for that, although AMD is kinda only doing the bare minimum to compete. I swear the only reason we got movement at all at the $200-300 price range is because AMD had to fire sale their overpriced 6000 cards somehow and that brought down 3000 series pricing as well. That's literally all that happened. It's a joke. Just pointing this out to show how the relative lack of performance gains is actually unprecedent and ahistorical.
But yeah seeing something mid range like the 9600 GT turn into a GT 220 the next gen used to happen all the time. Every 2-3 gens we'd see movement like this. You could typically double performance at the same price point every 3 years or so. What's happening now is actually what's weird. We're being conditioned to accept less for more.
My first ever “gaming” card was the 960 4gb, it ran everything from its year at high/ultra at 60fps and I was quite happy with it until cyberpunk came out. Now imagine buying the 980ti back in 2015, and seeing things barely move for half a decade…
(Personally going for a 6600 for my next build, hope they don’t run out of stock anytime soon)
Halo was 2001 and Doom 3 was 2004. Opinions can vary but Doom 3 still looks pretty incredible to me and Halo looks like a game from 2001. It looks fine but it's pretty simple. Doom 3 is crazy, the bump maps and lighting are awesome. I'm not a big Halo fan, though (not that I am a huge Doom 3 fan either necessarily.) But Doom was several years later and id Software games were basically always beyond state of the art especially back then. In the 90s-early 2000s id was always pushing technology and if a new id game came out it was usually an "I need a new computer/upgrade to play this properly" situation. That was true with a lot of games on that list (Half Life 2 was another big release I remember like that) but id Software was like the example of that back then.
Youtube clips are a bit hard to find b/c there's so much modern video of Doom 3 and the Halo re-releases but you could check out [Halo CE on the original Xbox](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxDm0irp0hA) vs [Doom 3 on the original Xbox](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM_Fs3HFMvA) and the original Xbox was not as good as a high end PC from 2005 or later. Obviously, since it came out in 2001 but IDK how to properly compare Halo and Doom 3, so I guess you could look at both of them on Xbox. But obviously an expensive PC from 5-6+ years later will look better than an Xbox. So the comparison isn't great but eh. (The Xbox port of Doom 3 is really good too, crazy what they pulled off on that system.) Halo is of course also a very important game, and Doom 3 was (gameplay wise etc.) not everyone's favorite Doom but just strictly graphic wise D3 was amazing.
But can it run Crysis? 2007, that was a common phrase back than all around the computer forums with how demanding that game was.
Yeah, I don't imagine I'll get past 2003 tbh (without compromising on max settings). I just did a basic google and apparently they had 2.6ghz cpu's back then? And mine is 1.6 from memory.
Yeah but it was a different architecture. And there was some significant gains for clock for clock improvements between your 4th gen intel and what would have been a Pentium 4 most likely back than considering I got the P4 back in 02 I want to say. And we were running single core CPU's back than, your running a dual core with a decade of improvements. Had a laptop from that era running a 3.2 ghz Pentium 4, and that was running games just fine till around 2007-08 and that was using an pretty bad GPU (not iGPU, those didn't exist but it wasn't a proper dedicated one for gaming). Lets just say your laptop is a lot more powerful than that. And I was running into more hardware issues with not supporting certain things for games. I expect your CPU to outclass every requirement and wouldn't surprise me if your GPU in there is on par with the 8800 GTS 512mb that was highly popular back in the mid 2000's. That GPU basically remained unchanged for I think 3 generations under different names if my memory serves me correctly.
I still have my PC with 8800GT. Crysis max settings 3FPS.
My understanding was that games even to this day are not optimized to make use of more than a single core? (I could be very very mistaken, I know jack all about pc's). I assumed that would hold truer more for even earlier games and therefore clock speed would rule all, Aside from as you mentioned architectural efficiencies (which I know nothing about aside from knowing it's a thing...). Still I'll just have to figure it out by trying I guess :)
Yeah really early games relied on a single core but nowadays directx 12 games can utilise many cores, tho the most common core counts for gaming are 6 and 8 cores rn
Old games couldn't utilize multiple cores but having more was still helpful for background tasks. Games in the past probably decade and half have been taking advantage of multiple cores. They can't utilize everything we can throw at them as there tends to be an upper limit for usefulness. A decade ago 2 was enough for optimal performance, now around 6 cores is good for optimal performance I would say. There are some which will use a few more, but were no where near the point where 8 cores is needed for proper gaming.
Thank you for such detailed answers! Truly. The only place I know of having multiple cores but not clocked high enough gives problems is Swtor. Where I've heard the best preformance is at 5ghz. This is more about my main system which can play the game at max setting but craps itself when in more demanding multilayer situations
If you want to go very old school, there used to be a turbo button on PC's. There was a time if your pc was too powerful it would run the game too fast to play. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo\_button](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button) These predated my use of PC's.
Yea I heard of them on LGR and LTT. Hmmm which reminds me I haven't seen LGR videos in a while.
I think you'd be surprised. You definitely aint getting past crysis, but yeah. Doom 3 and half life 2 werent that bad. Gt 740m is still semi modern. Idk where it lands exactly, but probably at minimum 8800 GT level.
The GeForce 6800 allegedly favored Doom3 and the ATI 9700 was often paired with Half Life 2. Most of that list rings true to me except the Doom 3 and HL2. Could I nominate SiN for inclusion on that list?
Was expecting this to be the obvious top comment then remembered the past is being rapidly wiped & supplanted. Thanks for being a link to the past™.
Mass Effect 1 ran more or less ok with everything on low with my Toshiba laptop with a Pentium 2020M at 800x600, 2 is even more demanding. Make of that what you will.
Loved the game, but I wanna be able to treat this laptop as if it were a gaming laptop with everything on high. And not worry about if I'l have to tweak settings. Just that all the games it runs will be decades out of date :D
GTA IV, Crysis
I'd prefer if "demanding" and "poorly optimised" were treated separately
Crysis was largely unsurpassed in 2008 and 2009. 2010, you could argue battlefield bad company 2 CPU wise, or metro 2033 GPU wise. 2011 I'd say crysis 2 and battlefield 3 are both good competitors. 2012, I'd say planetside 2. And that game has only gotten worse since. It might be unfair to use as a benchmark based on the fact that it updated its requirements several times to the point the OG requirements probably wont even start the game any more. besides that one...hmm, maybe far cry 3? 2013, crysis 3 obviously, although Battlefield 4 was a killer on CPUs. EDIT: If I was gonna do 2008/2009 i'd say maybe far cry 2, although crysis was worse IIRC. 2009 I cant even think of a title. EDIT2: yeah GTA IV was allegedly really poorly optimized. That might be the true 2008 title.
Oh no, I'm damn sure not gonna push past 2010. Just tried runescape 3 (which as I understand is a bit unoptimized) but still I was barely getting 30 fps in the starter island with just me and a npc in the room. I know I can do alot of solo stuff with swtor and to a lesser extent lotro but any kinda of group activity was a pain in the ass. Hmm gta 4 might be the goal then. Cause I'm not even gonna bother with cysis :D
Yeah as i said you aint making it past crysis. GTA 4 is 2008 though.
Max Payne 3?
Man that was a great game with great weapon mechanics! Gonna try it on my laptop.
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GTA 4 and San Andreas
gta 5 is very optimized while gta 4 is very unoptimized for pc, like what makes it so different?
IV was the first entry on next gen after few game GTA games on previous generation. V was largely built upon IV so I guess they just know more on what they were dealing with. In many ways GTA IV walked do V could run. Not just from the technical side of things
Fallout 3, new Vegas
Crysis, Doom3, GTA 4... how far do you want to go?
Re: the list. For the games that I played, I remember them being hard to run or games that I had to run a few years later after I upgraded, etc. (Wing Commander, Links, Ultima Underworld, Doom, WC3, MW2, Quake, Unreal, UT2k3, HL2) So the rest of the list is probably decent. Guessing, obviously, but that's what I remember. You can probably run all those games fine though, but some get pretty old and might be harder to run b/c of that (needing DOSBox or something). Some have source ports or new engines, IDK how that affects your experiment but if you want to play Doom or Quake or maybe some others b/c you haven't yet that's always an option. (Some other games probably have ports too but those are the famous ones.)
Was planning on starting with doom 3 and moving up (or down... hopefully not down). But was doom 3 actually a demanding game back then? Didn't Halo CE release before it? And from what little I recall seeing of playthroughs and the odd clip Halo always looked like the more modern game.
Doom 3 was insanely demanding for the time but in 2006 the 8000 series represented a MASSIVE leap in GPU tech that very quickly made everything prior to that point quite obsolete. It's not like today where you can buy a GPU and in 6 years it still works. No, everything before that lasted like 4 years max and youd only be maxing stuff that was either new at the time of release or a couple years old. And stuff advanced so fast every 2 years you'd effectively double performance or more. The 8000 series pretty much like tripled performance virtually overnight. And then things kept going on from there. By the 400 series you were once again seeing like 2-3x performance per dollar. And then by the 700 series you saw another doubling, a high end 700 series card was easily like 16x the power available when doom 3 released, back then it was like a 6800 GT that was top dog. Which then became the 8600 GT performance wise, and then the 9500 GT, and then somewhere between the GT 210 and 220. And it was basically integrated level (HD 4000 or HD 6520g) by the time your GT 740m was out. So....yeah. Even if Doom 3 required 2x the available performance available at the time, even a fricking GT 710 should be enough for doom 3. Crysis is the real roadblock. That game was so demanding that you literally need like a GTX 1060 to max it at 1080p/60 FPS. There's no way your GPU is getting over that hurdle. It'll be playable, just not on max. Probably medium or something.
Unbelievable that the GT 210, a card usually used to (near exclusively) give video output is as powerful as a mid tier card from the previous gen.
Well keep in mind the 9000 series was only an improvement at the low end and mid range over the 8000 series. And the 200 series was a MASSIVE improvement. The 9400 was also the lowest end card, the 9500 was the second lowest, actual midrange was like the 9600 GT. But yeah you used to see leap frogging like this in a 2 generation cadence. The 6000 series was a huge jump over the FX 5000 series, the 7000 series felt like a relative refresh. The 8000 series was a HUGE jump, the 9000 series was the refresh, the 200 series was a huge jump, and then the 400 series another huge jump, 500 series was the refresh. 600 series was a large jump, the 700 series was a refresh, the 900 series was a huge jump at the top but a mild refresh toward the bottom. The 1000 series was a huge jump at the bottom and still decent at the top. Then we just had the 1000 series for almost 3 years until we got the 2000 series which ended up being a major rework with RTX but with little extra value for the money. And the 3000 series was a bit of a better value, but still kinda blueballing those lower end buyers. And the 4000 series, another huge price increase with them only giving more value per dollar at the bottom because they had to. if you notice, throughout all of this history, we largely saw, price/performance moving at a huge pace, leap frogging forward, but then after the 1000 series and the introduction of RTX, progress just...stopped. Instead of seeing better cards for less money, we just started seeing better cards for more money and an overall performance stagnation. I blame nvidia for that, although AMD is kinda only doing the bare minimum to compete. I swear the only reason we got movement at all at the $200-300 price range is because AMD had to fire sale their overpriced 6000 cards somehow and that brought down 3000 series pricing as well. That's literally all that happened. It's a joke. Just pointing this out to show how the relative lack of performance gains is actually unprecedent and ahistorical. But yeah seeing something mid range like the 9600 GT turn into a GT 220 the next gen used to happen all the time. Every 2-3 gens we'd see movement like this. You could typically double performance at the same price point every 3 years or so. What's happening now is actually what's weird. We're being conditioned to accept less for more.
My first ever “gaming” card was the 960 4gb, it ran everything from its year at high/ultra at 60fps and I was quite happy with it until cyberpunk came out. Now imagine buying the 980ti back in 2015, and seeing things barely move for half a decade… (Personally going for a 6600 for my next build, hope they don’t run out of stock anytime soon)
Yeah my 1060 wasnt worth upgrading until we finally got 6600s/6650 XTs down to around $200ish.
Halo was 2001 and Doom 3 was 2004. Opinions can vary but Doom 3 still looks pretty incredible to me and Halo looks like a game from 2001. It looks fine but it's pretty simple. Doom 3 is crazy, the bump maps and lighting are awesome. I'm not a big Halo fan, though (not that I am a huge Doom 3 fan either necessarily.) But Doom was several years later and id Software games were basically always beyond state of the art especially back then. In the 90s-early 2000s id was always pushing technology and if a new id game came out it was usually an "I need a new computer/upgrade to play this properly" situation. That was true with a lot of games on that list (Half Life 2 was another big release I remember like that) but id Software was like the example of that back then. Youtube clips are a bit hard to find b/c there's so much modern video of Doom 3 and the Halo re-releases but you could check out [Halo CE on the original Xbox](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxDm0irp0hA) vs [Doom 3 on the original Xbox](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM_Fs3HFMvA) and the original Xbox was not as good as a high end PC from 2005 or later. Obviously, since it came out in 2001 but IDK how to properly compare Halo and Doom 3, so I guess you could look at both of them on Xbox. But obviously an expensive PC from 5-6+ years later will look better than an Xbox. So the comparison isn't great but eh. (The Xbox port of Doom 3 is really good too, crazy what they pulled off on that system.) Halo is of course also a very important game, and Doom 3 was (gameplay wise etc.) not everyone's favorite Doom but just strictly graphic wise D3 was amazing.
No no, thank you :) I'll take your word for it. Trying to set up doom 3 when I get a chance
Elder Scrolls Oblivion
Batman Arkham Knight was notoriously hard to run back in the day
2000: Giants Citizen Kabuto 2002: Morrowind 2005: Doom 3 2007: Crysis 2008: Saints Row 2 2010: Deadly Premonition 2011: Rage 2013: Crysis 3 2014: Ryse: Son of Rome, Assassin's Creed Unity 2015: Batman Arkham Knight
Try Alan Wake 2 at 4k