Hey guys,

My gaming laptop is a few years old now, so many games don't run on it very well. I tend to buy lots of games on steam at discount, so if something doesn't run well it's not a huge waste of money, those games sit there in my account and I'll eventually get to play them when I replace this PC.

Still, that's a shitty way of buying games, especially because more and more games will not run on this box. How do you guys figure out if your machine meets the minimum required specs listed on a steam store page?

In particular the graphics card stuff is a mystery to me, if a game says the minimum required is for example "NVIDIA® GeForce® 9600GT, ATI Radeon™ HD 5870", how do I know if my laptop GPU is better or worse than those?

Do you know what GPU your laptop has? Just search it on google and you can probably find some benchmarks..

Basically, you look up the equivalent laptop GPU of the 9600GT, and see if your laptop's GPU is older or newer than it.

Of course, there's no such thing as perfect equivalent, it's a matter of "strength zone" for each desktop GPU and it's laptop "equivalent", so what you do is go on youtube and watch how well a few laptop GPUs run certain games, and those videos should give you an idea of the strength of those laptop GPUs, and then you can compare them to desktop GPUs of the game power, and figure out what is equivalent to what.

This isn't a 100% successful but Can You Run It is alright for automatically checking wether your system holds up with a specific game: http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri

I use http://en.checkreq.com/ and it serves my purpose for the most part, but I would love a better thing to check and see if my computer can run games, something more accurate.

I found http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri to work good but to me it seems Intels integrated gpus throw it for a loop, usually giving bad results even when your machine can run it good.

Not sure how bad your laptop is doing but its always worth trying in 720p resolutions. This is what the xbox 360 was at so games like Bioshock infinite and Tomb Raider won't be horrible to play in that resolution.

Thanks, that's really helpful. That site seems rather optimistic about my computer though :). According to that site I should be able to run GTA 4, The Witcher and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, and all those games run like shit on this machine. It also thinks I can run Sleeping Dogs, Dark Souls and Dishonored, which is correct -- those all run fine (or good enough for me).

(This machine has a GeForce GT 540M, Core(TM) i7-2630QM CPU @ 2.00GHz)

Find where your card is on this hierarchy chart. If it is just above the minimum you can pay it, but you'll have to make big compromises in the video settings. If it is around our above the recommended then you should easily run the game with the graphics dialed up.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html