So, I had someone build me a PC a little over a year ago. Since then, I've bought a couple of newer games but not too many out of fear of not being able to play them at a capacity that would really be any better than one of my consoles (frame rate or graphics-wise). But, since it's the Steam summer sale I've been looking at some stuff.

Right now I have an AMD Phenom II X6 1035T CPU, and a GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and 8GB of DDR3 RAM.

Knowing that, and considering the fact that I really don't have the money to upgrade anything, should I be okay to play most new games? Say, for instance, Tomb Raider at medium to high settings while still getting a good frame rate?

And, is there a good place to compare what I've got to what is listed under a games recommended specs on Steam? Getting into the nuance of numbers doesn't really mean a whole lot to me (which is all I can really get on Wikipedia), and I don't really know enough to look at the names to know if what I've got is good enough.

Here is a nifty site I use that can measure your specs against system requirements.
http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri
I've used it before and had no problems.

I'm not a PC expert but I think you'd be able to get away with medium settings, consistent framerate with a 550 ti. don't know much about AMD cpu's but 2.6 six core sounds decent

@enai said:

Cool, thanks for the site! Going by that, seems like I'd kind of barely be able to play Tomb Raider, which is less than ideal. Maybe I'll just stick to smaller/older games until I can afford a better video card since that seems to be what's holding me back.

@epidehl: @enai: That site is crazy inaccurate a lot of the time, use with caution.

You'll be better off with the console version of Tomb Raider.

Your system looks pretty good actually, only think its lacking would be in the graphics department thats it... whenever you get a chance to upgrade that would be good, you do not need a complete overhaul your machine is about perfect...

Most games still look good on medium to low settings...

true story? I I had a 3870 when they were new and still only played most games at 1024 X 768 for a while (yes I learned my lesson) .... You don't mean to max out the settings especially if you have a 24in or less screen.

This guy has a similar machine to yours and seems to run Tomb Raider just fine on medium-high settings.

You should be fine buying most games in the Steam sale. You could get a lot more mileage out of your computer with a better card, though.

What i do is google how games run on a similar system before i buy them. There are usually tons of gameplay posted by people on youtube etc, and can give you a fair depiction of what to expect. And if your running medium, your about 10x better than consoles at least on most games lol. Especially if your fine with capping at 30fps, which is standard console frame rate anyway.

And also look up what settings are system hogs as some lower performance with little visual advantage. I used to run the witcher 2 pretty much on high with my hd5770 just by lowering certain things that really didn't matter.