The PC gamer's life may seem tough, given the expensive systems and the constant pressure to upgrade. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, for example, only required a Pentium 3 and 256MB of memory to play, but you'll need a CPU, video card, and memory upgrade if you want to play its hit sequel, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Not all games are as demanding as Oblivion. Developers can't afford to narrow down a game's potential audience by only targeting the most powerful hardware.
Many current releases can be very playable if you're willing to lower the graphics settings--the gameplay will still be there even if the graphics aren't. The PC platform also has a huge back catalog of older games that run fine on less-powerful hardware. These timeless classics may not have the best graphics compared to today's shader-driven games, but many are just as enjoyable as they were when they were first released.
We put together a list of recent games and several past favorites that all run decently on less-powerful hardware. We tested all the games on two systems: an Athlon XP 3200+ system with a DirectX 8-compatible AGP Radeon 9250 video card and 256MB of system memory, and an Athlon 64 2800+ system with a PCI Express DirectX 9 GeForce 6200 video card and 256MB of system memory. Even though both of our test systems had weak CPUs and underpowered video cards, we found that limiting our system memory to 256MB hurt game support the most. Games like World of Warcraft become unplayable with such a small amount of memory, because the system slows to a crawl as it thrashes the hard drive to load information that would normally sit within system memory.
The Radeon 9250 256MB and the GeForce 6200 64MB (128MB with TurboCache) cards both functioned adequately, but we had to set most resolutions to 1024x768 or 800x600 and lower image-quality settings to get games running smoothly. We couldn't avoid some hitching in more-recent games like Guild Wars, but we were still impressed with how well the games ran on the four-pipe cards. The more-recent DX9-enabled games looked better on the GeForce 6200, since the Radeon 9250 forced games to fall back to less-impressive DX8 graphics. We used our GeForce 6200 for the in-game screenshots.
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
Sid Meier's Pirates!
We only listed a few of the great games that don't require great hardware. Can you recommend more great games with forgiving system requirements?
Great Games That Don't Require Great Hardware
Not all PC games require the newest and most expensive hardware to run. We put together a list of ten great games that you can play on less than stellar systems.
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