This might have been posted on the forums before but I find it to be a useful resource if I'm ever unsure about whether or not my laptop can run a pc game.

http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri

It will compare the game requirements to your pc's stats, then tell you whether it can run the game at min, med, or max specs or not at all.

I've found the results to be somewhat unreliable.

Me too. I stopped using this service a while ago, since it told me on a number of occasions that rig didn't cover the minimal requirements and yet I was playing on the highest available settings afterwards. There were also times when it was the other way around - the service said the game should run perfectly on max settings, but wasn't as great when I tried it.

Now I usually just find a way to try it before buy, to see if it behaves as expected and then get it here or on steam if there is a good deal for it.

The only reason I still haven't pre-ordered my Wild Hunt from GOG is that I'm not sure it my laptop will run it the way I want to experience it. I'm afraid it won't be able to handle it, so I'll get me a PS4 just for it (at least in the beginning).

What if you want to know before buying a game, do you pirate it just to try it in less than one hour? (Not saying if that's a bad or good thing, I just want to know what to do :p)

You can always look at the minimum specs required for the game and compare them to what you have :)

I use that site and a few others but don't put all your faith in it. Ask around and definitely
do your research.

I have a really low low low end Acer Aspire that I ran The Witcher Enhanced Edition on it
and got some great FPS. So, really just experiment.

Worst comes to worst, you're out of a few bucks but then when years go by you can find your
"old" game and be like, OMG! I can totally play this now! LOL. It's happened to me before! :P

- Tim

I generally won't play anything unless my computer is significantly above the specs required for the game, as I've also found the minimum and recommended settings from many games to be misleading (in both ends of the spectrum).

Demos were a wonderful idea and still exist...sometimes :)

True, but minimum doesn't quite cut it, at least for me. I need to be able to experience the game in the way it was meant to be experienced, not just go get it to run and be done with it. Two times I have changed laptops just to be able to run the current WItcher game in the way it's supposed to be run :) Now I'm going to do it again, but in a slightly different way.

To answer GreenDigitalWolf's question - If I doubt the game is going to run properly I get it from a friend first to try it. If no one has it I search the web for other people who played it on the same hardware - I use a laptop for PC gaming, so my configuration is available to other people too and someone is bound to have tried it and shared an opinion (in the best case scenario there is a screencast somewhere which shows how good the game runs). The last time I resorted to piracy before buying the game was when Diablo 3 came out. I wasn't sure my laptop would be able to run it properly and the game costed like $80 here.

That site checks official information, which is probably the same info you could find on a game's box or its GoG/Steam page. It is not 100% accurate, since I've managed to run games like Alan Wake's American Nightmare with an Intel Integrated Graphics Card, which is noted as not possible in the game's requirements. It's still on low quality, but it' s playable (for me).
The best choice will always be to play the game yourself, and if it doesn't work, keep it for when you have a better computer :P

I never wrote that this was the most accurate service or even the best, just trying to help and thought that it might give one a decent idea:P Suppose I should have added the caveat that Your Mileage May Vary.

Same.

To test it I inquired about a number of games I had running and known to be working well enough, and they pretty much all turned up as not runable. There may be some disparity between what companies say the minimum requirements for a game are, and what will work, but if the site isn't doing much more than comparing your stats to the official requirements, then I'm not sure it provides any real useful information to someone that knows what all those numbers mean.

Maybe that is the point. It's really just a rough guide for all of the people that don't know what computer stats translate into and can't do the comparison. Most people are probably in that group, so it's probably useful to them. I wish it was based on something a bit more real world that it feels like, but I'm probably a difficult to serve minority, and "runs"is pretty subjective even before you start talking to opinionated know it all's

It's not this particular page, it's how vague the "minimum/maximum" concept is. There are many things involved in a game's performance, from hardware to drivers, but when the devs talk about "minimum" requirements, they're probably talking about something like "you need this to be able to start the program", which still doesn't say anything about performance.

Am I the only one that read the title as "Can you ruin it"? I clicked in thinking "Yeah, I can ruin pretty much anything...

Aye, to both. Personally I use the site to gauge whether or not it's worth running even with the so-called minimum requirements. For instance, it tells me I can run Divinity:Original Sin at min but I know just from past experience after reading the comparison of my pc stats and the requirements that I can likely run it at closer to medium.