Is there a service or knowledge base somewhere that can help you find the highest rated games for your hardware?
Background: I don’t have much time for games and just installed Bazzite on a few years old ThinkPad. I would like to play some games on it but don’t know what I can expect to be playable. I see tons of “will it run on steam deck” info but honestly couldn’t even figure out where this computers performance lies compared to a steam deck. This should be easy. Just type in specs, maybe filter genre and say “sort by meta score” or “sort by steam rating”.
If you have friends, “Never Split the Party” is a fun random dungeon-crawler game where each party member (4p coop) has an aspect of the game user interface like health or the map. If you split up you lose that UI. (ive never played binding of Issac but it seems like similar genre)
Recommended specifications from developers are highly subjective, so it would be kind of pointless to really create a database of what “works” because it’s different for who is writing the reviews/reports. If there was a database of what was reported solely from the developer, I guess you’d at least know what it was tested on for the best experience, but that doesn’t mean someone else would rather just get it to play on the lowest settings and experience just to have it work.
Sounds like a use case for a good product or program, but it’s a hard problem to figure out game performance without installing and running. Soooo many videos online where people install 8 different games to manuallytest framerate, and none where they look up a ready value.
You could first look up the laptop’s GPU, and try putting it into a GPU compare site, score it against a GPU you’ve known and try games you’re familiar with.
If it’s just an Intel GPU, you pretty much know you’d only play basic 2D/lowpoly indie games, if which there are many.
I’d totally be fine with a rough “tier list” to start with. I know there are 2d games that are quite demanding, especially badly optimized indie games. And I think half life 2 can basically run on a potato despite still looking decent. So simply judging by how fancy it looks probably isn’t always going to work.
