ingenuity that comes from necessity

April 9, 2020 3:30 PM

One gamer's quest to achieve the lowest graphics settings [YouTube]

“Though he lives in Barcelona now, The LowSpecGamer (as he likes to be called) was born in Venezuela and grew up unable to afford the newest hardware. For him, learning to push games below their minimum settings was the only way to play them. “There’s always this narrative about PC gaming being about trying to get the best out of the game, trying to get the best graphics and so on,” he says. “That’s the main narrative in gaming culture. That didn’t really fit with what I was doing or how I felt and I thought I was the only one.” [...] “I remember one guy commenting, ‘I don’t see the point of this, you can get a good computer for X amount of dollars at your local store and put it together so I don’t see the point of your channel.’ I was about to answer him when one person responded, ‘The world doesn’t end at your doorstep.’””

LowSpecGamer is a channel dedicated to budget gaming and low graphics, from pushing entry-level and old hardware to its limits to forcing the lowest graphics on modern games by all means possible. [via: PC Gamer]

• Can you run Half Life: Alyx on an integrated GPU?
• Doom Eternal on a low end PC? Here's how!
• How to run Grand Theft Auto 5 under the minimum requirements
• How to run Borderlands 2 on a low end computer
• Running the Witcher 3 under the minimum specs
• Playing Destiny 2 on a low end PC
• Fortnite, fps boost for low end computers (Intel Celeron + IntelHD)
• Red Dead Redemption 2 on low end PC gets a bit WEIRD
• Increasing Minecraft performance by using Mods!
• Improving performance on Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition
• How to improve performance on Skyrim
• Monster Hunter World on old CPU + GPU
• An External GPU for an old Laptop?
• Can an IntelHD GPU be overclocked?
• How to REALLY make Windows 10 Super Light for Gaming

posted by Fizz (10 comments total)

There are a boatload of videos on his main YouTube gaming page, but I cherrypicked some of the games that people might have in their Steam account but are worried they cannot play. As someone who has an aging GTX 950, I love the work that he's doing. Sometimes you just want to play a game, even if it looks like potato.
posted by Fizz at 3:35 PM on April 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Discovered this channel maybe six months ago, and absolutely love this guy. I've played games on PC since I was literally in diapers (my parents have have photos to prove this!) and at no point have I had access to anything resembling top-of-the-line hardware, or even remotely close to it. I played counter-strike in 400x300 software rendering, at sub-30 FPS back in the day. I currently have what feels to me like the best gaming rig I've had in... pretty much forever? It's a hand-me-down HP EliteDesk SFF with a Core i5 4570, and a GT 1030 I slapped in it. Has run everything I've thrown at it, though sometimes with some tweaks on top of turning everything to minimum (and this is where LowSpecGamer becomes useful as well as just informative/entertaining). A lot of stuff that I flat couldn't run on my old system runs with everything all the way up, even - my backlog goes pretty far back. It replaced a socket 754 Athlon64 3200+ with a GeForce 4 MX440 which was hardly cutting-edge when I got it in... 2005? and which I didn't retire until about a year and a half ago. PC prices these days are just insane. GPUs that people refer to as mid-range these days cost more than absolute top-end cards did fifteen years ago. Crazy.
posted by Dysk at 4:25 PM on April 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

Yeah this was fantastic. I don't even play games much anymore (kids, sigh), but I really appreciate making stuff more available. Awesome.
posted by Literaryhero at 4:57 PM on April 9, 2020

Also, gaming on regular to old machines probably has a tenth of the carbon footprint, Enh?
posted by eustatic at 6:26 PM on April 9, 2020

The latest version of No Man's Sky has a feature that lets you keep the HUD, interface, and menus at your regular legible screen resolution, but crank the 3D graphics (which is where most of the performance hit happens) way down (like all the way down to 10% of normal, so I guess 192 x 108 in my case).

So for anyone feeling nostalgic for Noctis, NMS can finally look like the spiritual sequel to Noctis that it kinda is.
posted by straight at 9:39 PM on April 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

That kind of resolution scaling is becoming more and more common, thankfully. It wasn't as big a deal back in the day - a lot of UIs weren't as complex, but also CRTs could generally actually display lower resolutions than their maximum, so your UI was big because its the low res, but still clear and legible. With LCDs, they only have one resolution they can actually display, and anything lower is scaled up to that, leading to awful, blurry, illegible messes for UI if you try and run a low res that isn't an integer fraction of your panel's native resolution. So the rise in internal 3D resolution scaling, while still outputting a signal to your monitor at its native res is great!
posted by Dysk at 9:55 PM on April 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

this is awesome, thanks.

can they do a thing where i don't have to download the 800 GB of 4K textures or something if i am trying to play a game on a potato?
posted by capnsue at 11:21 PM on April 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

Sure just go to the PC games section of the video game store and buy a disk so you don't have to download anything. Hahahahahaha. sob.

I don't really miss looking for good old cheap PC games in the bargain bin at Staples (Unreal Tournament for only $6!), but I kinda do.
posted by straight at 11:30 PM on April 9, 2020

This ten year old PC says thank you. My phone has more RAM than this ol' girl, but I still love her. Triple-A games are overrated anyway.
posted by Acey at 1:44 AM on April 10, 2020

My screen consists of a single pixel.

My program randomly turns it on or off.

My game is closing my eyes and guessing which state it will be in when I open them.

My score is holding steady at 50%.

My attention is wavering.
posted by fairmettle at 11:37 PM on April 10, 2020 [1 favorite]